Church and State Quotes

Matthew 6:5-6 NIV ⁵"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. ⁶But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." -- Jesus

Matthew 22:20-21 NIV ²⁰and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?" ²¹"Caesar's," they replied. Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." -- Jesus

"Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." -- Authored by American diplomat Joel Barlow in 1796, US Treaty of Tripoli, approved by full Senate June 7, 1797, and signed by President John Adams

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Establishment Clause website

"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever..." -- Thomas Jefferson, in the Virginia Act for Religious Freedom, 1786

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law." -- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private schools, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separated." -- President Ulysses S. Grant

"America's ideals are corrupted by human nature, just as the ideals of Christianity are corrupted by human nature. A wise man once said "Satan's greatest trick is to make us think he doesn't exist at all". I disagree, Satan's greatest trick is to make us think we're doing the Lord's Work." -- LJUser:Ordos45

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal

"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects ... do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side." -- Aristotle

"The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning." -- Voltaire

"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man." -- Thomas Jefferson

"The Presbyterian clergy are the loudest, the most intolerant, of all sects; the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the law-giver, if such a word could not be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to the Calvinistic creed! They pant to reestablish by law that holy inquisition which they can now only infuse into public opinion." -- Thomas Jefferson

"Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." -- James Madison

"The danger of silent accumulations and encroachments by ecclesiastical bodies has not sufficiently engaged attention in the U.S." -- James Madison

"The priesthood have, in all nations, monopolized learning, and ever since the Reformation where or when has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry or free thought. The most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahoooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find that you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hands, and fly into your face and eyes." -- John Adams

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." -- Mohandas Gandhi

"When a Religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and, when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support [it], so that its Professors are oblig'd to call for help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780

"Every time that religion has identified itself or entangled itself with a particular political movement or a particular government, religion has been harmed by that. I see religion as a powerful positive healing force for this nation and the world. But that force is blunted, weakened, compromised inestimably, if we turn religion into a tool for advancing political strategy; if we make it a matter of how to win political office; if we treat it as anything other than a sacred part of life from which we ought to draw sustenance and values and strength for living courageously as good citizens." -- Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of The Interfaith Alliance

"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

"As for the second notion, the idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria, I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. But there is a latent deep strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture; it is rooted in our history and it has broken out many times in the past. It is with us now; there has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, some of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, and anti-libertarian.

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country – Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva’s Zion, Smith’s Nauvoo, a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other.

Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not – but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."

From Concerning Stories Never Written: Postscript in Revolt in 2100
Robert A. Heinlein
Colorado Springs, Colorado
October 1952

Anybody who wants religion is welcome to it, as far as I'm concerned -- I support your right to enjoy it. However, I would appreciate it if you exhibited more respect for the rights of those people who do not wish to share your dogma, rapture or necrodestination. --Frank Zappa