Politics & Power Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

“Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand” lands like a compliment and reads like an indictment. Durrenmatt, a dramatist with a taste for moral booby traps, uses “beautifully” as bait: the word belongs to romance or aesthetics, not to the blunt mechanics of power. That dissonance is the point. He’s not praising harmony; he’s exposing how smoothly two institutions built on legitimacy can swap services.

The intent is surgical cynicism. Religion offers a ready-made vocabulary of righteousness, sacrifice, destiny, purity - terms that can disinfect policy choices that are, at root, strategic. Political expediency, in return, offers religion visibility, enforcement, and a pipeline to the public imagination through law and ritualized ceremony. Durrenmatt is telling you the partnership isn’t accidental or rare; it’s structurally efficient. When leaders want compliance, nothing beats a story that frames dissent as sin. When religious authorities want permanence, nothing beats the state’s appetite for order.

Subtext: the real danger isn’t fanaticism at the extremes but the polite, administrative version of it. “Hand in hand” implies intimacy, even tenderness - the kind that normalizes the arrangement. That’s Durrenmatt’s bleak joke: people accept the coupling because it feels traditional, even comforting, while it quietly launders self-interest as moral necessity.

Contextually, Durrenmatt wrote in a Europe still reckoning with fascism’s pageantry and postwar politics’ rhetorical gloss. He understood how easily ethics becomes stagecraft - and how often God’s name is the most useful prop.