Stephen Carter 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.

Each new lawsuit seeks to expand the size of the 'religion-free zone' in the public square.

There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere.

Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate. However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our constitution prohibits.

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

The ACLU has been able to harass out of existence public expressions of faith.

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.

Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.

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

I am very concerned about the lack of tolerance coming from those who say they want to see more tolerance in the public square. We've seen some of those individuals are very intolerant of religious freedom and expression.

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.

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.

It is interesting to me that the secularizers bend over backward in our federally controlled schools to keep atheists from being offended by the mention of God, prayer, or morality, yet over the federally controlled airwaves Christians can be offended every day of the week by the broadcasting of blasphemy against God and the Lord Jesus Christ or attacks on our moral values.

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.

The ACLU sees the separation of church and state as so absolute that not a single religious word must be allowed to pass a schoolhouse door.

To the ACLU, the First Amendment speaks more directly to freedom from religion than it does to freedom of religion.

Removing religious symbols from public places is not neutrality. On the contrary, it sends a highly negative message - that religion is something shameful, embarrassing, or at best strictly private.

The problem is efforts by liberals to establish a wall between religion and society, in the guise of maintaining the wall between church and state.

Removing religion from the womb of culture has become the practiced virtue of the ACLU over the past several decades.

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.

What good is religious liberty if it can only be practiced behind stained-glass windows on Sunday?

The arbitrary division between church and state... is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions.