"Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"
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Mencken’s line is a dagger sharpened on two edges: he insults religion’s object (the “unknowable”) and its tools (the “not worth knowing”). The first phrase concedes, with a kind of grudging sophistication, that ultimate questions may sit beyond proof. Then he twists the knife: theology doesn’t merely fail to reach the unknowable; it distracts itself with trivia, a fussy vocabulary of hairsplitting that turns awe into bookkeeping. The contempt isn’t for mystery, but for the industry built around pretending mystery can be domesticated.
The intent is classic Mencken: puncture piety by reframing it as bad intellectual labor. “Effort” is doing heavy lifting here, implying toil without payoff, a bureaucracy of thought. He’s not arguing against God so much as against the clerical temperament - the impulse to convert lived uncertainty into systems, ranks, and rules that can be taught, examined, and used to police others. Theology becomes a kind of credentialed overconfidence.
The subtext is political and cultural. Mencken wrote in an America where Protestant moralism was a civic force, not a private hobby - crusading against vice, sex, and modern science. His broader project, from skewering the “booboisie” to covering the Scopes Trial, was to treat that moral certainty as a form of mass control dressed up as righteousness. This sentence works because it collapses theology’s prestige in one motion: from lofty metaphysics to pedantry, from spiritual quest to paperwork for the soul.
The intent is classic Mencken: puncture piety by reframing it as bad intellectual labor. “Effort” is doing heavy lifting here, implying toil without payoff, a bureaucracy of thought. He’s not arguing against God so much as against the clerical temperament - the impulse to convert lived uncertainty into systems, ranks, and rules that can be taught, examined, and used to police others. Theology becomes a kind of credentialed overconfidence.
The subtext is political and cultural. Mencken wrote in an America where Protestant moralism was a civic force, not a private hobby - crusading against vice, sex, and modern science. His broader project, from skewering the “booboisie” to covering the Scopes Trial, was to treat that moral certainty as a form of mass control dressed up as righteousness. This sentence works because it collapses theology’s prestige in one motion: from lofty metaphysics to pedantry, from spiritual quest to paperwork for the soul.
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