Quotes About Religion

What today's Christian nationalists call "religious liberty" is in reality a form of religious privilege—for their kind of religion.

There is no official count of the number of pregnant women who have turned to Catholic hospitals and clinics when something goes wrong, only to be denied the medical care they need.

The biggest fraud of Christian nationalism—that the United States was founded as a Christian nation—is also the movement's source of its greatest weakness.

One political party endorses ultraconservative varieties of religion and it is exploiting them to lock in power. This is how the Christian nationalist movement works.

Christian nationalism is not a religious creed but, in my view, a political ideology.

In America today, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the financial pathways that lead from the public coffers to mega-preachers' lives of bounty.

It is really about deciding what kind of nation the United States will become. Are we a nation in which one brand of religion enjoys a place of privilege? Are we a nation of laws—except in cases where the law offends the feelings of those who subscribe to our preferred religion? Will we recognize the equal dignity of all of our citizens? Or are we the kind of society that heaps contempt upon those groups that our national religion happens to despise?

In God We Trust" was adopted as the national motto in 1956;

Also in Texas, Allen Beck, the founder of Advantage Academy, a four-campus charter school funded by taxpayers, has said he established the schools in order to bring "the Bible, prayer, and patriotism back into the public school system.

As the historian and author Randall Balmer writes, "It wasn't until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right's real motive: protecting segregated schools."33

In order to achieve political unity around abortion, the leaders of the emerging Christian nationalist movement understood, it was also necessary to change the deep frame of American religion. So that is what they set out to do. The modern pro-life religion that dominates America's conservative churches and undergirds a variety of their denominations is a political creation.

prominently placed "In God We Trust" signs in every public school building are now mandatory.

We have heard the single-issue, pro-life or -death refrain so many times that we no longer remember a time when America's houses of worship, including conservative ones, tended to approach a vast range of issues that affect our society with the humility and appreciation of their complexity that is their due.

An aim of the movement, it would seem, is to turn houses of worship into the cash machines of the political system by allowing special interests to pour millions of tax-free dollars into churches, which could then turn around and spend like super PACs to elect or defeat candidates.

Are we a nation in which one brand of religion enjoys a place of privilege? Are we a nation of laws—except in cases where the law offends the feelings of those who subscribe to our preferred religion? Will we recognize the equal dignity of all of our citizens? Or are we the kind of society that heaps contempt upon those groups that our national religion happens to despise?

For the evangelical church right now, membership is no longer based on color," Onishi notes. "It is also not really based in religion anymore, either. Your litmus test for religious belonging comes via your political beliefs.

The judicial strategists of the Christian Right claim that all they want is "equal access" and "toleration." But that isn't in fact all they want. They don't want equality; they want control. They don't want toleration; they want the opportunity to practice their intolerance. They don't want their religion to be included in the schools; they want the schools to be absorbed within their religion.

They ought to put a statement on the Bible just like they put on cigarettes - like, the contents of this book may freeze-dry your brains.

When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.

The Jews were the first monotheistic culture in history. They believed in one God and one God only. The Greco-Roman world of Herod's day was polytheistic. They believed in many gods, and much of their worship was sexual in nature.

We decide ourselves whether to do right or wrong, whether to be good or evil. For some, it is fear that keeps them within the law, but for others it is a greater sense of good. I do not think any religion can make a person good, or protect a good person from bad happening to him.

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.

But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.

Human inheritance is both blessing and curse. And in religious inheritance this paradox is acute. For many of us religion is heavy baggage. Stories of love and fear, liberation and constriction, grace and malice come not only from our own experiences, and our family's past, but from an ancestral history within a tradition. What curses do we need to shed, in the process of growing up? What can we hold to, as blessing?