Faith & Spirit Quote by Mikhail Bakunin

Bakunin isn’t gently arguing for secularism; he’s lighting a fuse. “The first revolt” frames atheism not as a private belief but as the opening move in a total political uprising. Theology is cast as “supreme tyranny,” a power that doesn’t just govern laws but colonizes the imagination. By calling God a “phantom,” Bakunin attacks the emotional engine of authority: the idea that obedience can be sanctified, and that suffering can be made meaningful enough to endure.

The line works because it’s a clean piece of revolutionary rhetoric: compress the whole architecture of domination into a single vertical relationship. “Master in heaven” becomes the blueprint for every master on earth. It’s not only that churches ally with kings; it’s that the habit of submission is trained in the soul. If you accept an all-seeing, all-judging sovereign above, hierarchy stops looking like a human choice and starts looking like the natural order. That’s the subtext: political emancipation fails when people carry a supernatural cop in their heads.

Context matters. Bakunin is writing in 19th-century Europe, where church authority and state authority were often entangled, and where revolutions repeatedly ran aground on restored order and moral policing. His anarchism needs a theory of why people keep rebuilding their own cages. Religion, for him, is the most efficient technology of consent: it teaches people to love their chains, then calls that love virtue.