Parenting & Family Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken is skewering a peculiarly American moral accounting system: the way failure gets baptized as virtue while success gets prosecuted as sin. The line moves like a joke, but it’s not gentle comedy; it’s a scalpel aimed at the sentimental pieties that let people feel righteous without changing anything. By framing the “theory” as folk theology - God claims the losers, the Devil repossesses the winners - he exposes a lazy narrative that turns economic outcomes into spiritual verdicts.

The intent is less to defend the successful than to indict the culture that needs villains. If you’re broke, you can be cast as humble, pure, “authentic” - safely nonthreatening. The moment you win, you become suspect: corrupt, arrogant, morally compromised. That swap reveals the subtext Mencken cares about: envy laundering itself as ethics. It’s resentment dressed up in Sunday clothes, a way for the crowd to preserve its self-image while refusing to admit it simply dislikes being outpaced.

Mencken wrote as a professional heretic during the early 20th century, when American life was thick with revivalist religion, booster capitalism, and moral crusades. He loved puncturing the sanctimony that linked virtue to suffering and vice to ambition. The brilliance is the inversion: he uses religious language to accuse the religious-minded of superstition, and he uses the Devil not as theology but as a metaphor for how quickly public affection curdles into moral panic once someone stops needing your pity.