Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Howard

Howard is taking a scalpel to a familiar piety: the kind that confuses intensity with truth and ends up policing everyone in the room. His claim is less about religion as such than about “earnestness” as a psychological posture. Earnness, in his framing, is faith under strain - the moment conviction stops being spacious and starts being anxious. Once belief is fueled by fear (fear of contamination, doubt, moral disorder), it naturally hardens. “Brittleness” is the tell: a worldview that can’t bend without snapping, so it compensates by tightening rules and narrowing acceptable speech. The inquisition isn’t just a historical institution here; it’s the recurring impulse to interrogate, purify, and expel.

What makes the sentence work is its controlled inevitability. “Forever tends toward” suggests a pattern that repeats across eras, not a one-off scandal. Howard leans on “mythology and history” as twin archives of human behavior: myth as the symbolic record of what we dread, history as the practical record of what we do when dread gets power. The subtext is cautionary and, quietly, self-implicating. He’s warning religious communities that their moral seriousness can metastasize into coercion, and he’s also offering nonbelievers a diagnosis more nuanced than “religion is bad.” The target is not devotion but the fearful style of it.

Contextually, this sits in a modern landscape where public faith is often performed under cultural pressure. When a community feels embattled, earnestness becomes defensive; defensiveness becomes surveillance. Howard’s line is a reminder that the path from purity to persecution is paved with panic, not principle.