“Sometime ago I had a conversation with a Marxist economist from China. He was coming to the end of a Fulbright Fellowship here in Boston, and I asked him if he had learned anything that was surprising or unexpected. And without any hesitation he said 'Yes, I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy ...'"
In 1928, Dr. George Washington Carver worded that sentiment in a spiritual light: "Human need is really a great spiritual vacuum which God seeks to fill ... With one hand in the hand of a fellow man in need and the other in the hand of Christ, He could get across the vacuum ... Then the passage, 'I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me,' came to have real meaning."
George W. Carver wrote in A Brief Sketch of My Life, 1922: "I would never allow anyone to give me money, no difference how badly I needed it. I wanted literally to earn my living."
Booker T. Washington stated: "Anyone can seek a job, but it requires a person of rare ability to create a job ... What we should do in our schools is to turn out fewer job seekers and more job creators."
Washington added: "At the bottom ... there must be for our race, as for all races ... economic prosperity, economic independence ... Political independence disappears without economic independence."
Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall prayed: "May freedom be seen not as the right to do as we please but as the opportunity to please to do what is right. May it be ever understood that our liberty is under God and can be found nowhere else. May our faith be something that is not merely stamped upon our coins, but expressed in our lives."
In 1861, at the beginning of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe traveled to Washington, D.C., and saw the city teeming with military, horses galloping all around and innumerable campfires burning. She wrote: "I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind ... "In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea; With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."
