Faith & Spirit Quote by David Brainerd

Brainerd writes like a man watching a society rot from the inside and refusing to soften the diagnosis. The sentence is engineered as an indictment: “extravagant errors” in belief don’t merely coexist with “infamous vices” in behavior; they generate and protect them. The parallel structure (errors received, vices obtained) is doing moral cause-and-effect work, collapsing the gap between theology and daily life. He’s not arguing that people are hypocrites in spite of religion. He’s arguing that the religion, as socially installed, becomes the machine that legitimizes vice.

The subtext is deeply colonial and missionary. Brainerd, an 18th-century New England pastor and missionary, often wrote about Indigenous communities through a Puritan lens, interpreting unfamiliar spiritual systems as “established articles of faith” that misdirected conscience. That choice of phrase is strategic: it mimics the language of creeds and confessions, implying an institutional rigidity that can’t self-correct. “Sanction of their laws” raises the charge from personal sin to civic corruption. It’s not just that individuals do bad things; the culture has converted wrongdoing into policy.

The intent, then, is persuasion through moral escalation. By pairing “impunity” with “authorized,” Brainerd suggests a terrifying upgrade: vice isn’t merely tolerated; it’s normalized, even celebrated, because the moral framework is broken at the root. For his intended audience back home, this kind of rhetoric functions as fundraising copy, spiritual justification for mission work, and a warning about what happens when a community’s sacred stories become a shield for power rather than a check on it.