Institutional Religion Quotes

Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.

A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.

Organized religions by their very natures are misleading.

Public schools have become the established church of secular society

You need to remember that being rejected by church is not the same as being rejected by God. God did not kick you out of church, honey. The church kicked God out of church.

To be honest with you, I am passionate about all the people out there who want to know Jesus, they want to know God, and they are sick of a system that is hung up on a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the love of God.

I never went to church when I was in college, either.

Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

Government seems to me to be a part of religion itself - a thing sacred in its institutions and ends.

He was sick of God and God's religion, sick of all the little religious social clubs that didn't seem to make any real difference or affect any real changes.

Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? . . . these religious debates - questions of the nature of God, or of Christ - simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.'

It's the priests who have demands, not the gods.

For a person who is very much involved with the institution of religion but has lost the religious spirit, the 'religion' label is the real threat to liberty.

I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

[The disestablishment of religion] may not have been such a good idea.

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions.

Remember: Bureaucracy elevates conformity ... Make that elevates 'fatal stupidity' to the status of religion.

I think most of our religious institutions are pretty corrupt, so they're not reliable. I think the Christian religion that I was brought up with has very little to do with Christ, really, and more an institutions that have built up around the church.

It's religion that killed our King, you know what I'm saying - that religious idea that has distorted the love of God, and now the world doesn't want it. They don't want religion. They want Jesus in their heart. They want Him. They just don't want the religion.

Organized religious institutions are in for a huge transformation, for the simple reason that people have become genuinely religious in spite of them.

I love the spiritual side of religion, but the church, for me, is a place where I feel very repressed.