It was part of a larger segment describing ignorance. Now, it may be hyperbolic but it certainly describes episodes in human history fairly accurately, the ones that turn away from the facts of the surrounding world for the comfortable fictions of belief, either religious or political.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Not all religious people feel this way, but they are standing by while others are. They permit the ignorance to be fed by their silence. They become just as culpable in the retreat to the Dark Ages as the fanatics. I refuse to stand by meekly and see this happen.  4:36:37 PM