Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine doesn’t bother with polite interfaith balance; he lines up “Jewish, Christian or Turkish” to make a blunt Enlightenment point: any state-backed church, regardless of creed, starts to look less like a path to God and more like an administrative technology. The word “institutions” does the heavy lifting. He isn’t arguing with private belief so much as with organized religion as a branch of governance - staffed, funded, protected, and inevitably invested in its own survival.

The insult is surgical: “human inventions.” In Paine’s hands, that phrase strips churches of supernatural authority and drops them into the same category as monarchies, titles, and other man-made hierarchies he spent a career torching. His verb choices sharpen the indictment. “Terrify” targets the psychological weaponry of damnation and taboo; “enslave” makes the political charge explicit, equating spiritual obedience with civic submission. Then comes the motive clause, “monopolize power and profit,” which yanks the debate from theology to political economy. Religion, he implies, isn’t just a story people tell; it’s a market cornered by an elite.

Context matters: Paine wrote as a revolutionary propagandist turned heretic, shaped by the American and French Revolutions and hardened by the spectacle of churches aligned with crowns. His “Turkish” (a period shorthand for Muslim) isn’t anthropological curiosity; it’s rhetorical refusal to treat Christianity as the exception. The subtext is a warning about nationalism itself: once faith is fused to the state, dissent becomes not merely wrong but disloyal, and coercion can dress as salvation.