At its most profound, civility has little to do with taste, everything to do with truth. And the truth it affirms, in religious terms, is that everyone, from the pope to the loneliest wino on the planet, is a child of God, equal in dignity, deserving of equal respect. It is a religious truth that we all belong one to another; that's the way God made us. From the Christian point of view, Christ died to keep us that way, which means that our sin is only and always that we put asunder what God has joined together.

William Sloane Coffin, The Heart Is A Little to the Left by Wiliam Sloane Coffin