Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas Paine

Paine’s line is a dagger aimed less at faith than at power wearing faith as a badge. He starts with a tactical concession: persecution isn’t “original” to religion. Belief, in his framing, begins as persuasion, community, maybe even dissent. The turn comes with “established by law,” where private conviction hardens into public machinery. Once a creed is stapled to the state, it stops competing in the marketplace of ideas and starts policing it.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Always” and “strongly marked” are absolutist on purpose: Paine isn’t describing an occasional abuse, he’s naming a predictable design flaw. When religion becomes law, enforcement becomes a sacrament. Orthodoxy needs borders, and borders need guards. “Persecution” follows not because believers are uniquely cruel, but because institutions that claim divine sanction can’t easily tolerate rivals; dissent becomes not just disagreement but a kind of civil crime.

Context sharpens the edge. Paine writes in the wake of Europe’s long confessional violence and during the American experiment in separating church from state. He’s also writing as a radical democrat suspicious of inherited authority. The subtext is a warning to the new republic: don’t flatter yourselves that tyranny only comes crowned. It can arrive as moral certainty backed by courts, taxes, and licensing - the quiet bureaucratic violence of making one group’s metaphysics everyone’s obligations.

Paine’s real target is the merger itself: when the state claims to save souls, it inevitably decides whose souls count.