Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Middleton

A quiet panic hides inside the measured cadence: Middleton isn’t lamenting youthful ignorance so much as diagnosing a political vulnerability. Coming from an 18th-century American politician, “a rising generation” works as both demographic shorthand and warning flare. It frames the young not as individuals with changing ideas, but as a mass trend that can tilt a nation’s future. The line’s real target is the “general decay of religion,” a phrase that smuggles in an assumption common among elite revolution-era thinkers: public virtue needs scaffolding, and religion is the most reliable scaffolding available.

The intent is less evangelistic than civic. “Do not know God” isn’t only a theological claim; it’s a proxy for declining discipline, weakened moral consensus, and the fear that freedom without restraint becomes chaos. In the decades around independence, Americans were building institutions almost from scratch and arguing about what could hold a republic together when monarchy and inherited hierarchy were gone. Religion, in that context, doubles as social technology: a way to produce trustworthy citizens at scale.

Subtextually, the quote also performs authority. By asserting a “decay,” Middleton positions himself as a guardian of order against creeping modernity - whatever form that modernity takes: Enlightenment skepticism, religious pluralism, or simply looser community bonds. The sentence is crafted to feel observational, even inevitable, which is precisely how moral arguments win political ground: they present contested cultural change as obvious decline, and call for restoration without naming whose power gets restored along with it.