Faith & Spirit Quote by Ralph Steadman

Steadman’s line reads like a spit-take aimed at the respectable face war likes to wear. Coming from a cartoonist best known for savage ink-blots of power and hypocrisy, “Man’s idea of God” is doing more work than “God” ever could: it’s not theology, it’s branding. The quote yanks the divine down from the heavens and pins it to the corkboard of human invention, where it can be deployed, revised, and weaponized.

The sharpest move is the coupling of “idea” with “collusion.” Steadman implies that war needs a metaphysical accomplice, or at least the appearance of one. Collusion suggests a backroom deal: leaders and institutions laundering violence through sanctimony, outsourcing moral responsibility to an all-purpose higher authority. It’s not that God commands war; it’s that war becomes legible, recruitable, and emotionally survivable when wrapped in sacred language. “Essential part of the equation” turns genocide into a spreadsheet problem, which is exactly the point: once God is inserted as a variable, the numbers can be made to come out clean.

Contextually, Steadman’s career runs through the late-20th-century hangover of Vietnam, Cold War paranoia, and the post-9/11 era when “God bless” became a rhetorical sealant on policy. His drawings have always treated official narratives as grotesque masks. Here, he’s saying the mask isn’t optional. For war to scale, it needs more than weapons; it needs permission, and nothing grants permission like a deity people can ventriloquize.