I write all my sermons.
Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.
I know, if I'm speaking to God in any kind of way, I keep myself from using profanity.
Today the separation of church and state in America is used to silence the church. When Christians speak out on issues, the hue and cry from the humanist state and media is that Christians, an all religions, are prohibited from speaking since there is a separation of church and state.
Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice.
While even pornography is protected as free speech, the courts have consciously undermined religious speech and freedom of religion for years.
I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
Thank you, your Holiness. Awesome speech.
You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.
If you go to the Lincoln Memorial, the Second Inaugural is probably the most religious speech ever given by an American President. In its 732 words, it references God 14 times and has two verses of the Bible.
We are obliged, therefore, to say that whoever speaks that which is foreign to religion is using many words, while he who speaks the words of truth, even should he go over the whole field and omit nothing, is always speaking the one word.
One of the things that I'm doing and I'm - we have the Johnson Amendment. You know what that is. That Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s passed an amendment because supposedly he was having a hard time with a church in Houston, with a pastor. And he passed an amendment saying basically if you're a pastor, if you're a religious person, you cannot get up and talk politics.
Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.
It is one thing to be eloquent and charming in profane speech, and another when the one speaking as a religious.
Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.
The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
