Top 95 Quotes About Secularism
#1. If Christianity is to be discounted as wishful thinking because it removes fear of meaninglessness and annihilation, then secularism should be open to the same charge, since it removes the hated ideas of an absolute superior and of real responsibility.
Richard L. Purtill
#2. To imply that religious believers have no right to engage moral questions in the public square or at the ballot is simply to establish a Reichian secularism as our state faith.
Maggie Gallagher
#3. I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own.
Marilynne Robinson
#4. The best response to bad religion is better religion, not secularism.
Jim Wallis
#5. The paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while England, with an established church headed by its constitutional monarch, is among the least.
Richard Dawkins
#6. Secularism teaches us that we ought to look to this world. Christianity teaches us that the best way to prepare for this world is to be fully prepared for the next.
Charles Spurgeon
#7. I want the French people to respect values that allow each individual to practice his or her faith, but in the frame of our common rules of secularism.
Francois Hollande
#8. Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.
Richard Rohr
#9. When your claim to be victims of secularism rests on Wal-Mart greeters wishing shoppers Happy Holidays, you are clearly a bunch of great big babies.
Katha Pollitt
#10. Secularism will not work in Egypt any more than theocracy. What will work is governance that is guided by the Islamic values of the majority with protection of the minority rights.
Ahmed Zewail
#11. For me, my secularism is, India first. I say, the philosophy of my party is 'Justice to all. Appeasement to none.' This is our secularism.
Narendra Modi
#12. Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.
Will Self
#13. French laicite is probably aggressive and antagonistic to the religion, but there are other models of secularism in the world where there could be reconciliation between religion and secularism.
Rashid Al-Ghannushi
#15. The Obamacare contraception mandate was never about freedom. It was always about pitting secularism against religion, and using the power of government to sponsor secularism.
Ben Shapiro
#16. If we allow our Christian faith to be adulterated with materialism, watered down by secularism, and intermingled with a bland humanism, we cannot stand up to a system that has vowed to bury us.
Billy Graham
#17. Positive secularism is not tolerance of all religions, but it is the total denial of religious beliefs: it is the emergence of homogeneous human outlook which is based upon verifiable facts of life.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao
#18. Secularism denounces supernaturalism and promotes a nonreligious or antireligious basis of social organization and morality.
Carl F. H. Henry
#19. I am a sworn atheist and therefore from my point of view the Talmud or the Koran don't constitute works of political philosophy but rather writings that stand in utter contradiction to concepts like logic, freedom, feminism, secularism, brotherhood - which are my ideals.
Michel Onfray
#20. The Founding Faith, then, was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty - a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone.
Steven Waldman
#21. Secularism is not only indifferent to alternative religious systems, but as a religious ideology it is opposed to any other religious systems. It is therefore a closed system.
Harvey Cox
#22. No Muslim country has ever done as much as Turkey to make itself over in the image of a European nation-state; the country's westernised elite brutally imposed secularism, among other things, on its devout population of peasants.
Pankaj Mishra
#23. I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.
John Gresham Machen
#24. But the West is trying to weaken Islam from outside and inside. They attack our people and invade our countries from outside, and they weaken us from within with ideas like secularism, liberalism and democracy. This is all designed to contaminate our pure Islam.
Abu Bakar Bashir
#25. It's no secret that in New York during the last 30 years there has been a tragic exodus from the churches into materialism, secularism and humanism.
Billy Graham
#26. I believe that pluralistic secularism, in the long run, is a more deadly poison than straightforward persecution.
Francis Schaeffer
#27. When the gospel has been eclipsed (whether by repression, false religion secularism, humanistic philosophy, or spiritual decay within the church), the status of women has declined accordingly.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#28. Secularism for the Congress is merely a slogan while for the BJP it is an article of faith. Secularism is about votebank politics for the Congress, while it is about 'India first' for the BJP.
Narendra Modi
#29. There are two principal approaches to secularism, focusing respectively on (1) neutrality between different religions, and (2) prohibition of religious associations in state activities.
Amartya Sen
#30. Secularism and Religion are both all about your personal performance. The Gospel is the performance of another applied to you.
Timothy Keller
#32. One of the challenges of secularism is that it's not something outside us. In too many instances, secularism has so permeated the church that sometimes it's the frame of reference even for very good people, people who have a strong allegiance to the church.
Donald Wuerl
#33. Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.
Richard Dawkins
#34. Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies.
A.W. Tozer
#35. Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.
Adam Nevill
#36. Congress' dynastic politics has shattered the hopes & aspirations of people. Congress hides behind the veil of secularism whenever its governance falters and its misconduct is exposed. This will no longer go unchallenged. The younger generation will not accept these actions of Congress!
Narendra Modi
#37. The mask of secularism may differ in thickness, may be less visible, but religion is always there hidden under hallowed big beautiful words
Nawal El Saadawi
#38. Secularism does not accept many things as absolutes. Its principal objectives are pleasure and self-interest. Often, those who embrace secularism have a different look about them.
James E. Faust
#39. I guess I'm a spiritual secularist, if that's not an oxymoron. My paths of secularism and spirituality are the same: I try to do the appropriate thing at each moment.
Paul Krassner
#40. It seems true that the growth of science and secularism made organized Christianity feel under threat.
Mary Douglas
#41. Perhaps more than ever before, there is that aggressive secularism and there are those who would indeed try to destroy our Christian heritage and culture and take God from the public square. Religion must not be taken from the public square.
Keith O'Brien
#42. Brigham Young observed, "Man's machinery makes things alike" (JD 9:370), while God gives to seemingly like individuals pleasing differences. Secularism is no friend of righteous individuality.
