Damning Words: the Life and Religious Times of HL Mencken
by DG Hart, Eerdmans, £18.99
Henry Louis Mencken worked hard to poke fun at religion. The best gags came when Mencken was in epigrammatic mood. “The Christian,” he wrote, was “one who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”
All too often, Mencken’s faith-bashing invective lacked substance and he came across, as Darryl Hart puts it, as “one part village atheist and one part town drunk”. Sometimes, though, a depth can be discerned in Mencken’s religious musings.
