J. D. Salinger on Christianity

Jesus knew — knew — that we’re carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we’re all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff.

I don’t know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

Abraham Lincoln1809–1865

• Anti-Religion

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963“Is Theology Poetry?” (1945)

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.