Word: menckenism
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...respecter of the religious impulse, Mencken has some illuminating things to say about it: "Always, in time of bloodshed, pestilence and poverty, there is what theologians call a great spiritual awakening. But when peace and plenty caress the land the priest has a hard time keeping his flock at prayer, and great numbers desert him altogether. ... I am myself a theologian of considerable gifts, and yet I can no more imagine immortality than I can imagine the Void which existed before matter took form. Neither, I suspect, can the Pope...
...Mencken thinks polytheism still rears its many heads. "The God of the Episcopalians is an elderly British peer, courtly in manner, somewhat beefy, and, in New York, vaguely Jewish. The God of the Mormons shaves his upper lip, and believes in large families and a protective tariff. The God of the Methodists is an agent pro-vacateur, forever fingering his pad of blank warrants. The God of the Baptists is amphibious, and, in some of his aspects, almost identical with the Neptune of the Greeks...
Though his book purports to be a comparison of historical religions, most of it is concerned with Christianity, as the religious form most familiar to the western world. Mencken examines Christianity in detail, its Founder, its Bible, its Church...
...typical piece of Menckenian irony: he describes a hanging he once reported, at which the Baptist prisoner loudly recited the 23d Psalm while the sheriff and the hangman were busied with the final preparations; the fall of the drop cut short the prisoner's words of praise. Says Mencken: "As an American I naturally spend most of my time laughing, but that time I did not laugh...
...Significance. H.L. Mencken is admired for his tickling wit, not for his uncomforting, uncomfortable common sense. His skepticism, shared tacitly by an intelligent minority of U.S. citizens, he voices in so vigorous and individual a manner that it can be laughed off by many who secretly agree with him. "No one will deny, I take it, that we owe the Rockefeller Institute, at least in part, to certain purely theological tremors in the donor. . . . However . . . this is really not an argument in favor of religion; it is simply an argument against the human race." The U.S. has no Established Church...