Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Story

Story isn’t waxing pious here; he’s drawing a hard boundary with the cool certainty of someone who has watched religion turn political authority into a weapon. The phrase “solemn consciousness” signals that this is not theoretical Enlightenment posing. It’s lived institutional memory: European state churches, colonial establishments, and the kind of sectarian knife-fights that made early Americans suspicious of any alliance between pulpit and legislature.

What makes the line work is its unflattering psychological portrait of religious power. “Ecclesiastical ambition” frames churches as actors with careerism and appetite, not just doctrine. “Bigotry of spiritual pride” is sharper: conviction becomes vanity, righteousness becomes status, and disagreement becomes moral contamination. Then “intolerance of sects” lands the point that pluralism doesn’t automatically produce peace; it can just as easily produce a marketplace of mutual excommunications. Story’s subtext is that sincere belief is not the danger. Institutionalized belief, armed with state coercion, is.

The kicker is the policy conclusion: exclude “all power” from the national government “to act upon the subject.” He’s defending what we’d now call a jurisdictional solution to a cultural problem. Don’t ask officials to referee salvation, define orthodoxy, or pick winners among competing moral authorities, because the incentives will corrupt both government and religion. As a Justice and constitutional commentator in the early republic, Story is also quietly shoring up legitimacy: the First Amendment isn’t mere tolerance; it’s a preemptive strike against an old, recurring human failure.