Faith & Spirit Quote by Barney Frank

Barney Frank’s sentence performs a familiar piece of liberal-era political jujitsu: it defends religious people by refusing to flatter them. The line is built as a rebuke to the speaker’s own side, or at least to a fashionable suspicion of faith-based politics. Frank doesn’t argue that religious actors are automatically tolerant; he argues that it would be a choice - an uncharitable one - to define them as incapable of coalition. That’s a pointed shift from judging beliefs to judging civic behavior, where democratic legitimacy actually gets decided.

The syntax is doing the heavy lifting. “I hope we will not so characterize...” pretends to be mild, even pastoral, while smuggling in an accusation: if you insist religious people are “so narrow” they can’t collaborate, you’re the one stereotyping. Frank’s phrasing also pins down a paradox. The critics he’s addressing likely concede that religious communities are “committed” to a “common cause” (usually poverty, addiction, homelessness, AIDS relief, or anti-violence work), yet want to disqualify them as partners because of doctrinal difference. He exposes the contradiction without sermonizing.

Context matters: Frank, a blunt-tongued Democratic congressman and a gay public figure, had every reason to be wary of religious power. That’s why the sentence lands. It’s not piety; it’s coalition politics with teeth. The subtext is pragmatic and combative: if progressives can’t work with believers on shared goals, the problem may be progressive purity, not religious prejudice.