John Rawls Quotes

If Baptists want to sleep in the pews and Pentecostals want to leap over them, it is none of Congress's business.

I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President, should he be a Catholic, how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners how to vote.... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant or Jewish ... for while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist.

I want to say to you is that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson did not intend to drive a stake in the heart of religion and to drive it out of our public life. What they intended to do was to set up a system so that we could bring religion into our public life and into our private life without any of us telling the other what to do.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

The law for religious freedom... [has]put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizen the freedom of the mind.

This issue is whether or not our government should be infusing religion into the public schools. Our churches are very strong in this nation and I think that's great and everybody should have the ability to worship as he or she sees fit. I choose to worship not believing in God and government should not thrust a religious idea down my throat.

I have been an atheist my entire adult life. I do not proselytize, however. Nor do I question the faith of others. I just don't want to be obliged to accept someone else's faith as a factor in my government.

The disconnection of Church and State was a master stroke for freedom and harmony.

When church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued.

The logic of freedom of religion implies freedom to be an atheist, even though, from a historical perspective, this has not been accepted in the Muslim world.

By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars.

Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.

The First Amendment...does not say that in every respect there shall be a separation of Church and State....Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other - hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly....The state may not establish a 'religion of secularism' in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.

Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States, is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect.

I strongly believe in the separation of church and state. But freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion, there is a better way.

Freedom is won by relegating religion to a purely private sphere remote from the body politic. In fact, the establishment of a free society is predicated on the idea that religion must be surgically removed from culture.

A nation that is Christian at its heart doesn't need to write it into law.

It is interesting to me that the secularizers bend over backward in our federally controlled schools to keep atheists from being offended by the mention of God, prayer, or morality, yet over the federally controlled airwaves Christians can be offended every day of the week by the broadcasting of blasphemy against God and the Lord Jesus Christ or attacks on our moral values.

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish - where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us.

Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion.

The new source of divisiveness is the assault of secularism on religion.

No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism.

Let us labor for the security of free thought, free speech, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and equal rights and privileges for all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion;.... leave the matter of religious teaching to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contribution. Keep church and state forever separate.