Politics & Power Quote by Luke Ford

A confession like this lands with a thud because it’s not dressed up as policy language or humanitarian concern; it’s nakedly theological and managerial. “Divine mission” is doing the heavy lifting: it sanctifies expansion, pre-emptively absolves violence, and reframes domination as duty. The sentence is built on a quiet sleight of hand, too. “Civilize” sounds like education; the clause that follows reveals it as remaking. The world isn’t being helped, it’s being edited.

The triad “western, democratic and Christian” reads like a values package, but it’s also a hierarchy. “Western” becomes the default setting, “democratic” the political justification, “Christian” the moral seal. The implied subject is “English-speaking people,” a category that smuggles empire into the present tense: not just Britain’s past, but the broader Anglosphere’s cultural confidence, from missionary zeal to soft-power evangelism. It collapses language, ethnicity, and legitimacy into one club with a sacred mandate.

Ford’s “I believed” is the tell. It suggests a retrospective accounting: either a renunciation, a critique of a former self, or at least an acknowledgment of how seductively coherent that worldview can feel from inside. The subtext is less about personal faith than about the intoxicating story Western modernity tells itself: that its preferences are prescriptions, its history a template, its God a passport. The line exposes how easily “progress” becomes a sermon with borders.