Love Quote by Mary Douglas

Religion isn’t being blamed here so much as stripped of its sentimental alibi. Mary Douglas frames the line as a pointed question, but the shape of it is an argument: stop treating belief as a moral technology that reliably upgrades human character. The phrasing “Religion can make it worse” lands first as a scandalized rebuttal to the cozy modern assumption that faith equals community spirit. Then she tightens the screws with a second, longer question that parodies the usual sales pitch: transcendence! grand rituals! music! preaching! love your neighbor! The rhetorical excess is the point. By stacking these uplift-signals, Douglas exposes how easily aesthetic intensity gets mistaken for ethical transformation.

The subtext is anthropological, and quietly unsparing: religion is not primarily a kindness machine; it’s a system for organizing meaning, solidarity, boundaries, and authority. Those same tools can elevate generosity, but they also amplify rivalry, status anxiety, and the policing of outsiders. “Jealousy and frustration” are not minor defects that a good hymn can wash out; they’re durable social emotions, often sharpened by tight communities where comparison is constant and moral expectations are public.

Context matters: Douglas spent her career showing how groups manufacture purity and danger, how symbols regulate who belongs and who’s suspect. Read through that lens, the quote is less anti-religious than anti-naive. It refuses the comforting idea that the sacred automatically civilizes, and hints at something more unsettling: transcendence can sanctify the very human impulses we’d like it to dissolve.