Quotes About Church Politics

#1. Educational institutes can no longer be prizes in church politics or furnish berths for failure in other walks of life.

E. Franklin Frazier

#2. Politics, according to the Social Doctrine of the Church, is one of the highest forms of charity, because it serves the common good. I cannot wash my hands, eh? We all have to give something!

Pope Francis

#3. I am tolerant of all creeds. Yet if any sect suffered itself to be used for political objects I would meet it by political opposition. In my view church and state should be separate, not only in form, but fact. Religion and politics should not be mingled.

Millard Fillmore

#4. The liberal understanding of 'the separation of church and state' means that as the area of politics expands, the area of private freedom - religious and otherwise - shrinks.

Joseph Sobran

#5. We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.

Stephen Colbert

#6. We will arrange for 'religion' to become a small subdepartment of ordinary life; it will be quite safe - harmless, in fact - with church life carefully separated off from everything else in the world, whether politics, art, sex, economics, or whatever.

N. T. Wright

#7. Since the dawn of time, warring combatants have regularly reached for what support they could find to nerve their own side for battle.

Mark A. Noll

#8. Whenever we use our religion, as individuals, or as groups within the church, to act in tandem with political and economic groups that arrest the voice of truth or destroy others, then we are Judas.

Megan McKenna

#9. I mean, I went to a church school when I was younger and imbibed a certain amount of religion then but it was really in university that I got interested in religion and politics at the same time. I don't think as if it were one moment of conversion but my spiritual journey really began then.

Tony Blair

#10. Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation.

Christian Wiman

#11. What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Are not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion. O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride!

William Blake

#12. No church that panders to the zeitgeist deserves respect, and very shortly it will not get respect, except from those who find it politically useful, and that is less respect than disguised contempt.

Robert Bork

#13. The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church's public marks of the covenant-baptism and holy communion-must be denied citizenship.

Gary North

#14. Kind of the bottom line for me, I don't think people come to the church where I preach to hear my view on politics.

Max Lucado

#15. We are formed by environment and grace, by politics and prayer, by church and conscience. All God's creatures conspire to teach us as well. We stumble. We stutter. We rise. We are lifted.

Anthony Of Padua

#16. The Church of England is the only church in the world that interferes neither with your politics nor your religion

Anthony Trollope

#17. Since politics fundamentally should be a moral enterprise, the church in this sense has something to say about politics.

Pope Benedict XVI

#18. If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like everyone else.

George Carlin

#19. My Methodist upbringing was very formative in my politics. I was born in 1969, and there was all this ecumenical 'we're in this together' sensitivity that was part of the United Methodist Church in the 1970s.

Joel Burns

#20. All politics are local, and so in church.

Greg Boyle

#21. We put up a kind of spiritual firewall and make a conscious effort to shut out the headlines, because our (Bible) discussions are meant to be timeless.

John Kasich

#22. If I use Facebook to stay in touch with my high school friends who are church-going Republicans, I may be getting more ideological diversity than in hanging out with secular progressives on the World Politics sub-reddit.

Ethan Zuckerman

#23. The Church is larger than any one nation or any one political scene.

Brother Andrew

#24. In the politics of Jesus the world will be changed by non-coercive love or not at all. It's not the task of the church to change the world by legislative force. It's the task of the church to be the world changed by Christ. This is revolutionary in a way that conventional politics never can be.

Brian Zahnd

#25. The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount ... If we don't have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State.

Harry Truman

#26. When the Holy Father passed away in 2005, Laura, Dad, Bill Clinton, and I flew together to his funeral in Rome. It was the first time an American president had attended the funeral of a pope, let alone brought two of his predecessors.

George W. Bush

#27. Adulterers in churches and pornography in the schools, you got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making rules. When you gonna wake up?

Bob Dylan

#28. The Church must take right ground in regard to politics ... Politics are a part of a religion in such a country as this, and Christians must do their duty to the country as part of their duty to God ... God will bless or curse this nation, according to the course Christians take in politics.

Charles Grandison Finney

#29. You must not wait to be elected into office, before you begin to serve. Begin to serve every where you are; in the home, community, school, university, work, hospital, church, market, society, nation and among many other places.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#30. When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.

Harry A. Blackmun

#31. Again, a conversation with the doctor. We always come back to the same point: "The church may not mix in politics." he says. And I tell him that when you are a Christian and profess that God is almighty, there is no single area of life from which you can eliminate God. -From the diary of Diet Eman

Diet Eman

#32. Politics is noble; it is one of the highest forms of charity, as Paul VI used to say. We sully it when we mix it with business. The relationship between the Church and political power can also be corrupted if common good is not the only converging point.

Pope Francis

#33. The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#34. The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

Wilhelm Reich

#35. I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I'm here.

Pope Francis

#36. The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]

James Madison

#37. Homosexuality, to the limited extent it was discussed in our church, was little more than a political football, a quick test of orthodoxy.

Matthew Vines

#38. The unholy alliance of religion and politics collaborated in finding Jesus guilty.

Eugene H. Peterson

#39. We are not engaged in domestic politics, in church building or in social uplift work, but we are engaged in nation building.

Marcus Garvey

#40. But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.

T. S. Eliot

#41. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all - I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape.

Henry David Thoreau

#42. For a number of people, church attendance seems to be primarily a social affair, the act of meeting other people outside of the pressures of work. For others it is pure business/politics. I get it. It's important to have access to a community like the one a church provides.

Gudjon Bergmann

#43. There's no stronger bulwark of sound conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better place to make friends who'll help you to gain your rightful place in the community than in your own church-home!

Sinclair Lewis

#44. The conversion of agnostic High Tories to the Anglican church is always rather suspect. It seems too pat and predictable, too clearly a matter of politics rather than faith.

Terry Eagleton

#45. When it comes to labor and politics, I am inclined to be sympathetic
to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to
the right.

Dorothy Day

#46. Your right of religious freedom ends where my right of religious abstinence begins ...

T. Rafael Cimino

#47. My principles in respect of religious interest are two,
one is, that the Church shall not meddle with politics, and the government shall not meddle with religion.

Lajos Kossuth

#48. C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist.

Philip Yancey

#49. Politics and church are the same. They keep the people in ignorance.

Bob Marley

#50. My politics is my religion, my religion is my politics.

Mahatma Gandhi

#51. It was in this year, 1828, that the standard of "the Christian Party in Politics" was openly unfurled ... This was an evident attempt, through the influence of the clergy over the female mind - until this hour lamentably neglected in the United States - to effect a union of Church and State.

Frances Wright

#52. I believe that, in this country, the press exerts a greater and a more pernicious influence than the church did in its worst period. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians.

Henry David Thoreau

#53. Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

Harold Bloom

#54. In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.

Stanley Hauerwas

#55. A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

Russell Baker

#56. Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either.

Mahatma Gandhi

#57. We thought the church had withdrawn from interfering in Italian politics ... but instead there is a terrible resurgence. These are ugly signs for freedom of expression.

Dario Fo

#58. Pat Robertson is an embarrassment to the church and a danger to American politics, .. It's time for Christian leaders of all stripes to call on Robertson not just to apologize but to retire.

Jim Wallis

#59. In no other arena is the church at greater risk of losing its calling than in the public square.

Philip Yancey