Politics & Power Quote by Noah Webster

Webster’s sentence reads like a civics lesson disguised as a pious aside, and that’s the point. He isn’t merely praising Christianity; he’s defining what a “free government” requires to survive. The phrasing “under a free government” does heavy lifting: liberty, for Webster, isn’t self-sustaining. It needs citizens trained early in a moral grammar sturdy enough to keep freedom from curdling into license. By tethering religious instruction to political order, he turns faith into infrastructure.

The subtext is anxious and managerial. Post-Revolution America was an experiment without a monarchy, without inherited hierarchy, and with a constantly expanding electorate. Webster, famous for standardizing language, also wanted to standardize character. “All children” signals a nation-building project: mass formation, not private devotion. He’s arguing for a common moral baseline that can bind diverse colonies-turned-states into something legible and governable. Christianity, in his view, supplies the shared story, the shared restraints, and the shared vocabulary of duty that law alone can’t enforce.

Context matters: in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, public schooling was emerging, denominational competition was real, and “religion” often functioned less as sectarian doctrine than as social discipline. Webster’s intent isn’t pluralist; it’s consolidating. He’s sketching an American identity where citizenship is taught alongside creed, implying that without Christian formation, the republic’s freedom is an empty procedural shell - vulnerable to corruption, faction, and moral drift.