Religious Office Quotes
It is you who have called us unto this office; but being thus called we have our authority from God;
Then the Deputy Governor, Winthrop had been attacked as being too authoritarian. The conceptual struggle with democracy, divine right, and religion had begun in America long before the American Revolution. There is an interesting parallel with the current debate over Islamic attacks on democracy by an Islamic party being elected, but then responsible to God and not only the people who elected them.
Responding to criticism of his flamboyant personal lifestyle:
Leo the Great. Saint Peter was the first head of the Catholic Church—the Pope. Pope Leo observed that the Papacy and the church itself is not permanently diminished just because a particular pope is corrupt or unworthy. This is a principle that has been accepted by most governments regarding their heads of state. A particular bad President for example, does not mean the Presidency is bad.
i.e., a clergyman representing a congregation The theory of this particular expulsion applied not to clergy in general, but to clergy who represented a Congregation. In the absence of strict separation of church and state, clergy representing congregations had representative and legal roles in other aspects of the government and therefore represented a problem of separation of powers within the government. The same logic, for example prohibited Sheriffs and Tax Officials from the House of Commons as well as Judges sitting in the Lords. With strict separation of church and state however, the separation of powers argument does not hold, and hence there is no such current prohibition. However, at the end of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic and some other religious institutions had reached the conclusion that clerics serving as elected representatives to various civil legislative bodies potentially had an inherent conflict of interest and divided loyalty and banned the practice from the religious end although the civil laws did not preclude it.
