Science & Tech Quote by Robert Bork

Bork frames “religious renewal” less as a spiritual question than as a power struggle over cultural legitimacy. By naming “the intellectual classes” as the “major obstacle,” he casts academics, journalists, and professional tastemakers as an unelected priesthood whose real influence comes from deciding what counts as “respectable.” The phrasing is calibrated to sting: “primitive superstition” isn’t his view so much as the sneering caricature he attributes to his opponents, a move that invites religious readers to feel not merely disagreed with but socially humiliated.

The subtext is classic late-20th-century American culture war: faith is losing not because it lacks truth or vitality, but because it’s being policed out of public life by credentialed gatekeepers. “Science has left atheism as the only respectable intellectual stance” is doing double duty. On the surface, it describes a triumphalist narrative of modernity; underneath, it insinuates that atheism’s prestige is fashionable and institutional rather than philosophically earned. Bork isn’t arguing theology; he’s arguing sociology.

Context matters. Coming from a jurist and conservative public servant associated with the battles over liberal legal culture, the line reads as an extension of his broader suspicion of elite institutions shaping national norms. It also attempts to reframe secularization as a kind of class prejudice: the problem isn’t religion’s claims, it’s the contempt of those who set the terms of debate. The strategic effect is to rally believers around a grievance that doubles as a political program: challenge the arbiters, not the arguments.