Quotes about Morality

Christians obscured the good news by their efforts to restore morality to the broader culture?

I wonder about the enormous energy being devoted these days to restoring morality to the United States. Are we concentrating more on the kingdom of this world than on the kingdom that is not of this world?

in John Adams' words, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

Lest I sound like a cranky moralist, I should say that to me the real question is not why modern secularists oppose traditional morality; it is on what basis they defend any morality.

President Bill Clinton tried to make that distinction. As a Christian, he said, he sought guidance on moral issues from the Bible. As president of the United States, though, he could not automatically propose that everything immoral should therefore be made illegal.

circumstances, whether fortunate or unfortunate, are morally neutral. They simply are what they are; what matters is how we respond to them. Good and evil, in the moral sense, do not reside in things, but always in persons.

Because of our failure to live out our beliefs, our own lack of moral clarity, and our meddling with partisan politics, Western culture no longer looks to Christianity as its moral source.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion," cautioned T. S. Eliot.

The more Christians focus on tangential issues, the less we will be heard on matters of true moral significance.

To justify Christianity because it provides a foundation of morality, instead of showing the necessity of Christian morality from the truth of Christianity, is a very dangerous inversion

Sadly, Jesus' followers tend to take the reverse approach. Some churches gradually lower the ideals, accommodating moral standards to a changing culture. Others raise the bar of grace so that needy people feel unwelcome: "We don't want that kind of person in our church." Either way we fail to communicate the spectacular good news that everyone fails and yet a gracious God offers forgiveness to all.

do worry about the recent tendency for the labels "evangelical Christian" and "religious right" to become interchangeable. Increasingly Christians are perceived as rigid moralists who want to control others' lives.