Politics & Power Quote by Robert Rainy

Rainy’s opening move, “Of course,” is a quiet power play: it frames his claim as self-evident, the kind of thing only the naive would contest. That matters because his subject is not theology in the abstract but institutional strategy. He’s drawing a sharp line between two kinds of religious presence: a church “planted among the nations” and a “sect” that sprouts inside an already-Christian landscape during a revival. One is cast as foundational and civilizational, the other as reactive and local.

The subtext is ecclesiastical politics dressed up as common sense. “Planted” evokes apostolic mission and long-term cultivation; it suggests legitimacy, patience, and a mandate that precedes popular mood. “Sect forming in connection with religious awakening” subtly demotes revival movements to temporary weather systems: emotionally charged, socially contagious, and potentially destabilizing. Rainy isn’t merely describing difference; he’s protecting the idea of a national church as something structurally distinct from dissenting offshoots.

Contextually, a 19th-century clergyman in Britain is writing in the aftershocks of evangelical awakenings, denominational competition, and imperial mission. Churches were negotiating authority: who gets to speak for “Christianity” in a modernizing society, and who counts as a legitimate heir versus an improvised splinter? Rainy’s sentence is a preemptive justification for unequal expectations. A missionary church can claim adaptation to “the nations,” even accommodation. A revival-born sect, by contrast, can be judged as opportunistic or fractious. The elegance is in how he smuggles hierarchy into taxonomy, making governance sound like mere description.