Institutional Faith Quotes

Organized religion is a very bad way of passing on spiritual values because it becomes so corrupted with political and repressive agendas which don't help anybody to develop their spirituality.

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

When you say you don't get religion, you're just saying that you don't get organized religion.

The military is very constitutionalist, and I have my faith in them and in the cooler heads of the people.

We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.

In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term.

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.

Ask me, it's a sin to pervert faith with religion. Despite every church, mosque, & synagogue in it, this is not the world any God worth his salt would have created.

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

I've never been tempted by God but I like his trappings.

Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.

I think that citizens should be skeptical of government power. But I fear it's bled over to cynicism. It is something that is getting in the way of reasoned discussion, and I'm very concerned about how to change that trend of cynicism.

I grew a very strong dislike for the organized aspect of religion over the course of time.

We worry a great deal about the problem of church and state. Now what about the church and God? Sometimes there seems to be a greater separation between the church and God than between the church and state.

When you undermine faith in a system, your child may not necessarily see the difference between the politician who is no longer respected and the policeman, the teacher, the parent.

It's true that when Christianity is socially powerful, faith can look from the outside as if it is mainly a matter of membership, of participation in the vast synchronised swim of institutions.

When one loves God better than the Church is one called a heretic?

If the Church of England were to fail, it would be found in my parish

You have to trust your government. Don't let every scar, every wart, every hiccup condemn the whole body.

I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

We see in Africa the way it builds up historical resentments, people’s sense that they cannot place faith in the system. Over time, people who hear this message can come to believe that they do not have a stake in the state or have a responsibility to obey the rule of law that they are told no longer exists. When you start to delegitimize your system, including your electoral systems, your media and the police in different ways, then you start to have people genuinely questioning the value of the system. It takes a generation to rebuild that trust. This is not something that gets done in a year or two.

I wasn't trying to change the laws or slow down the machine. Maybe I should have. My critics say that I was not revolutionary enough. But they forget that I am a product of the system. I worked those desks, I know those people and I still have some faith in them, that the services can be reformed.

When I say, 'I am supporting the police or the army,' I am talking about the army in general and the police in general. In general, those institutions are good institutions.

Somewhere along the line, organized religion stopped being about faith, and started being about who had the power to keep the faith. You said that the purpose of religion was to bring people together. But does it, really? Or does it-knowingly, purposefully, and intentionally--break them apart?

I think some people have blind faith in American institutions without knowing a whole lot about them and think they will stand up to Trump and are indestructible.