Faith & Spirit Quote by James L. Buckley

A small, barbed warning dressed up in parliamentary prose. Buckley’s line lands because it flips a familiar biblical idea on its head: instead of humans being made in God’s image, modern society is busy manufacturing a God who looks suspiciously like us - our preferences, our politics, our moral alibis. The bite is in “dismaying tendency”: not a one-off mistake, but a pattern, a drift, the kind that happens when institutions and habits quietly reshape belief.

Buckley, as a politician and public moralist of the American right, is aiming at a very specific cultural posture: religion as a validation machine. The subtext is that faith is being domesticated into a therapeutic accessory or a partisan mascot. A God remade in man’s image won’t command sacrifice; he’ll endorse lifestyles, bless budgets, and rubber-stamp resentments. That’s why the line is less about theology than about authority: who gets to set the terms of moral reality - a transcendent standard, or the electorate of the self?

The phrase also needles a broader late-20th-century anxiety: modernity’s pressure to translate every strong claim into something palatable, negotiable, market-tested. Buckley’s context is a country where religious language saturates politics while doctrinal seriousness thins out. His fear isn’t secularism so much as counterfeit piety: God reduced to a flattering mirror, and worship replaced by self-recognition.