Top 70 Nancy Pearcey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Having a Christian worldview means being utterly convinced that biblical principles are not only true but also work better in the grit and grime of the real world.”

— Nancy Pearcey

2. “Competition is always a good thing. It forces us to do our best. A monopoly renders people complacent and satisfied with mediocrity.”

— Nancy Pearcey

3. “Redemption is as comprehensive as Creation and Fall. God does not save our souls while leaving our minds to function on their own. He redeems the whole person. Conversion is meant to give new direction to our thoughts, emotions, wills and habits.”

— Nancy Pearcey

4. “An idol is anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality – the eternal, self-existent, uncaused cause of everything else.”

— Nancy Pearcey

5. “The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.”

— Nancy Pearcey

6. “America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge – to determine what are the accepted facts – wield the greatest social and political power.”

— Nancy Pearcey

7. “The loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression. Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny.”

— Nancy Pearcey

8. “My aim in homeschooling is to give my children the ability to be an adult learner, a skill set that will last the rest of their lives.”

— Nancy Pearcey

9. “In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter – which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking ‘enlightenment’ meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference.”

— Nancy Pearcey

10. “Can reason be an idol? Certainly. The philosophy of rationalism puts human reason in the place of God as the source and standard of all truth.”

— Nancy Pearcey

12. “The best organizations regard the nurturing of their employees as a spiritual mandate.”

— Nancy Pearcey

13. “The sense of all stylistic change is that the underlying view of the world changes.”

— Nancy Pearcey

14. “For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion.”

— Nancy Pearcey

15. “In high school, I came to realize I had a second-hand faith, derived from my parents and family background. I had no actual reasons for believing it.”

— Nancy Pearcey

16. “But things that are intrinsically good can also become idols-if we allow them to take over any of God’s functions in our lives.”

— Nancy Pearcey

17. “We do not create marriage from scratch. Instead, in the elegant language of the marriage ceremony, we ’enter into the holy estate of matrimony.”

— Nancy Pearcey

18. “The costs of marriage breakdown are borne by the entire society, and therefore it is reasonable for the entire society to demand support for marriage – to insist that it is privileged both culturally and legally.”

— Nancy Pearcey

19. “Developing a Christian worldview means submitting our entire self to God, in an act of devotion and service to Him.”

— Nancy Pearcey

20. “The Rosetta Stone of Christian social thought is the Trinity.”

— Nancy Pearcey

21. “During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.”

— Nancy Pearcey

22. “Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.”

— Nancy Pearcey

23. “There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from?”

— Nancy Pearcey

24. “The defense of marriage is the defense of freedom. Neither of which is obsolete.”

— Nancy Pearcey

25. “Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal – ‘translatable’ into any cultural idiom.”

— Nancy Pearcey

26. “America has always welcomed anyone willing to assimilate to its national character. But radical Islam rejects assimilation and is bent on the conquest of our national character.”

— Nancy Pearcey

27. “Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities – in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church.”

— Nancy Pearcey

28. “Morality is always derivative. It stems from one’s worldview.”

— Nancy Pearcey

29. “Christian adults need to think about talking to our own children as a form of cross-cultural missions. Cultural change happens so quickly that teens are exposed to ideas and worldviews very different from those of previous generations.”

— Nancy Pearcey

30. “No one lives like a robot. We all make choices from the moment we wake up in the morning.”

— Nancy Pearcey

31. “Knowing the truth has meaning only as a first step to living the truth day by day.”

— Nancy Pearcey

32. “Homeschoolers are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers. They are self-motivated and self-directed, independent-minded and creative. They are not content to turn their education of their children over to the government.”

— Nancy Pearcey

33. “Artists are often the barometers of society.”

— Nancy Pearcey

34. “When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.”

— Nancy Pearcey

35. “A part is always too limited to explain the whole. You might picture a worldview as trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. Invariably, something will stick out of the box. Its categories are too “small” to explain the world.”

— Nancy Pearcey

36. “You don’t have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience – what we all know about ourselves.”

— Nancy Pearcey

37. “No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.”

— Nancy Pearcey

38. “If people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, “Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined that I will get.””

— Nancy Pearcey

39. “To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.”

— Nancy Pearcey

40. “To be intellectual does not require one to be alienated and oppositional.”

— Nancy Pearcey

41. “Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture.”

— Nancy Pearcey

42. “I began asking, ‘How can we know Christianity is true?’ Sadly, none of the adults in my life offered an answer. Eventually I decided Christianity must not have any answers, and I became an agnostic.”

— Nancy Pearcey

43. “The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.”

— Nancy Pearcey

44. “Urban areas tend to attract members of the ‘knowledge class’ – people who work with ideas, data, information.”

— Nancy Pearcey

45. “To use biblical language, those who exchange the glory of God for something in creation will also exchange the image of God for something in creation – and because it is something less than God, it always leads to a lower view of humanity.”

— Nancy Pearcey

46. “All of science is largely formalized common sense.”

— Nancy Pearcey

47. “A merely symbolic religion does not threaten the ruling regime of materialistic science.”

— Nancy Pearcey

48. “The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter – no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.”

— Nancy Pearcey

49. “Darwinism has become our culture’s official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.”

— Nancy Pearcey

50. “When the only form of cultural commentary Christians offer is moral condemnation, no wonder we come across to non-believers as angry and scolding.”

— Nancy Pearcey