It is ironic that America, with its history of injustice to the poor, especially the black man and the Indian, prides itself on being a Christian nation.

You can't divorce religious belief and public service ... I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.

In the "lynching era," between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these "Christians" did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

The Gospel of liberation is bad news to all oppressors because they have defined their "freedom" in terms of slavery of others.

And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than "going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly." It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst, "building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side." The gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice, fighting for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching.

Any analysis of the gospel which did not begin and end with God's liberation of the oppressed was ipso facto unchristian.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

I'm not a politician. I don't want to be a politician, because politicians do what is politically expedient. I want to do what's right.

We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.