government and politics on Secularism

Modernity slowly weakened spirituality, by design and accident, in favor of commerce; it downplayed silence and mere being in favor of noise and constant action. The reason we live in a culture increa...

Allow me to introduce you to Secular Sam. Secular Sam is very successful. He has a good job, a nice girlfriend, a beautiful apartment, a new car, and excellent health. He’s humorous, intelligent, and ...

In Europe, the seat of Christian faith for most of its history, many do not give it a thought. Barely a third of French and British respondents even believe that God exists. While visiting France I sp...

Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in [the twenty-first century] many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?

The United States is undergoing a marked change in its attitude toward religion, and Christians here face new challenges. When a blogger named Marc Yoder wrote about “10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids Le...

The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of ...

Human life in the western world today... is characterized by an enormously wide range of incompatible truth claims pertaining to human values, aspirations, norms, morality, and meaning— A hyperplurali...

In one generation, the place of Christianity within culture dramatically shifted as we experienced what theologians and sociologists of religion call the “death of Christendom.” Christendom isn’t Chri...

The truth is simpler… and more alarming. [This] is the end of religious experience, the very opposite of mysticism…. We have been going round the paths, and suddenly we see our path goes round a hole,...

Towards the end of his life, the great missionary, theologian, cultural critic (and even bishop!) Lesslie Newbigin gave an interview. His interviewer asked him an interesting question, made even more ...

I was in London browsing one of the ubiquitous British tabloids and an advertisement for a new health club grabbed my attention. The picture was of a magnificent gothic church sanctuary that had been ...

The wall Jefferson referred to is designed to divide church from state, not religion from politics. Church and state are specific things: the former signifies institutions for believers to congregate ...

When the church, in the name of political power, allies and aligns too much with the current secular left or right, it is sapped of both spiritual power and credibility with nonbelievers. Theologicall...

There is no social evil, no form of injustice whether of the feudal or the capitalist order which has not been sanctified in some way or other by religious sentiment and thereby rendered more impervio...

Many people have misinterpreted the separation of church and state to mean that religious views shouldn’t play a role in public discussions and lawmaking. Someone might say, “We shouldn’t restrict abo...

Citizens are the bearers of opinion, including opinion shaped by or espousing religious belief, and citizens have equal access to the public square. In this representative democracy, the state is forb...

More often than not, park-it-at-the-door thinking [about religious faith] has less to do with hostility to faith than with the avoidance of risk, for many employer’s fear that any hint of religion is ...

Freedom of religion is one of the greatest gifts of God to man, without distinction of race and color. He is the author and lord of conscience, and no power on earth has a right to stand between God a...

We have the same biblical texts that earlier generations of Christians thought their way through, of course, but our reflections are shaped by six unique factors. (1) Especially in the Anglo-Saxon wo...

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.

Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.

The 20th century gave rise to one of the greatest and most distressing paradoxes of human history: that the greatest intolerance and violence of that century were practiced by those who believed that ...

We can’t separate what we believe in the political arena from who we are in Christ and what obedience to God demands...That said, not every tenet of Christianity should become the law of the state. We...

The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.

Christianity has always thrived most as a life giving minority, not a political majority.

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

History shows that when the church uses the tools of the world's kingdom, it becomes as ineffectual, or as tyrannical, as any other power structure. And whenever the church has intermingled with t...

God built into the creation a variety of cultural spheres, such as the family, economics, politics, art, and intellectual inquiry. Each of these spheres has its own proper "business" and nee...

More than any other religious group, white evangelicals believe that increasing cultural diversity in the United States is a negative development—this despite the fact that the majority of new immigra...