Burke on Preachers and Politics

Preachers who talk about politics know less about the subject that they do about the subjects in which they were trained. Their uninformed opinionating on the subject can only make you wonder why you should trust what they say about God when they are willing to discourse from the same pulpit about matters about which they know little.

Edmund Burke puts it in 18th-century style:

...politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement....The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.

(Reflections on the Revolution in France, Library of Liberal Arts edition, at 13)