Joseph Brown Matthews Quotes

I am struck by the fact that personal faith and political agendas are intertwined more closely now than at any other time in recent history.

Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equaled in American elections.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist

They are religious people and the problem with religious people in politics is that religious politics do not make good compromises.

It's far from clear that restoring Christian social authority is an appropriate aim of politics in the first place.

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black.

Turkey is immersed in a profound social and political conflict between secularists, who have been in power since the republic was founded, and an insurgent Islamic-based movement that seeks to increase the role of religion in public life.

Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand.

The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.

Look at all the misery in the Middle East, for example. All these countries have Islam in common, and far too few dare to criticize Islam as an ideology, and what it's doing to these countries. I know I might get punched in the face for saying these things, but my conviction is that less religion in the world would be better.

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.

The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion.

God is not a franchise of the Republican Party.

My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don't think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all... I thought: 'I do not want to go back to medieval times.'

My political view really comes from a biblical perspective.

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion.

We have this idea in our minds that there's this separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing. And we extend that to our politics - not just church and state, but it's also there's a separation of religion and politics. But of course there isn't.

Communists will infiltrate the highest offices of government in the US until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

When you say “radical right” today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.

It is human beings who are the basis for politics. A Christian person has great liberty to separate his religious faith from his political activity. The mistake committed by the Church in the Middle Ages was rectified - obviously after a struggle and violent revolutions - and political rule was entirely separated from politics. In our case (of Arab countries), ever since the struggle over who would inherit Prophet Muhammad's place, political rule was essentially based on religion.

The Republican Party has become the party of one branch of one religion.