Faith & Spirit Quote by Thomas More

More is doing something sly here: praising tolerance in the New World while letting Europe’s hypocrisy indict itself offstage. Writing in the orbit of Utopia, he frames Indigenous people not as savage threats but as practical moderators of belief. The line turns on a quiet reversal. Those who “have not received our religion” don’t “fright any from it” and don’t harm converts; the lone punishment he witnessed becomes less a mark of native cruelty than a statistical rebuke to Christian Europe, where heresy trials and coerced conformity were becoming policy, not exception.

The phrasing matters. “Our religion” carries the proprietary confidence of a Christian humanist certain of truth, yet the behavioral comparison is the real argument. More’s implicit measure of a society isn’t doctrinal purity but how it treats dissent and conversion. That is a radical yardstick in early 16th-century Europe, where confessional identity was hardening into state power and where “mission” often traveled with conquest. By emphasizing the absence of intimidation and the rarity of punishment, More gives his reader a destabilizing thought: the people presumed to need Christian civilization already outperform Christians on a core Christian virtue.

There’s also careful self-protection. He reports rather than preaches: “all the while I was there.” Eyewitness posture lends credibility and plausible deniability. More can smuggle a critique of coercive religion into a travel observation, letting the “others” model what Christian princes refuse to practice.