Quotes from Christian Smith

The good we advocate is not to never judge anybody or anything. The good, rather, is to carefully and reasonably judge (weigh, appraise, discern and perhaps appropriately critique) all things in life – but always with an awareness of one's own fallibility, openness to learning and an interest in all moving closer to the truth.

Protestant insistence on the written word in the Bible as the only and sufficient Christian authority for faith and practice relies on an impossible anachronism that artificially projects a modern standard of authority and means of knowledge conveyance retrospectively back into a pre-modern reality that operated by different but reliable and legitimate standards.

The Catholic Church does not offer certainty in human knowledge in the way that some ex-evangelicals seem to want to have it. So forget about that. Learn, have faith, seek understanding, and be prepared to give an account. Be forgiven and forgive. Be formed by the sacraments and practices of the Church, particularly the Eucharist, and learn Christian love for God and your neighbor. That's it.

I don't need a whole lot to be happy now. You want to have a roof over your head, to have a car, to have Internet. You need to have Internet, that's just, there's just no other way. Like your house is not really actually a habitable house if it doesn't have Internet. You could live without water or trash, but not without Internet. -- young, Emerging Adults interviewed on their lifestyle.

Why stash little ones away in a nursery downstairs with volunteers, who are hard to recruit and who themselves then miss the service, when they can actually be part of God's people in worship? This can make it hard sometimes when children are acting up. But it keeps families together.

Humans are religious because they hope for superhuman powers to help them realize human goods and avoid bads, especially to grant them blessings, prevent misfortunes, and aid them in crises; and because they wish to enjoy the various forms of identity, community, meaning, expression, aesthetics, ecstasy, control, and legitimacy that practicing religions offer.

Evangelicals usually fail to challenge the system not just out of concern for evangelism, but also because they support the American system and enjoy its fruits. They share the Protestant work ethic, support laissez-faire economics, and sometimes fail to evaluate whether the social system is consistent with their Christianity.

Evangelicals come from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but nearly 90 percent of Americans who call themselves evangelicals are white.

The same is true about husbands being the "spiritual heads" of their households (not one verse says that), about Sunday and not Saturday being Christians' set-apart day of rest and worship (just ask Seventh Day Adventists)

From the isolated, individualistic perspective of most white evangelicals and many other Americans, there really is no race problem other than bad interpersonal relationships.

Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a "personal relationship with Jesus." That's certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin.

To be evangelical, then, means having one's life centered on the terrifically good message that God is reconciling the world to himself in Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 5:17–19).

Most young people today know they need to approach their careers with a variety of skills, maximal flexibility, and readiness to retool as needed. That itself pushes youth toward extended schooling, delay of marriage, and, arguably, a general psychological orientation of maximizing options and postponing commitments.

Part of the irony of religion's role is that in strengthening micro bonds between individuals, religion contributes to within-group homogeneity, heightens isolation from different groups, and reduces the opportunity for the formation of macro bonds—bonds between groups—that serve to integrate a society.

In fact, during his life on earth, there were parts of God the Father's plan that Jesus himself did not know (Mark 13:32). As for us, God tells us what we need to know and instructs us to get on with living in light of what he does tell.

Therefore, "a distinction should always be made between what Scripture reports and includes and what it teaches or intends."[269]

Many if not most of the interpretive mistakes in biblicism, I think, come in the form of texts having perlocutionary effects on biblicist readers that were not intended by the biblical authors or perhaps the God who inspired them.

Young people need to be loved, to put it as plainly as possible. They need to be engaged, challenged, mentored, and enjoyed. They, like every human being, need to be appropriately cared for, no matter how autonomous and self-sufficient they may think they are.

Another, more basic reason is that even being able to know or define in the first place what hurts or helps other people often itself requires reference to certain moral standards and understandings of what is good and bad.

American sociology as a collective enterprise is at heart committed to the visionary project of realizing the emancipation, equality, and moral affirmation of all human beings as autonomous, self-directing, individual agents (who should be) out to live their lives as they personally so desire, by constructing their own favored identities, entering and exiting relationships as they choose, and equally enjoying the gratification of experiential, material, and bodily pleasures.