Faith & Spirit Quote by Phillip E. Johnson

There is a lawyerly calm to Phillip E. Johnson's phrasing that signals his real aim: to reframe "religion in private life" not as exile but as insurance. The sentence is built like a reassurance memo to a nervous majority. "Does not necessarily threaten" is the key hedge, conceding the fear without validating it. He grants the majority religion its anxiety about losing cultural primacy, then gently drains that fear of inevitability. The payoff comes in the second clause, where the moral center of gravity shifts to minorities and the "tyranny of the majority", a phrase that smuggles in the entire liberal-democratic argument for rights that can't be put to a vote.

The subtext is a corrective to a familiar political reflex: treating secular governance as a hostile act against faith. Johnson implies that public neutrality is not anti-religious; it's anti-coercive. The majority religion, if it is "vital", should survive without state scaffolding. If it can't, the problem is less persecution than dependence.

Context matters: this is a U.S.-coded argument, shaped by First Amendment battles and the long fight over whether pluralism requires everyone to downshift their beliefs into a private register. Johnson is making a strategic case for a civic bargain: keep the state from blessing one theology, and you prevent the inevitable backlash cycle where today's majority writes the rules and tomorrow's is punished by them. The line works because it flatters the majority's self-image (we're not threatened) while warning it about power's boomerang.