"What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government cannot deprive any portion of citizens, however small"
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Johnson draws a bright, deliberately moral line: tolerance is what a majority grants when it feels generous; rights are what a government is forbidden to touch. In one stroke, he reframes “religious toleration” from a compliment into an accusation. Toleration implies permission, a kind of civic babysitting where the state pats dissenters on the head and says, you may exist. Johnson insists the American promise is harsher and more radical: religious liberty is not a favor on loan but a claim held against power itself.
The sentence is built like a legal brief but powered by democratic threat assessment. “Indulgence” is the key tell. It paints government not as neutral referee but as a potential patron, tempted to reward compliant faiths and penalize inconvenient ones. By rejecting indulgence, Johnson is really rejecting the whole European model of established churches and conditional pluralism - where minorities survive at the pleasure of the state and can be “un-tolerated” the moment politics turn.
The most pointed subtext sits at the end: “however small.” That clause anticipates the easy cruelty of majoritarianism, the shrug that says a tiny sect doesn’t count. Johnson answers that size is irrelevant to principle; the test of a republic is whether it restrains itself when the target is unpopular, marginal, or powerless. In the early 19th-century United States - a nation still negotiating disestablishment, suspicious of Catholic influence, and prone to local religious coercion - the line reads less like civics homework and more like a warning: freedom of conscience is either structural, or it’s just fashion.
The sentence is built like a legal brief but powered by democratic threat assessment. “Indulgence” is the key tell. It paints government not as neutral referee but as a potential patron, tempted to reward compliant faiths and penalize inconvenient ones. By rejecting indulgence, Johnson is really rejecting the whole European model of established churches and conditional pluralism - where minorities survive at the pleasure of the state and can be “un-tolerated” the moment politics turn.
The most pointed subtext sits at the end: “however small.” That clause anticipates the easy cruelty of majoritarianism, the shrug that says a tiny sect doesn’t count. Johnson answers that size is irrelevant to principle; the test of a republic is whether it restrains itself when the target is unpopular, marginal, or powerless. In the early 19th-century United States - a nation still negotiating disestablishment, suspicious of Catholic influence, and prone to local religious coercion - the line reads less like civics homework and more like a warning: freedom of conscience is either structural, or it’s just fashion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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