Parenting & Family Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s jab lands because it pretends to offer tolerance while quietly gutting the pieties that usually prop it up. He grants “respect” to religion only in the way we politely endure a stranger’s boasts about his family: you nod, you don’t argue at the dinner table, and you certainly don’t reorganize your life around his private delusions. The comedy is social, not metaphysical. Religion is reframed as a personal vanity project, an opinion with emotional utility for the believer, not a claim that deserves public deference.

The subtext is classic Mencken: skepticism toward moral grandstanding, impatience with credulity, and contempt for the cultural habit of treating faith as automatically ennobling. By pairing religion with the stock fictions of “beautiful wife” and “smart children,” he implies that belief often functions as self-flattery dressed up as truth. It’s not that the wife can’t be beautiful or the children intelligent; it’s that the speaker’s certainty is self-interested and socially protected from scrutiny. Mencken is attacking the immunity, not merely the content.

Context matters. Writing in an America still marked by Protestant dominance and the aftershocks of fundamentalist-modernist battles (think Scopes-era vibes), Mencken positioned himself as an urbane heretic against small-town certainty. His “respect” is the thin civility of pluralism: live and let live, but don’t demand that your private consolations be treated as public fact. The line works because it weaponizes manners against sanctimony, turning politeness into a boundary rather than a tribute.