# Thomas Edison — "Religion is all bunk" > [!quote] "So far as religion of the day is concerned, it is a damned fake. ... Religion is all bunk. ... All bibles are man-made." > — Thomas Edison, interview with Edward Marshall, New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1910 ## Context In October 1910, New York Times journalist Edward Marshall interviewed Thomas Edison — then 63 years old and the most famous inventor in America — following press interest in the alleged posthumous "manifestation" of philosopher William James's soul. Marshall asked Edison directly: "What does God mean to you?" Edison replied: "Not a damn thing." He went on to deliver the passage above, dismissing organized religion as fraudulent, scripture as human fabrication, and prayer as ineffective. "Billions of prayers" had been uttered, Edison observed, with no discernible effect on disasters or wars. The interview detonated. Angry ministers protested from their pulpits across the country. Thousands of irate letters arrived at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. A Catholic cardinal wrote in Columbian Magazine that Edison's views on profound questions carried no weight because he was, after all, "a mere mechanic." The backlash was fierce enough that Edison agreed to a follow-up clarification interview with Marshall, published in the Columbian Magazine in January 1911. In it, Edison drew a distinction that infuriated partisans on both sides: "I never have denied Supreme Intelligence." He rejected not divinity itself but "a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might." The New York Times characterized his position with precision: "A merciful and loving Creator he considers not to be believed in. Nature, the supreme power, he recognizes and respects, but does not worship." Edison's views were not arrived at casually. He credited [[Thomas Paine]]'s The Age of Reason as a formative intellectual influence, recalling: "It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood ... it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought." Historian Paul Israel has characterized Edison as a "freethinker" who defended Paine's "scientific deism" — the position that the universe reveals an ordering intelligence through its laws, but that organized religion distorts and exploits this insight for institutional power. ## Why this matters Edison's dismissal of organized religion is significant to the [[Quotes Hub]] not because one inventor's theological opinions are inherently authoritative, but because of what the quote reveals about the tension between American scientific achievement and the [[Christian Nationalism]] narrative. The Christian Nationalist movement — documented extensively in this vault through its theological infrastructure of [[Dominionism]], the [[Seven Mountain Mandate]], and its political expression in [[Project 2025]] — depends on a foundational claim: that America was built as a Christian nation, by Christian men, on Christian principles. Pseudo-historians like [[David Barton]] have built entire careers manufacturing evidence for this claim, selectively quoting founders while suppressing their skepticism. Edison is not a Founding Father, but he is something arguably more potent in the American mythos: the self-made inventor, the empiricist hero, the man who literally brought light to the nation. And he called religion "a damned fake." Edison's position places him squarely in the American freethought tradition that runs from Paine through Robert Ingersoll to the present — a tradition the Christian Nationalist project must either co-opt or erase. His views were not atheism but a rigorous deism rooted in the [[Scientific Method]]: nature reveals order, and that order is worthy of study, not worship. This is the same empiricist orientation that animates the [[Enlightenment Science]] tradition the religious right seeks to subordinate to biblical authority. The clergy's reaction to the interview is equally instructive. The cardinal's dismissal of Edison as "a mere mechanic" previews the [[Theocracy]] playbook: when empirical authority contradicts theological authority, discredit the empiricist's standing rather than engage the argument. This is the same rhetorical move the contemporary religious right deploys against climate scientists, evolutionary biologists, and public health officials — the assertion that technical expertise confers no standing to challenge revealed truth. Edison's quote belongs in the [[Science Hub]] and [[History of Science Hub]] not as an anti-religious polemic but as primary-source evidence of a persistent American counter-tradition: the insistence that observable reality, not inherited dogma, is the proper foundation for understanding the world. ## Verification - **Primary source**: The interview was published in the New York Times Magazine on October 2, 1910, conducted by journalist Edward Marshall. The follow-up clarification appeared in the Columbian Magazine in January 1911. - **Wording**: The exact phrasing — "Religion is all bunk" and "All bibles are man-made" — appears consistently across multiple independent secondary sources including the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Wikiquote, and scholarly treatments of Edison's religious views. - **Edison's own writings**: The Rutgers University Thomas A. Edison Papers Digital Edition maintains a dedicated folder (D-10-27) for Edison's correspondence on "Religion & Spiritualism," confirming this was a sustained area of engagement, not a one-off remark. - **Historical consensus**: Biographer Paul Israel and other Edison scholars consistently classify Edison as a deist and freethinker, not an atheist — a distinction Edison himself insisted upon in the 1911 follow-up.