Faith & Spirit Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s line lands like a warning label on the politics of faith: treat religion as a weapon and you don’t just harm your opponent, you corrode the whole category. It’s a president’s argument dressed as moral principle, built to sound timeless while answering a very specific problem of modern democracy: pluralism under stress.

The phrasing is doing quiet rhetorical work. “Whoever seeks” avoids naming enemies, which widens the target beyond any one denomination or party and makes the threat feel structural rather than personal. “Set one religion against another” describes a deliberate act of engineering conflict, not organic disagreement. Then comes the turn: the saboteur claims to defend “true” religion, but their method guarantees the opposite outcome. By the time you turn worship into a tribal scoreboard, religion stops being a source of conscience and becomes just another factional brand, inviting backlash, cynicism, and state intervention.

The subtext is Roosevelt’s larger project: national unity in an era when demagogues could exploit religious and ethnic divisions, and when the stakes of cohesion were existential. As a wartime and crisis-era leader, FDR consistently framed internal conflict as a luxury the country couldn’t afford. This sentence fits that playbook, but it’s also a strategic defense of the American experiment: if the United States is going to hold together, belief has to coexist without being conscripted.

It’s not piety; it’s civic engineering. Roosevelt isn’t asking people to believe the same thing. He’s arguing that the only way religion survives in public life is by refusing to become ammunition.