Gods always behave like the people who make them.

Hurston’s line points to a human-centered view of religion: deities tend to mirror the values, fears, social hierarchies, and everyday behavior of the cultures that imagine them. Rather than treating “the gods” as independent moral authorities, the quote suggests that religious images and divine commands often function as projections—sanctioning what a community already believes or wants to justify. Read this way, the remark is both anthropological and satirical: it implies that to understand a society’s gods, one should study the society itself, because the divine temperament (merciful, punitive, jealous, tribal, universal) frequently reflects human temperament and politics.