Neal A. Maxwell
#43. Catholics and evangelicals need to remain allied, and in solidarity, against the increasingly aggressive secularism of our age.
Gary Bauer
#44. The Christian community must live out it's calling in the conscious recognition that secularism is false.
Richard J. Mouw
#45. Unity and secularism will be the motto of the government. We can't afford divisive polity in India.
Manmohan Singh
#46. Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism.
Greg Graffin
#47. Secularism breeds narcissism. There is nothing higher to live for, so you live for you
Dennis Prager
#48. Secularism is a religion, a religion that is understood. It has no mysteries, no mumblings, no priests, no ceremonies, no falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#49. Secularism must be applied everywhere, because that is how everyone will be able to live in peace with each other.
Manuel Valls
#50. Hollywood is McWorld's storyteller, and it inculcates secularism, passivity, consumerism, vicariousness, impulse buying, and an accelerated pace of life, not as a result of its overt themes and explicit story lines but by virtue of what Hollywood is and how its products are consumed.
Benjamin R. Barber
#51. Religion is removed from the public realm, and the public realm is removed from the affairs of religion. However, this is not neutrality. Implicitly, it supports secularism.
Stephen V Monsma
#52. When it comes to the culture, there's no such thing as peaceful coexistence. If we're not defending truth, fighting for Christian values in all of life, the truth will be sacrificed on the altar of mainstream secularism.
Charles Colson
#53. Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
Dennis Prager
#54. Some people believe the alternative to bad religion is secularism, but that's wrong ... The answer to bad religion is better religion
prophetic rather than partisan, broad and deep instead of narrow, and based on values as opposed to ideology.
Jim Wallis
#55. My definition of secularism is very clear. The sole religion of the Government is Nation First, the holy book is the Constitution.
Narendra Modi
#56. Secularism is not only in our constitution but also in our veins. We worship Mother Nature too. We believe that the world is our family.
Narendra Modi
#57. Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness.It means profusion of religions.
Shashi Tharoor
#58. The new source of divisiveness is the assault of secularism on religion.
William Bennett
#59. The rise of secularism has brought about an increase in hostility toward things religious.
Jon Stewart
#60. Spirituality is a natural part of ourselves, as natural as emotions, but we've got all the language wrong and made this divide between secularism and spirituality, whereas instead it's about being human.
Alan Green
#61. The great American tradition is one of pluralism, not exclusive secularism. The strength of our country is reflected in the contributions that we all make to the common good.
Donald Wuerl
#62. The need of our times is to revive the Nehruvian notion of secularism.
Khushwant Singh
#63. The secularizing 'values' and events that have been predicted would happen in the Muslim world have now begun to unfold with increasing momentum and persistence due still to the Muslims' lack of understanding of the true nature and implications of secularization as a philosophical program.
Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
#64. But I decided that buying the gift was more for me than for her, anyhow. A commercial kind of substitute for prayer.
Joe Haldeman
#65. But she wouldn't pray, she took what comfort and credit she could for not praying; it wasn't that one disbelieved in prayer; one never lost all one's belief in magic. It was that she preferred to plan, it was fairer, it wasn't loading the dice.
Graham Greene
#66. When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time
Svetlana Alexievich
#67. Truly barren is a secular education. It is always in labor, but never gives birth.
Gregory Of Nyssa
#68. Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?
Sandra Day O'Connor
#70. It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.
Richard M. Weaver
#71. When all seems hopeless, cross your fingers and stick with the secular prayer.
Brian Spellman
#72. Secular humanists of every type may ridicule the Bible, but they cannot escape it; and in their obsession with change, calls for reform, doomsday warnings, and utopian visions, they continue to steal from it.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#73. If freedom once required a secular critique of religion, it can also require a religious critique of the secular.
Harvey Cox
#74. The world is getting too small for both an Us and a Them. Us and Them have become codependent, intertwined, fixed to one another. We have no separate fates, but are bound together in one. And our fear of one another is the only thing capable of our undoing.
Sam Killermann
#75. In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.
John Taylor Gatto
#76. They (theological liberals)seemed to know what the answer was supposed to be and weren't much concerned with how to get there. They knew only that whatever answers the Fundamentalists came up with must be wrong.
Eric Metaxas
#77. The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith.
Christopher Henry Dawson
#78. Far from being marginalized, as is presently the case, nineteenth-century freethought was a social movement at the core of our national life.
Fred Whitehead
#79. The existence or non-existence of an undefined 'god' are quite pointless.
[From 'Why I am a Secular Humanist']
Herman Bondi
#80. A truly free society protects all faiths, and true faith protects a free society.
Rick Warren
#81. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox
#82. You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!
Sam Harris
#83. Whether we "spiritualize" our life or "secularize" our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp.
Alexander Schmemann
#84. But the philosophical and scientific process which I call 'secularization' necessarily involves the divesting of spiritual meaning from the world of nature; the desacralization of politics from human affairs; and the deconsecration of values from the human mind and conduct.
Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas
#85. How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.
Christopher Hitchens
#86. And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green ink
Vikram Seth
#87. Because I believe God is bigger than the rules we impose on one another. I think He does not mind if we find different paths to Him.
S.J. Parris
#88. In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Alain De Botton
#89. If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?
Howard Jacobson
#90. Those who use religion for their own benefit are detestable. We are against such a situation and will not allow it. Those who use religion in such a manner have fooled our people; it is against just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
#93. Nothing - not even the US Army - more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.
Marc Cooper
#94. The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.
Orhan Pamuk
#95. We can't be secular till there is politics because it is a religion that hates every other religion ...
Ranu Das
