Russell Kirk Quotes

Our culture's tolerance wears thin when religion intrudes on the public discourse... Our schools, courtrooms, and libraries set the tone for the entire society. The message they currently communicate is harsh and unambiguous: religion is offensive and should be kept out of public view.

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.

The new source of divisiveness is the assault of secularism on religion.

Under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion, the Court has steadily made religion a matter for the private individual by driving it out of the public arena.

For years we've been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?

our great common challenge ... is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.

Many journalists seem to desire 'liberation' from Christian roots.

Sometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion doesn't mean we need to try to have freedom from religion

Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise, and in this sense and to this extent our civilization and our institutions are emphatically Christian.

It's time to resist efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union who have conducted a religious lobotomy on this country, seeking to strip it of any vestige of religious influence.

To those who cite the first amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions and everyday life, may I just say: The first amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny.

I think the philosophy in our public schools, and many other institutions today, is that a dose of God is more hazardous to your health than a dose of herpes or drugs.

The Founders intended only to prevent the establishment of a single national denomination, not to restrain public religious expressions.

Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.

It's not religion that's the problem - it's the lack of religion!

I believe in the separation of church and state. The government has the right to say what happens in a civil case, like in a court house. And religious people have a right to say what happens in a church congregation. They are two completely separate things.

Freedom of religion has been replaced by freedom from religion.

Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.

Since the Court took God our of our schools, we've gotten exactly what we should expect: godless schools.

This shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.

Many people are trying to remove religion from public life. Under the banner of pluralism, cultural and political leaders are seeking to push all talk about God out of the public arena.

One of the genuine phenomenons over the past four decades has been the liberal community's steadfast insistence that God should be barred from the public sphere. This is not law. It is religious prejudice.

When our atheistically dominated Supreme Court removed the Ten Commandments from our halls, not a whimper was heard from the 95 million Christians in this country, who still don't realize that their religious freedoms are being systematically removed without a fight.