Secular law

“ But, while seeking to enforce its laws in opposition to the laws of the State, the teaching of the Church seems somehow not to have been able to retain much hold over the general conscience which, ever since the first secular law came into being, has availed itself of the relief so afforded to free itself from galling shackles. ”

“ The Catholic clergy proving a hindrance to the government in the application of its new catechism, the law on secular instruction was passed to force them out of the schools: the state, henceforth sole master, can form at the will of Cæsar, not Christians, but soldiers or slaves, which are more in accordance with its taste—all that is taught being made to converge to the one end of blind and absolute submission to secular power. ”

“ That certain, but by no means all, religious groups condemn the behavior at issue gives the State no license to impose their judgments on the entire citizenry. The legitimacy of secular legislation depends instead on whether the State can advance some justification for its law beyond its conformity to religious doctrine. ”

“ Now human law whereby men are subject to the secular power is of less account than the divine law of the Old Testament. Much more, therefore, since they have become members of Christ's body, are men freed from the law of subjection, whereby they were under the power of secular princes. ”

“ It is equally true that the New Testament is sectarian as to the Jew, and the whole Bible is equally so as to those who reject its authority in any version.... There is no sense or candor in a mere play on words here. It is not decent in a Protestant ecclesiastic, who has no more rights than the humblest Jew, virtually to say to the latter: ‘You are nothing but a good-for-nothing Jew; you Jews have no claim to be regarded as a religious sect, or included in the law of state impartiality as between sects which Protestants monopolize for their special benefit. Away with your Jewish consciences! ”

“ I conclude that, in using sectarian institutions to further goals in secular education, the three statutes do violence to the principle that
government may not employ religious means to serve secular interests, however legitimate they may be, at least without the clearest demonstration that nonreligious means will not suffice. ”

“ When the secular and religious institutions become involved in such a manner, there inhere in the relationship precisely those dangers -- as much to church as to state -- which the Framers feared would subvert religious liberty and the strength of a system of secular government. ”

“ This State can only redeem itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit. ”

“ At the same time, the secularization of them was deemed too bold a step; nor could laymen, with any shadow of consistency, or by a valid title, hold benefices which the law declared to be ecclesiastical. ”

“ For here, after he has claimed credit for his church as the champion of a secular education, he tells the Congress that secularism is one of the great dangers of the age, against which the church must fight with all her strength. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” It must be fought “by the church, and eminently by our own church. Our duty therefore is to fit ourselves for the encounter, and we must do this with the cause of religion, undertaking in its breadth and embracing all branches of religious, spiritual, and ethical culture.” ”

“ Where there exists such discrimination against any religious sect, or where any one sect is favored or sustained by the government, there of course is no religious equality, although there may be religious freedom. Progress in this direction, then, has consisted in the growth of a really tolerant spirit, which has led to the removal from Catholics, Protestant dissenters, and Jews all civil disabilities, and the placing of all sects on an absolute equality before the law. ”

“ Accordingly, the Catholic Church has always, and in the most positive manner, inculcated obedience to secular authority as a duty and a matter of conscience, and has opposed and condemned those who taught the contrary. Only if the secular authority commands anything which is actually sinful, one must obey God and the Church rather than men. ”

“ While our institutions reflect a firm conviction that we are a religious people, those institutions by solemn constitutional injunction may not officially involve religion in such a way as to prefer, discriminate against, or oppress, a particular sect or religion. Equally the Constitution enjoins those involvements of religious with secular institutions which (a) serve the essentially religious activities of religious institutions ”

“ I want you to know and feel it that I want to do everything I can to get every one of these statutes off our books that discriminates against a man because of his religious belief—that I am in favor of a secular government, and of all these rights. ”

“ Ecclesiastical authorities, for example, would be the first to welcome a repeal of legislation as regards heresy; but, on the other hand, we fully recognize the right of a secular State to protect itself, even by the death penalty, against those who threaten the existence of the sanctions on which a secular State takes its stand. We recognize her right, I say; but I do not mean by that that you will not find a majority of ecclesiastics who hold that it is, to put it mildly, a deplorable policy and very imperfectly Christian. ”

“ No one had heard or taught, nor did anyone know anything concerning the secular authority, whence it came, what its office or work was, or how it should serve God. The most learned men—I will not name them—looked upon the secular power as a heathen, human and ungodly thing, as a state dangerous to salvation.... ”

“ If, however, sectarian, unsectarian, or non-Catholic institutions receive support from the state, and receive the children of the Catholic Church and of other persuasions, they must be conducted upon the same principle with state institutions, and in them “no law respecting the establishment of a religion” must be made or enforced, but the most perfect liberty of conscience must prevail. We ask no special favors for ourselves or our church; all we claim is perfect equality before the law and the state, and the full benefit of that fair play which we extend to others. ”

“ A state's interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 571 (2003) ”

“ They solemnly agreed that the new nation should not belong to any particular church, but that it should secure the rights of all.
Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword; that it should be allowed only to exert its moral influence. ”

