State Sponsored Religion Quotes

Nothing is more dreaded than the national government meddling with religion.

Resolved, That we especially protest against this present attempt to force all the people to follow the religious dictates of a part of the people, as establishing a precedent for the entrance of a most dangerous complicity between Church and State, thereby subtly undermining the foundation of liberty, so carefully laid by the wisdom of our fathers.

The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.

Many military service chaplains are behaving more like commissars. They are making people loyal to an ideology rather than to a democratic state.

The government ought to stay out of the prayer business.

I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.

To say that religion cannot stand without a state establishment is not only contrary to fact (as has been proved already) but is a contradiction in phrase.

Opinions of the founding generation were scattered all across the spectrum on the question of the assistance government should give religion.

The Roman Catholics must know as well as we do that 'Popery' when encouraged by government has always been dangerous to the liberties of the people.

Whether we like it or not, religion and government policy are unavoidably linked.

We want no new types of public appropriations for sectarian purposes

When the government says to you that they want to help you be more religious, you want to run away from them as fast as possible.

I don’t believe in theocracy. Everywhere you have a state religion, it dies.

This issue is whether or not our government should be infusing religion into (schools).

The lessons of the First Amendment are as urgent in the modern world as the 18th Century when it was written. One timeless lesson is that if citizens are subjected to state-sponsored religious exercises, the State disavows its own duty to guard and respect that sphere of inviolable conscience and belief which is the mark of a free people.

The prince must employ his authority to destroy false religions in his state.

There is no neutral aid when that aid principally flows to religious institutions nor is there truly “private choice” when the available choices resulting from the program are predominantly religious.

When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain.

History showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith.

Government is contemptuous of true religion when it confiscates the taxes of Caesar to finance the things of God.

Typical Christmas observances in schools tend towards indoctrination and degenerate into meaningless ritual; weaken the witness of the church when it surrenders its peculiar functions to any agency of the state; and puts the public school into competition with the church.