Joseph Sobran Quotes

There's no religious test in our country, and there shouldn't be. We're an open, competitive society.

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

Freedom of religion has been replaced by freedom from religion.

Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.

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.

No religious consensus is possible in the United States, and to impose one would be both unconstitutional and unjust.

In a pluralistic society, public schools are places for persons of all faiths and none. Schools may neither promote nor denigrate any religion.

There is little doubt that religious liberty is best exercised within the setting of the secular state.

Freedom arises from a multiplicity of sects, which pervades America, and which is the best and only security for religious liberty.

Secularism is a very neutral thesis that simply states that all religions, and the state – and its sources of authority – should be kept very distinct from one another so that different religions can flourish and survive without any one of them being privileged above the others so the public domain in the state can be a neutral one where everyone meets as equals.

I believe in the separation of church and state... We all have our own religious beliefs. There are people out there who are atheists, who don't believe at all... They are all citizens of Minnesota and I have to respect that.

Of publishing a book on religion, my dear sir, I never had an idea. I should as soon think of writing for the reformation of Bedlam, as of the world of religious sects. Of these there must be, at least, ten thousand, every individual of every one of which believes all wrong but his own.

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.

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 United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.

Government needs to stay out of the religion business altogether.

Secularism is categorically not saying that the religious may not speak out publicly or have a say in public life. It is about saying that religion alone should not confer a privileged say in public life, or greater influence on it. It really is as simple as that.

Whatever America's founders believed about Christianity - and they believed a wide range of things - they clearly rejected the idea of an established church.

The problem is that you can't impose the church's teachings on all Americans as a matter of law.

The restriction of religion to private life therefore does not necessarily threaten the vital interests of the majority religion, if there is one, and it protects minority religions from tyranny of the majority.

One of the features of a democracy is the disentanglement of the sacred from the secular because in religiously pluralistic countries, no one can legitimately claim special status by faith membership.

Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they do. The Founding Fathers made a bet that if you didn't force everyone to profess religion in their own particular way, you could protect intellectual freedom, and religion would flourish.

No religion deserves a privileged place in American life—not even my own.