“ The government does not discriminate against any citizen on the basis of the citizen's religious faith if the government is secular in its functions and operations. On the contrary, the Constitution mandates that the government remain secular, rather than affiliate itself with religious beliefs or institutions, precisely in order to avoid discriminating among citizens on the basis of their religious faiths.
A secular state, it must be remembered, is not the same as an atheistic or antireligious state. A secular state establishes neither atheism nor religion as its official creed. ”

“ For a man to prove all things needful, and hold fast to that which he considers good, is the true maxim of freedom and progress. Secularism, therefore, proclaims and justifies the right to Differ, and the right to assert conscientious difference on the platform, through the press, in civil institutions, in Parliament, in courts of law, where it demands that the affirmation of those who reject Christianity shall be as valid as the oath of those who accept it. ”

“ There is a difference of principle in the case, which an impartial Jew, Mohammedan, infidel, or even Protestant can and ought to admit, as some have admitted. Those persons who, in England or elsewhere, have been put to death by the civil power for the crime of heresy under the Catholic law, have been condemned for abjuring that religion in which they had been brought up, and which had been part of the law of the land, as well as the universal and traditional belief of the nation, from the beginning of its formation, or at least for centuries. ”

“ Because, it will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion, has produced amongst its several sects. Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinions. Time has at length revealed the true remedy. ”

“ In light of the evolution of our Sunday Closing Laws through the centuries, and of their more or less recent emphasis upon secular considerations, it is not difficult to discern that as presently written and administered, most of them, at least, are of a secular rather than of a religious character, and that presently they bear no relationship to establishment of religion as those words are used in the Constitution of the United States. ”

“ In this country the full and free right to entertain any religious belief, to practise any religious principle, and to teach any religious doctrine which does not violate the laws of morality and property, and which does not infringe personal rights, is conceded to all. The law is not committed to the support of any dogma, the establishment of any sect. ”

“ The American Republic has not escaped the difficulties and problems which are inevitable to the Secular State, when some of its citizens profess a religion which brings them into conflict with the common system of morals which the nation takes for granted; the case of the Mormons is a typical example of such a problem. But there is some evidence that, as the Americans have applied the doctrine far more logically than we, they have also a keener perception of the logic of its limitations. ”

“ When God through incarnation became man, He allowed Himself to be born in a Jewish home of a Jewish mother. Thus, according to God's Word, all people have, in the first instance, the same human worth and thereby the same human rights. Our state authorities are by law obliged to respect this basic view. Paragraph 2 of the Constitution states that the Evangelical Lutheran religion will remain the religion of the State. That is to say, the State cannot enact any law or decree which is in conflict with the Christian faith or the Church's Confession. ”

“ These policies violate the establishment clause unless they survive a three-part test. They must have a secular purpose. Their primary effects must be ones which neither advance nor inhibit religion. And they must avoid any excessive entanglements with religion. ”

“ But the Court nevertheless holds that the State must prefer a religious over a secular ground for being unavailable for work that state financial support of the appellant's religion is constitutionally required to carry out 'the governmental obligation of neutrality in the face of religious differences * * *.'
Yet in cases decided under the Establishment Clause the Court has decreed otherwise. It has decreed that government must blind itself to the differing religious beliefs and traditions of the people. ”

“ The Imperial Edicts issued against the innovations led him to speak more fully of the interference of the secular authorities on behalf of religious doctrine generally. “God,” he declares, “will permit none to rule over the soul but Himself alone.... Hence, when the secular power takes upon itself to make laws for the soul it is trespassing upon God’s domain and merely seducing and corrupting souls. ”

“ There should be no secular interference in sacred things; no laws to suppress or establish any church or sect in religion, no religious persecutions, tests, or 420disqualifications; the different sects should be left to inveigle and hate each other as much as they please; but without the love of exclusive domination and spiritual power there would be little temptation to bigotry and intolerance. ”

“ We must feel astonishment at him who declares the Secular right to be essentially a Christian right, when it is quite a different thing, is understood in an entirely different sense, and has an application unknown and unadmitted by Christianity. ”

“ If men fought for political freedom, they encouraged themselves in the struggle with religious motives, and strove to sanctify their claims to secular rights, by insisting that these rights were derived from the rightful interpretation of the Bible. ”

“ Here, then, we have a distinct declaration that the family relation is not a proper subject of religious regulation. If the state sees fit to make it as easy to loose the marriage bond as to tie it, the church has no right to object; it is a secular matter, and the free sovereign state is supreme in its own secular sovereignty. ”

“ Any suggestion, however indirect and unobtrusive, that Secularists were entitled to the rights of other citizens, was sure in those days to elicit some display of animosity from the majority of those who call their creed a religion of love. ”

“ Every appeal of a sect, a denominational church, or sectarian charity of any description, to the general government, or state or city governments, for subsidies or favors, should be at once discountenanced and forbidden by public opinion, and made impossible by positive statute. The Protestant sects in this country should hasten to remove from their record any advantages whatsoever guaranteed to them by civil law to any partiality or sectarian distinction. The most important privilege they enjoy by law in most of the states is the right of keeping the Bible in the public schools. ”