Joseph Smith Jr. Quotes

Freedom of religion does not entitle your religion to have a privileged position within the public sphere.

When they have opened a gap in the ... wall of separation between the Garden of the Church and the wildernes of the world, God hath ever ... made his Garden a Wildernesse.

I try to practice my religion in a very devout way and follow the teachings of my church in my own personal life, but I don't believe in America, a first amendment nation, where we don't raise any religion over the other, and we allow people to worship they please, that the doctrines of any religion should be mandated for everyone.

I don't have any complaints about homosexuals being married in a civil ceremony. But I don't think that the government ought to require religious organizations, churches, should perform marriages between homosexuals if a local congregation decides otherwise. I believe in the autonomy of individual churches.

As the magistrate has no power to impose by his laws the use of any rites and ceremonies in any church, so neither has he any power to forbid the use of such rites and ceremonies as are already received, approved, and practised by any church; because if he did so, he would destroy the church itself; the end of whose institution is only to worship God with freedom, after its own manner.

Religious liberty is misunderstood. It simply means that the Founders said that everyone in America should have the freedom to practice and exercise their religion. Not to believe it but to exercise our beliefs - to act on our beliefs. It's not about believing privately in your head, privately in that building, or simply about freedom of worship.

From the Founding Era onward, there was strong consensus about the centrality of religious liberty in the United States.

The Constitution treats religious belief as uniquely special, uniquely central to the dignity of the human person, and, for that reason, beyond the power of the state to control.

In a perfect world, there would be freedom of religion and freedom for all religions to exercise their religion everywhere.

While all religious beliefs should be respected, choice is a human right.

We are a nation built on principles of freedom, and high on the list of freedoms is freedom of religious expression.

We know that the Constitution wisely separates church from state, but remember: the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

It is error to believe that Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.

People of faith should not invoke the power of the state to decide what everyone can believe or think or read or do. In such cases, like abortion or prayer or prohibition or sexual identity, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law.

No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance.

The decision for complete religious freedom and for separation of church and state in the eyes of the rest of the world was perhaps the most important decision reached in the New World. Everywhere in the western world of the 18th century, church and state were one; and everywhere the state maintained an established church and tried to force conformity to its dogma.

I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end... where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man:To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe - a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the Nation or imposed by the Nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

Too many people in America believe that if you are pro-choice that means pro-abortion. It doesn't. I don't want abortion. Abortion should be the rarest thing in the world. I am actually personally opposed to abortion. But I don't believe that I have a right to take what is an article of faith to me and legislate it to other people. That's not how it works in America.

I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.

It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar.

There is not a truth to be gathered from history more certain, or more momentous, than this: that civil liberty cannot long be separated from religious liberty without danger, and ultimately without destruction to both. Wherever religious liberty exists, it will, first or last, bring in and establish political liberty.