Religion and politics Quotes

“Clerical fascism”

“Christian anarchism”

“Religious views on capitalism”

“Separation of church and state”

“Rule of the Islamic jurisprudent”

“Wikipedia: Religion and politics”

“The leaders of a faith have their responsibility and authority in the sphere of their faith, but in the sphere of public, of the public domain, they have no authority.”

“Small grants to non-Christian groups allow Bush and his supporters to speak of faith-based initiatives in pluralistic terms, but they don't change the essentially sectarian nature of "compassionate conservatism."”

“There is one ill that faith-based programs are proven to ameliorate — unemployment among Christian evangelicals. The Christianization of the safety net has created a kind of affirmative action for the born again.”

“Under the Constitution, the public has a right to know that, in the end, the votes I cast are driven by my own independent judgment and conscience, not by a set of marching orders given by any church hierarchy, prelate, or associated lobby group.”

“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

“It has become part of our political culture for candidates to be forced into asserting their religiosity. The creeping emphasis on religion in our political culture, with some candidates openly professing their beliefs on the campaign trail -- at times even hawking them -- is something that should deeply concern all Americans.”

“Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University who follows the faith vote closely, thinks the improvement in Catholic support for Biden this year was significant." White Catholics are important in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin," Burge says. "If you can swing them your way, that's the difference in close races."”

“The elaborate construction and propagation of the abortion myth, together with the ruse of selective literalism, which diverted evangelicals from their birthright of fidelity to the Bible suggests the perils of pandering for power. What should we read into the fact that evangelical conservatives dropped their longstanding denunciations of divorce about the same time they embraced Ronald Reagan, a divorced and remarried man, as their political savior in 1980?”

“"The religious landscape in terms of voting has been remarkably stable," says Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. "Since Reagan, we have essentially seen this: white Christian voters have tended to support Republican candidates, and Christians of color and everyone else, including the religiously unaffiliated, have tended to support Democratic candidates."”

“Although Christianity was an integral aspect of many early socialist movements – and in Britain remains so to this day – in general the Churches arranged themselves on the side of conservatism, partly as a result of their traumatic experience at the hands of democratic mobs in revolutionary France and elsewhere. This alliance of throne and altar duly broke down as the temporal power of the Churches was challenged by the nation states which vied for ultimate human loyalties.”

“The abortion myth and the ritual castigation of homosexuals have paid off handsomely for the Religious Right by providing them a political platform. But at what price? The political calculus behind choosing the issues of abortion and homosexuality while ignoring other issues, such as care for the poor and opposition to war, to name only two, exposes the evangelical ruse of selective literalism, which leads both to a distortion of the gospel and to a kind of mechanistic reading of the scriptures that takes no account of historical contingency.”

“Tyrants usually have large egos. A few even believed they were gods: Caligula demanded worship; al-Hakim still receives it. Bokassa claimed that he was the Thirteenth Apostle. Cromwell, Franco, Pinochet, and most emphatically Khomeini were convinced that they had God on their side. Many more, like Stalin, Hitler, or Kim Il Sung built extravagant personality cults that raised them to a superhuman level, and Trujillo, Bokassa, and Saddam encouraged something similar.”

“Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich, having tapped into the ire of evangelical leaders, were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be a challenge. It had worked to rally the leaders, but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale.”

“Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater Campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. “I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s.” What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”
During the meeting in Washington, D.C., Weyrich went on to characterize the leaders of the Religious right as reluctant to take up the abortion cause even close to a decade after the Roe ruling. “I had discussions with all the leading lights of the movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s, post-Roe v. Wade,” he said, “and they were all arguing that that decision was one more reason why Christians had to isolate themselves from the rest of the world.””