Barack Obama Quotes

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

Freedom of religion has been replaced by freedom from religion.

The United States is not a Christian nation. It is a great nation with Christians, among others, in it. But our greatness is based on the fact that there is no official religion.

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.

A nation that is Christian at its heart doesn't need to write it into law.

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

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.

Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation

The prevailing notion is that the state should be neutral as to religion, and furthermore, that the best way to be neutral about it is to avoid all mention of it. By this sort of logic, nudism is the best compromise among different styles of dress. The secularist version of 'pluralism' amounts to theological nudism.

How can you have the religion of the sovereign be the religion of the state if the sovereign belongs to many religions? And it's at that point, I think, historically, that you start to see people saying maybe the state should not associate itself with any religion. Maybe there shouldn't be any official religion.

Are we a Christian nation now? It's doubtful. But did we start out as one? Without question.

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing - good for our political culture.

What is especially important is addressing the question of how religion can be enforced through political means and what can be done to create a political environment that, on the one hand, acknowledges the role of religion in society, while on the other hand does not impose one religion on the populace at the expense of all others.

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.

I don't think it's a good thing to have Christian states, Muslim states, or any kind of ethnic states.

We will never accept any religious government in Iraq. Never. This is a red line for us. We will never live inside an Islamic Iraq.

As the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion …. The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.

It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy

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

There's a reason we seperate Church and State. The reason for the richness and the diversity of religion in this nation is because of the seperation of Church and State, and there are people out there who can't wait to make this nation a nation of one religion... THEIR religion.

The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox, again, is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.

I think one of the great strengths of Americans United is that it has such diversity. That it has not only people who have no religious belief, but lots of people who do and who take that belief very seriously. And I think that provides us with a great opportunity to talk about the separation of church and state. There are plenty of other groups, and some of them are quite good at what they do, but they also have an agenda of non-theism, but we don't have, you might say, a theology. We just have a commitment to the Constitution.

The state has no religion for the simple reason that it has each and everyone.

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.

No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination.