Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Swift

Swift takes a wickedly clinical pleasure in puncturing Christianity’s public-relations myth: that a state church naturally earns a nation’s affection. He flips the expected moral hierarchy. The clergy, supposedly custodians of love and salvation, become structurally unlovable the moment they’re installed as the official spiritual management class. It’s not their theology he’s diagnosing so much as their political positioning. When Christianity is “the religion of the country,” the clergy stop looking like martyrs and start looking like administrators: tax-adjacent, law-adjacent, and inevitably entangled with coercion. Popularity dies the second a collar comes with institutional power.

The barb in the second sentence is pure Swift: “Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.” Read it slowly and it’s almost an insult disguised as advice. The clergy don’t win hearts by holiness or service; they win them by suffering just enough to seem holy again. Persecution, in this formulation, is a branding strategy. It produces the flattering narrative of the righteous minority, even when the church is anything but powerless.

Context matters: Swift was an Anglican cleric himself, writing in a Britain still rattling with the aftershocks of Reformation conflict, anti-Catholic paranoia, and the everyday resentments of an established church with real privileges. His target isn’t faith as such; it’s the institution’s appetite for authority and the public’s appetite for a good martyr story. The subtext lands uncomfortably now: nothing fuels moral prestige like the performance of being under siege.