Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Chase

Chase frames religion less as private conviction than as civic infrastructure: a public utility that keeps the social machine from shaking itself apart. The phrasing is tellingly bureaucratic for something supposedly spiritual. "General and public concern" pulls faith out of the realm of conscience and into the realm of governance; "support" makes it sound like a load-bearing beam. The claim isn’t just that religion is good, but that it is politically necessary, a condition for "peace and good order" and the "safety and happiness" of the people. That’s a sweeping causal chain, offered with the calm confidence of someone used to turning assumptions into precedent.

The subtext is anxiety. Early American republicanism worried about what would restrain citizens once monarchy and inherited hierarchy were gone. Chase answers with a familiar Federalist-era logic: virtue is the fuel of self-government, and religion is the refinery. His sentence smuggles in a warning that without religious scaffolding, the state faces disorder and moral drift - a polite way of describing fear of faction, vice, and the perceived chaos of radical democracy.

Context sharpens the edge. Chase lived through the Revolution, the fragile experiments of the 1790s, and the fierce partisanship that led to his impeachment as a Supreme Court justice in 1804 for openly political conduct from the bench. In that light, the quote reads like judicial paternalism dressed as public safety: a rationale for privileging religion in civic life not because the Constitution demands it, but because Chase suspects the people can’t be trusted without it. The line works because it sounds like a neutral observation while quietly arguing for a moral gatekeeper state.