Stephen Carter Quotes

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.

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.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.

To suggest that a person's strongly held religious view is less tolerant than a strongly held antireligious view is morally, intellectually, and politically inconsistent and incorrect.

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

In the 20th century, evangelical Christians in America have naively accepted the role assigned to us by an anti-religious, anti-Christian consensus in our society. We have been relegated to a cultural backwater, where we are meant to paddle around content in the knowledge that we are merely allowed to exist.

The Constitution does not require complete separation of church and state; it affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.

In our day, you can mock religion in public and even get funds for doing it. But you can't show respect for religion in public - or you risk being hauled into court.

Any comprehensive doctrine, religious or secular, can be introduced into any political argument at any time, but I argue that people who do this should also present what they believe are public reasons for their argument. So their opinion is no longer just that of one particular party, but an opinion that all members of a society might reasonably agree to, not necessarily that they would agree to. What's important is that people give the kinds of reasons that can be understood and appraised apart from their particular comprehensive doctrines.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.

Those are big challenges in our age, not just how we live as co-citizens in societies with people of different faiths and different cultures - I mean, that's a big challenge itself - but how we think about all that as Christians, or as Jews, or as Muslims, or as Hindus. How do we think about the religious other? There's a theological dimension as well as a civic dimension to our pluralism.

Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice.

Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.

I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.

To criticize a person for their race is manifestly irrational and ridiculous, but to criticize their religion, that is a right. That is a freedom. The freedom to criticize ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticize and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

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

We live in a very pluralistic society today. There are Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Christians like me. There are a wide variety of religious expressions in this country. I think they all must be treated with respect and none of them must be given priority in the public arena.

It is ironic that anyone who appeals to religious values today runs the risk of being called 'divisive' or attacked as an enemy of pluralism.

On the issues of religious liberty, the Supreme Court continues to scrape against the bedrock of the American spirit.

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 great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance in whatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardly anywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference, which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, has added its weight to the scale.

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.

Almighty God hath created the mind free. All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens...are a departure from the plan of the holy Author of our religion...No man shall be compelled to frequent or support religious worship or ministry or shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion. I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.

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.

One would suppose that the battle for religious liberty was won in the United States two hundred years ago. However, in the time since, and right now, powerful voices are always raised in favor of bigotry and thought control. It is useful, then, to have a compendium of the thoughts of great men and women of all faiths (and of none) on the subject, to convince us that we men and woman of freedom are not and never have been alone.