Religious Right Quotes

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ's compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established church by law is prey to any denomination. The best that can be said is that this is pluralism of a kind.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.”
― Richard M. Rorty

“The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“The political vision of the religious right is for the most part an individualistic politics of righteousness, not a communal politics of compassion.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith

“The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians - and Christian conservatives most significantly - unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist.”
― James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

“Note, though, something else of great significance about the whole Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second coming, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that Jesus was already the true Lord of the world who would one day be manifested as such. The rapture theology avoids this confrontation because it suggests that Christians will miraculously be removed from this wicked world. Perhaps that is why such theology is often Gnostic in its tendency towards a private dualistic spirituality and towards a political laissez-faire quietism. And perhaps that is partly why such theology with its dreams of Armageddon, has quietly supported the political status quo in a way that Paul would never have done.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“What is even more striking than the negational character of this political culture is the absence of robust and constructive affirmations. Vibrant cultures make space for leisure, philosophical reflection, scientific and intellectual mastery, and artistic and literary expression, among other things. Within the larger Christian community in America, one can find such vitality in pockets here and there. Yet where they do exist, they are eclipsed by the greater prominence and vast resources of the political activists and their organizations. What is more, there are few if any places in the pronouncements and actions of the Christian Right or the Christian Left (none that I could find) where these gifts are acknowledged, affirmed, or celebrated. What this means is that rather than being defined by its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, its service to the needs of others, Christianity is defined to the outside world by its rhetoric of resentment and the ambitions of a will in opposition to others.”
― James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

“The religious right sees every group trying to achieve equality with them as a threat, because if they become equal to them, THEY won't be able to abuse their human rights anymore. Giving other people equality WITH THEM, in their minds takes something away from THEM - POWER - and that TERRIFIES them. It scares them shitless.”
― Christina Engela, Inanna Rising: Women Forged in Fire

“The religious right sees every group trying to achieve equality with them as a threat, because obviously if they become equal to them, THEY won't be able to abuse their human rights anymore.”
― Christina Engela, All That Remains

“The religious right is one of the most politically militant voting blocs in the country and the agenda is clear (a gun in every uterus). Time we stopped subsidizing the anti-abortion movement in the form of tax-exemptions.”
― Quentin R. Bufogle, Horse Latitudes

“But the consequences of the whole-hearted and uncritical embrace of politics by Christians has been, IN EFFECT, to reduce Christian faith to a political ideology and various Christian denominations and para-church organizations as special interest groups. The political engagement of the various Christian groups is certainly legal, but in ways that are undoubtedly unintended, it has also been counterproductive of the ends to which they aspire.”
― James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World

“The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left.”
― Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World

“It's pretty difficult to have a serious debate with someone who thinks an all-powerful sky dad is on their side.”
― Thor Benson

“I hadn't ought to say this but he’s [Billy Graham] one of those counterfeits I was telling you about. He claims he’s a friend of all the Presidents, but he was never a friend of mine when I was President. I just don’t go for people like that. All he’s interested in is getting his name in the paper.”
― Harry Truman

“From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. People like Jerry Falwell looked like party crashers who, rather than slikinking from bar to buffet in hopes of going unnoticed, demanded that the vegetarian, alcohol-imbibing hosts serve meat and tell the bartender to go home.”
― D.G. Hart, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism

“Don't let any of 'em in the room 'til my guy gets what he needs. We'll be outta here before they get their gloves on.
Tea Party Teddy's Legacy”
― Dianne Harman Author

“The Christian historian, like the non-Christian, does valuable service if he does no more than to clear the minds of his audience of some of the nonsense of the slogans and mythologies of his era.”
― Dirk Jellema

“The Christian historian, like the non-Christian, does valuable service if he does no more than to clear the minds of his audience of some of the nonsense of the slogans and mythologies of his era.”
― George Marsden

“It is a tragedy of the 20th and 21st centuries that the works of the great explorers of the mind: Freud, Reich, Jung, Lowen, and many others, phase in and out of fashion, and are generally excoriated by the Religious Right, also known as the Christian Conservative Movement. The light and wisdom these men brought to humanity should be part of everyday reading, conversation, schooling, and especially child rearing. It is deplorable and a sign that humans in general are not ready to take the next spiritual leap forward, that most of humanity is still afriad of their own minds.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“Like many Christian Right groups, Robertson and CBN were able to lobby the government and claim that they were being oppressed by it at the same time.”
― David John Marley, Pat Robertson: An American Life

“This is the biggest scandal in the story of Pat Robertson. Whatever one thinks of his religious or political views, the fact remains that he raised millions of dollars from his viewers, most of whom were elderly, and then took their money to create a business that was sold for almost $2 billion. What is most surprising about this scandal is that nobody cared. The evangelical world did not seem to notice, and the federal government was only concerned with legal actions, even if they were morally questionable. Democratic congressman Pete Stark said that the sale of the Family Channel was an example of 'transactions in which individuals have enriched themselves at the public’s expense while nonprofit organizations have been looted.”
― David John Marley, Pat Robertson: An American Life