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Leadership Quote by Mark Hatfield

"As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith"

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Hatfield’s line lands like a rebuke delivered from inside the sanctuary, not shouted from the street. By opening with “As a Christian,” he claims the authority the New Right liked to monopolize in late-20th-century politics, then uses it against them. It’s a rhetorical judo move: he refuses the easy partisan frame (“left vs. right”) and instead draws a boundary between faith as moral discipline and faith as political instrument.

The phrase “no other part... concerns me more” signals triage, not casual disagreement. Hatfield isn’t nitpicking policy; he’s naming a corruption of motive. “Self-serving misuse” is the dagger. It suggests that the problem isn’t religion in public life, but religion deployed as branding, as a loyalty test, as a way to launder power grabs into moral crusades. He’s accusing the New Right of treating belief less like a set of obligations and more like a weaponized identity.

Context matters: Hatfield was a Republican senator, an evangelical, and a consistent critic of militarism and cynical culture-war politics. In the era when the Moral Majority and allied groups were helping fuse conservative politics with overt religious messaging, his warning reads as an internal alarm bell. The subtext is stark: when faith is bent into ideology, it stops being a check on ambition and becomes ambition’s most convenient cover. Hatfield isn’t defending secularism so much as defending Christianity from being turned into a partisan prop.

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TopicFaith
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Hatfield, Mark. (2026, January 15). As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-a-christian-there-is-no-other-part-of-the-new-161522/

Chicago Style
Hatfield, Mark. "As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-a-christian-there-is-no-other-part-of-the-new-161522/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"As a Christian, there is no other part of the New Right ideology that concerns me more than its self-serving misuse of religious faith." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/as-a-christian-there-is-no-other-part-of-the-new-161522/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Mark Hatfield (July 12, 1922 - August 7, 2011) was a Politician from USA.

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