Motherhood Quote by Lemuel K. Washburn

Washburn’s line is a neat act of rhetorical sabotage: it doesn’t merely criticize religion’s moral authority, it demotes it to machinery. The incubator metaphor is doing the heavy lifting. An incubator creates conditions; it doesn’t supply DNA, affection, or lineage. By analogy, religion may shelter, warm, and standardize moral behavior, but it doesn’t originate the impulse to care, cooperate, or feel shame. Morality, in this framing, is older than the institutions that claim paternity over it.

The jab lands because it targets a specific cultural move: the habit of treating morality as religion’s proprietary product. Washburn refuses the premise. He implies that moral instincts come from human social life (and, implicitly, from evolution, empathy, and reciprocal dependence), while religion functions as a delivery system: codifying norms, rewarding compliance, punishing deviation, and offering a story that makes rules feel cosmic rather than negotiated.

The subtext is not “religion is useless.” Incubators are useful. They improve survival rates. That’s the trapdoor under the polemic: religion can be effective at producing morally legible citizens without being the source of goodness itself. The line also hints at a darker corollary: if religion is merely a device, it can incubate cruelty as efficiently as kindness, depending on what you put inside and how you calibrate the heat.

Contextually, this fits a modern, skeptical tradition of American freethought and secular moral philosophy, pushing back against sermons and politicians who equate disbelief with depravity. It’s a sentence built to puncture that argument in one brisk, memorable image.