Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Bond

Bond’s line is doing two provocations at once: it demystifies religion while refusing to dismiss it. “Enabled” is a deliberately blunt verb. Religion isn’t framed as divine truth or private solace; it’s a technology of social organization, a public apparatus that gives a community a shared stage on which to argue about “goodness.” That’s an almost theatrical definition of faith, and for a playwright like Bond, it’s also a claim about what art is for.

The comparison to Greek drama isn’t decorative name-dropping. Greek tragedy was literally civic infrastructure: performed at festivals, funded and attended as a public duty, it turned moral panic and political power into story, chorus, and conflict. Bond’s subtext is that societies need formal arenas where ethical questions aren’t merely asserted but contested. Religion did that at scale for centuries: codifying rules, dramatizing transgression and punishment, turning morality into narrative with characters (saints, sinners) and stakes (salvation, damnation).

But the sentence also contains a quiet indictment. When morality becomes “organized,” it can harden into bureaucracy and control. Bond, whose work often attacks institutional violence and the comforts of respectability, is hinting that the same structure that makes ethical debate possible can also police what counts as “goodness” in the first place.

Contextually, it reads like a manifesto for theater’s civic job description in a secular age: if religion once provided the communal forum, drama can reclaim that function - not as sermon, but as argument made visible.