Politics & Power Quote by Jeremy Bentham

Bentham’s line is a scalpel aimed at the oldest political temptation: turning private conviction into public machinery. “No power of government ought to be employed” is deliberately absolute, the kind of utilitarian hard edge that treats state force as a measurable harm, not a romantic instrument of national soulcraft. He’s not merely asking for tolerance. He’s arguing that religion becomes most dangerous at the moment it gains administrative teeth.

The phrasing matters. Bentham doesn’t say government shouldn’t establish a church; he says it shouldn’t establish “any system or article of belief.” That sweeps wider than Anglican supremacy or Catholic emancipation debates. It targets the micro-legislation of conscience: tests for office, mandatory oaths, school catechisms, blasphemy laws, “respect” statutes. He anticipates how governments smuggle theology in through policy details while claiming neutrality.

Context sharpens the intent. Bentham writes in the wake of the Enlightenment’s confidence in reason and the long European hangover of sectarian conflict, when British politics still hinged on religious identity and legal disabilities. His utilitarianism treats laws as tools for maximizing welfare; religious establishment, in that math, produces predictable costs: persecution, factionalism, hypocrisy, and the policing of inner life. The state can regulate actions; it cannot credibly regulate belief without creating lies on paper and resentment in practice.

Subtext: this is not pro-religion or anti-religion so much as anti-coercion. Bentham’s real enemy is legitimacy laundering - the trick where power claims divine backing to make itself unanswerable. Strip religion from government, and government has to justify itself in human terms: consequences, consent, and accountability.