"There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too"
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Armstrong lands her point with a move that feels almost mischievously domestic: she drags religion off the pedestal and drops it into the same messy human category as dinner, paintings, and intimacy. The intent isn’t to insult belief; it’s to puncture the fantasy that “religion” is automatically noble by definition. By pairing the sacred with the bodily and the everyday, she quietly dissolves the protective bubble that often surrounds faith in public debate. If we can admit to bad sex without indicting sex as a concept, why do we treat “bad religion” as either unmentionable or proof that all religion is poison?
The subtext is a criticism of absolutists on both sides. Fundamentalists want religion to be unimpeachable; militant secularists want its failures to stand in for the whole enterprise. Armstrong insists on a more adult standard: religion is a practice, made by people, and people are capable of craft or incompetence, generosity or cruelty. The comparison also carries a moral edge. Bad cooking can make you sick; bad religion can do worse. The line’s casualness is part of its rhetorical power: it normalizes the evaluation of religion, making scrutiny feel like common sense rather than taboo.
Context matters because Armstrong writes as a historian of religion and a public interpreter after decades of culture-war simplifications, especially in the post-9/11 West. Her framing pushes readers away from the lazy question “religion: good or bad?” toward the harder one: what kind, practiced how, toward whom, and to what ends?
The subtext is a criticism of absolutists on both sides. Fundamentalists want religion to be unimpeachable; militant secularists want its failures to stand in for the whole enterprise. Armstrong insists on a more adult standard: religion is a practice, made by people, and people are capable of craft or incompetence, generosity or cruelty. The comparison also carries a moral edge. Bad cooking can make you sick; bad religion can do worse. The line’s casualness is part of its rhetorical power: it normalizes the evaluation of religion, making scrutiny feel like common sense rather than taboo.
Context matters because Armstrong writes as a historian of religion and a public interpreter after decades of culture-war simplifications, especially in the post-9/11 West. Her framing pushes readers away from the lazy question “religion: good or bad?” toward the harder one: what kind, practiced how, toward whom, and to what ends?
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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