Quotes By Tony Campolo

It has been said that people never do evil with more enthusiasm than when they do it in the name of God.

Evangelical Christians, who once were a ridiculed irrelevant sectarian movement, have, over just three decades, become a powerful voting bloc that can no longer be ignored.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

I contend the state ought to do its thing and provide legal rights for all couples who want to be joined together for life. The church should bless unions that it sees fit to bless, and they should be called marriages.

I think it goes back to the fact that the evangelical community often does not have a biblical vision of God.

But I think it's up to a local congregation to determine whether or not a marriage should be blessed of God. And it shouldn't be up to the government.

I, for one, am quite willing to join the 'forgive, forget and move on' crowd, but it does make me wonder if Evangelicals are going to sound believable when they say that they tend to vote Republican because of their religious commitments to the family.

Young Evangelicals, especially, are breaking ranks with older Evangelicals (over 40) and are more and more leaning towards voting Democratic.

The two hot issues are the gay issue and the abortion issue. These are the two defining issues in the evangelical community these days. I'm sure that these hot buttons will be pushed, time and time again.

In religious circles, depression is often deemed to be a spiritual condition that can be cured with prayer.

I contend that Bush would be a lot more moderate if there weren't some fundamentalists breathing down his neck every time he wants to establish the state of Israel, every time he wants to do justice for the Palestinian people.

I am looking for suggestions on what we can do about extremists within our own society. They cannot be ignored.

As we consider the causes of depression, those of us in the church must face the ways we might be responsible for creating it.

And we've got to ask ourselves some very serious questions as to whether or not certain religious leaders, in terms of raising money - I hate to bring this up - are pushing hot buttons.

I am not suggesting that all those missionary organizations working in Haiti should pack up and go home, but I am urging them to understand that Haiti does not need clever Americans with newly contrived schemes for saving their country.

To prevent discussion of any other explanations of human origins is hardly what I would expect from open-minded educators.

I applaud the growing commitment of Evangelicals to the needs of the poor and oppressed in urban America.

President Bush once said that marriage is a sacred institution and should be reserved for the union of one man and one woman. If this is the case - and most Americans would agree with him on this - then I have to ask: Why is the government at all involved in marrying people?

It's a new day for the Democrats when it comes to matters of faith, and the younger Evangelicals are aware of this and many of them are moving into the Democratic camp.

When you listen to Christian radio stations - and there are thousands of them now in the United States - and when you listen to Christian television networks - and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country - they are all politically right.

The first reason for the preponderant influence of those Evangelicals who define themselves as advocates of Religious Right theological and political ideologies is that they have both the financial means and technological know-how to make widespread use of modern electronic forms of communication.

There are reasons why Religious Right Evangelicals will continue to dominate religious discourse, not only in their own sector of the Christian community, but also in what transpires in mainline denominations.

Women have the same privileges and opportunities as men, given the New Testament.

When leading evangelicals say terrible things about Islam, evil things about Islam, terrible things about Muhammad, they ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures does it say that God is omnipotent.

So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.

There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

If America is too arrogant, too prideful to repent, it's not the kind of country that God wants it to be.

I don't know of many evangelicals who want to deny gay couples their legal rights. However, most of us don't want to call it marriage, because we think that word has religious connotations, and we're not ready to see it used in ways that offend us.

Most Evangelicals claim to be politically non-partisan, and say they only identify with the Republican Party because the Republicans are committed to 'family values.'