Daily Inspiration Quote by Tony Campolo

"That's what they do in Europe. You go down to the city hall and you become legally connected. You have a civil union there. Then, if you're religious, you go down to the church, and the church blesses the union. That gets the problem solved"

Tony Campolo, Clergyman

About this Quote

Campolo slips a progressive argument into a pastor's cadence, and the move is strategic: he frames same-sex marriage (or at least legal recognition) not as a theological coup but as bureaucratic common sense. "That's what they do in Europe" functions as a rhetorical shortcut, invoking an imagined elsewhere where culture-war panic has already burned out. Europe becomes the calm, competent foil to America's legally entangled, spiritually overheated fight.

The crucial pivot is his quiet separation of spheres. City hall handles the contract; the church handles the blessing. By insisting on a two-step model, Campolo smuggles in an old liberal idea with a religious face: the state should distribute rights without asking permission from doctrine, and churches should retain autonomy over sacraments without governing civil status. The subtext is a rebuke to both sides of the American debate. To conservatives, he's saying: stop using civil law to enforce your ecclesiology. To progressives, he's implying: you don't need to win the church to win equality under law.

"That gets the problem solved" is deliberately reductive. It's not that the moral disagreements vanish; it's that the administrative nightmare and coercion anxiety vanish. Coming from a clergyman known for evangelical social justice, the line reads less like secularization and more like a peace proposal: keep the church's conscience intact while refusing to let conscience become a veto over citizenship. In the era of marriage amendments and culture-war brinkmanship, it's a bid to de-escalate by redefining what marriage debates are actually about: power, jurisdiction, and who gets to call their love legitimate.

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Topic	Marriage
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About the Author

Tony Campolo (born March 25, 1935) is a Clergyman from USA.

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