A Quote by Stephen L. Carter
There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.
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When a person's religious beliefs cause him to deny the evidence of science, or for whom public policy morphs into a battle with the devil, shouldn't that be a subject for discussion and debate?
The First Amendment is now being used by the secularists of our day as a cattle prod to herd conservative religious people out of the public life of the nation and into, as others have put it, a religious ghetto.
Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.
With each passing year, people of faith grow increasingly distressed by the hostility of public institutions toward religious expression. We have witnessed the steady erosion of the time-honored rights of religious Americans - both as individuals and as communities - to practice what they believe in the public square.
With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.
Today courts wrongly interpret separation of church and state to mean that religion has no place in the public arena, or that morality derived from religion should not be permitted to shape our laws. Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression. Secularists want to empty the public square of religion and religious-based morality so they can monopolize the shared space of society with their own views. In the process they have made religious believers into second-class citizens.
When you see what has happened in America, driving religion, driving believers from the public square, there is a clear connection to the challenges we have in this country morally, economically, militarily. It goes back to pushing biblical values out of the public square.
The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.
It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.
The Constitution forbids states from banning all religion from public spaces and from making churches the ghettos of religion where all manifestations of faith are kept separate from public life. Religious people have an equal right to participate in the public square and to have their contributions to Oklahoma history and society recognized.
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
The scary thing is how quickly everyone's star fades. Therefore, to be a voice, you need to do television. You need to stay in the public eye for the public to care about you, to be a big enough voice to help where it is needed.
Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.
People in the church should not accept the notion that the public square is off limits to religious values.
In the name of religious freedom, relativists have banished religion from the public square. They say they have to destroy public displays of religion in order to protect it. They response has been a culturewide gag order on Christianity in governmental and even commercial circumstances.
Perhaps more than ever before, there is that aggressive secularism and there are those who would indeed try to destroy our Christian heritage and culture and take God from the public square. Religion must not be taken from the public square.
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