Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Morgan

Morgan’s line reads like battlefield pragmatism dressed up as theology: religion isn’t praised here as private salvation but as civic infrastructure. Coming from a Revolutionary War soldier, the claim carries a soldier’s bias toward order. Governments, in his view, don’t stand on parchment alone; they stand on shared restraint. If the old moral scaffolding vanishes, something rushes in to replace it, and what rushes in is “anarchy” - not a romantic freedom, but the chaos that gets people killed.

The subtext is less “church or heaven” than “belief or obedience.” Morgan is arguing that authority needs an internal policeman. Religion supplies shame, duty, and a sense of consequence that courts and militias can’t administer fast enough, especially on a young continent where institutions were thin, distances vast, and violence never far away. The vivid phrase “a compleat Hell on earth” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it’s meant to make irreligion feel not merely misguided but socially apocalyptic, a contagion that spreads from the soul to the streets.

Context matters. In the late 18th century, “religion” often meant a broadly Protestant moral consensus, intertwined with community reputation and local governance. Morgan’s fear isn’t abstract atheism; it’s the unraveling of a common code at the exact moment the new republic is trying to prove it can govern itself. The kicker - “till religion returns” - implies cycles: society can fall into disorder, but stability is imagined as a reversion to the familiar, not an invention of new secular norms.