Civil Religion Quotes

#1. The words and acts of the founding fathers, especially the first few presidents, shaped the form and tone of the civil religion as it has been maintained ever since. Though much is selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity. ROBERT BELLAH1

Gregory A. Boyd

#2. Civil religion gives American culture its direction and defines its fundamental values, but it does not determine the diversified contents of American national culture.

Edward Hirsch

#3. In the US, what passes for Christianity - and it is, to say the least, a highly perverse, possessive individualist and capitalist version of what I would see as Christ's messianic ethical communism, to say the least - is a new civil religion, a civil religion of freedom.

Simon Critchley

#4. The crucified Christ has become a stranger to the civil religion of the First World and to that world's Christianity.

Jurgen Moltmann

#5. Civil religion is the attempt to empower religion, not for the good of religion, but for the creation of the citizen.

Stanley Hauerwas

#6. Some Christians worried about a faith that was so embracing as to be meaningless, that exalted not the Almighty so much as the American way of life. When civil religion bleached the challenge from faith and left behind a watery patriotism, there was room for concern.

Nancy Gibbs; Michael Duffy

#7. If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn.

Daniel Webster

#8. You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.

Midge Ure

#9. It is not the legitimate province of the Legislature to determine which religion is true, or what false. Our government is a civil, and not a religious institution.

Richard Mentor Johnson

#10. A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

Joan D. Chittister

#11. The great and good ends proposed by the Illuminati, as the ultimate objects of their union, are the overthrow of religion, government, and human society civil and domestic.

Timothy Dwight IV

#12. I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.

John Locke

#13. Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

Voltaire

#14. Atheists have just as much civil right to teach atheism as Christians have to teach Christianity; agnostics have just as much right to teach agnosticism as Christians have to teach their religion.

William Jennings Bryan

#15. Today's secular libertarians, who want to remove biblical religion from public life, have trouble making sense of the civil rights movement because it was so clearly a religiously inspired movement that entered the public arena and made a major difference in American life.

Bruce L. Shelley

#16. In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#17. [During the second Sudanese Civil War] what was actually killing us wasn't the Muslims, wasn't the Arabs. It was somebody sitting somewhere manipulating the system, and using religion to get what they want to get out of us, which is the oil, the diamond, the gold and the land.

Emmanuel Jal

#18. A just laicism allows religious freedom. The state does not impose religion but rather gives space to religions with a responsibility toward civil society, and therefore it allows these religions to be factors in building up society.

Pope Benedict XVI

#19. The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

Timothy Egan

#20. Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.

John Locke

#21. The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.

Francis Schaeffer

#22. Freedom of religion means the right of the individual to choose and to adhere to whichever religious beliefs he may prefer, to join with others in religious associations to express these beliefs, and to incur no civil disabilities because of his choice ...

Joseph Leon Blau

#23. The Establishment Clause ... stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders ... that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its 'unhallowed perversion' by a civil magistrate.

Hugo Black

#24. Religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort.

Edmund Burke

#25. Only a "dry as dust" religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of Heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an Earthly hell.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#26. An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.

Roger Williams

#27. Regardless of whether or not you belong to a majority religion, in the United States you may not impose your theology on civil law.

Lori Lipman Brown

#28. The settled opinion here is that religion is essentially distinct from Civil Govt. and exempt from its cognizance; that a connection between them is injurious to both ...

James Madison

#29. Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ...

Chris Crutcher

#30. For as Jews, the problem happens to be more urgent and vital than for others; because the destruction of religion on America will involve the destruction also of the religious training of freedom; and with that our civil liberties.

Louis Finkelstein

#31. Civil disobedience is not accepted by religion and the state does not accept it and there are many verses in the Holy Book that talk of following the ruler.

Pope Shenouda III

#32. When men take pleasure in feeling their minds elevated with strong drink, and so indulge their appetite as to disorder their understandings, neglect their duty as members of a family or civil society, and cast off all regard to religion, their case is much to be pitied.

John Woolman

#33. Those statues were exquisitely carved, without exception; that was what the Egyptians were really good at, along with organized religion and civil engineering.

Jonathan Stroud

#34. Piety, religion, and morality are intimately connected with the well being of that state, and indispensable to the administration of civil justice.

Joseph Story

#35. Neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion. -quoting John Locke's argument.

