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Religion is a very scary thing, because a pastor is in a position of power. And if you use that power badly, you ruin people's lives, and you ruin your own life.

When you use God as an excuse to hate people and you use God as an excuse to cut people down, first of all, I think it's insulting to God.

We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.

Every preacher who does not make prayer a mighty factor in his own life and ministry is weak as a factor in God's work and is powerless to project God's cause in this world.

I don't like to consider myself a normal preacher. When you look at religious people, they're the ones who hung Christ from the cross. I look at myself as a man carrying a message of hope.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

I have deep respect for people's individual faith, but when faith gets connected to the machinery of state, or the machinery of hate, I find it very confronting.

I'm not really concerned with trying to turn haters into believers.

When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.

Bad Religion has never been about criticizing people who are Christian. But we've always been about pointing out the irony and contradictions in Christian theology and the more extreme versions of Christians that seek to challenge modern secularism.