Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine’s line is a knife twist aimed at two targets at once: anti-intellectual obstinacy and the sanctimonious monarchy that brands dissent as sin. The first clause draws a clean moral map. “Rebels against reason” aren’t romantic freedom fighters; they’re mutineers against the only authority Paine thinks deserves obedience: the faculty that lets a public govern itself. It’s a deliberately unfashionable move in an age (and ours) that loves to aestheticize rebellion. Paine insists that not all defiance is virtuous; some of it is just ego dressed up as courage.

Then he flips the charge of rebellion back onto power. If tyranny is the aggressor, resisting it isn’t lawlessness but fidelity to a higher order: reason, natural rights, the idea that legitimacy must be argued for, not inherited. That’s the subtext: Paine is redefining loyalty. You don’t prove devotion by bowing to a king; you prove it by refusing to let force masquerade as truth.

The jab at “Defender of the Faith” is strategic mockery. George III wore a sacred-sounding title meant to fuse church authority to crown authority, as if political obedience were a religious duty. Paine steals the language of piety and reroutes it: the real “faith” worth defending is rational self-government. In the revolutionary context, this is propaganda with teeth: it gives ordinary readers permission to see themselves not as traitors, but as principled guardians of a moral and intellectual covenant stronger than any royal decree.