Thomas Jefferson

#36. Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society.

George Washington

#37. Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. To lend money without interest, is certainly an action laudable and extremely good; but it is obvious, that it is only a counsel of religion, and not a civil law.

Baron De Montesquieu

#39. Politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion.

Pope Francis

#40. Jefferson found in the religion phrases of the First Amendment no vague or fuzzy language to be bent or shaped or twisted as suited any Supreme Court Justice or White House incumbent. That amendment had built a wall, with the ecclesiastical estate on one side and the civil estate on the other.

Edwin Gaustad

#41. A civil ruler dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a clergyman dabbling in politics. Both render themselves odious as well as ridiculous.

James Gibbons

#42. But who is to decide who truly fears the Lord? The magistrate has no power to enforce religious demands. The laws of the First Table of the Ten Commandments are not regulations for a civil society or a political order. They belong to the realm of religion, not politics.

Roger Williams

#43. Our religion was the religion of a Book. Man must be educated on Earth for Heaven. John Quincy Adams

Paul C. Nagel

#44. Paperwork is the religion of the Civil Service. I can just imagine Sir Humphrey Appleby on his deathbed, surround by wills and insurance claim forms, looking up and saying, 'I cannot go yet, God, I haven't done the paperwork.

Jonathan Lynn & Anthony Jay

#45. Non Violence and Religion:
Both designed to keep the oppressed from murdering their oppressors.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#46. These men were religious when the spirit of religion was buried in forms and ceremonies, and when the priesthood had armed itself with the civil powers to put down all opposition, and suppress all freedom, intellectual, civil, and religious.

Ethan A. Hitchcock

#47. The worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.

Ayn Rand

#48. The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

Jonathan Lethem

#49. When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.

Benjamin Franklin

#50. Religious liberty is about freedom of action in matters of religion generally, and the scope of that liberty is directly correlated to the civil restraints placed upon religious practice.

Clarence Thomas

#51. The happiness of a people, and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend on piety, religion, and morality.

Fisher Ames

#52. My religion forbids me to belittle or disregard other cultures, as it insists, under pain of civil suicide, upon imbibing and living my own.

Mahatma Gandhi

#53. Superstition is an enemy to civil liberty.

David Hume

#54. Almost all the civil liberty now enjoyed in the world owes its origin to the principles of the christian religion.

Noah Webster

#55. We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Rebecca Solnit

#56. Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.

Thomas Jefferson

#57. Without the restraints of religion and social worship, men become savages much sooner than savages become civilized by means of religion and civil government.

Benjamin Rush

#58. [T]he Christian religion, in its purity, is the basis, or rather the source of all genuine freedom in government ... and I am persuaded that no civil government of a republican form can exist and be durable in which the principles of that religion have not a controlling influence.

Noah Webster

#59. Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.

Thomas Jefferson

#60. More than Christianity, the religion of Victorian times was a belief in human advance - the conviction that freed from ignorance and superstition, humanity could expand its power and be master of its destiny.

John N. Gray

#61. The author finds any freaking, and remarkably objective, way to estimate religion's influence on American society before the Civil War. The population closely aligned with evangelical sympathies was three or four times the size of the voting population in 1860

Mark A. Noll

#62. The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.

James Madison

#63. One cannot worship the false god of nationalism and the God of Christianity at the same time.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#64. I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.

Michael J. Fox

#65. When religion is good, it will take care of itself. When it is not able to take care of itself, and God does not see fit to take care of it, so that it has to appeal to the civil power for support, it is evidence to my mind that its cause is a bad one.

Benjamin Franklin

#66. Christianity, by introducing into Europe the truest principles of humanity, universal benevolence, and brotherly love, had happily abolished civil slavery. Let us who profess the same religion practice its precepts ... by agreeing to this duty.

Richard Henry Lee

#67. It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage ... Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe ...

James Madison

#68. Secularists argue that differences of religion were the chief cause of violence in our history - conveniently overlooking violent clashes of region, race, and class, not the least of which was the bloodiest war in history until that time, the Civil War.

Stephen V Monsma

#69. Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to God alone.

Thomas Jefferson

#70. New Rule: If you married a manic-depressive, three of your children died, and while you were president civil war broke out and someone shot you in the head, your coin really shouldn't say, In God We Trust.

Bill Maher