Religion and the U.S. presidency
Posted: 06.28.08
In another presidential election year 48 years ago, John F. Kennedy met head–on the prejudice that plagued his campaign. That prejudice in 1960 was religion.
Cecil Stoughton | Kennedy Library
As a Catholic, John F. Kennedy was hurt politically by the quiet conviction of many Americans that he was an agent of a foreign power, the pope in Rome. He couldn’t have his first allegiance to the United States, it was thought, since all Catholics must swear obedience to their bishops and the pope. In the White House he would have to take orders, not give them.
Kennedy was not the first Catholic presidential candidate: That distinction goes to Al Smith, the Democratic nominee in 1928 who was crushed by Herbert Hoover. Smith made no major effort to counteract the anti–Catholic prejudice he knew was hurting him. Kennedy did.
On Sept. 12, 1960, he addressed an assembly of Protestant ministers in Houston. That speech became one of the more famous in presidential campaign history. Quotes from it are showing up in the current campaign. The prospect of having a president who is at ease with religion and comfortable in church makes some people nervous. They use the words of Kennedy to isolate religious faith from public policy.
They hope to convince all of us that a high wall should separate not just Catholicism but any element of any religious faith from the councils of government. Religion, we are told, is a private matter, not eligible for any place in our politics.
Because Kennedy went to extreme lengths to assure Americans of his independence from religious authority, he can be used as an ally of today’s anti–religious prejudice. His statement “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute” is a favorite.
Another comment –– “... what kind of church I believe in ... should be important only to me” –– sounds like an endorsement of religion as strictly private business, emphasized in another flat statement: “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair.”
In fairness to Kennedy and his subtlety, that applause line in his speech was followed by a qualifying phrase that gives it political rather than personal color. The full sentence was, “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”
Since Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency was successful, and he proved to be no tool of the papacy in the White House, the prejudice against Catholics has pretty well dissipated. Now the pressure is heavier against religion as such in the public arena. Kennedy’s speech is used to shape public opinion toward an extreme view of the secular state. Its proponents would have us believe that candidates for political office must scrub any religious elements from their outlook, their thinking, their decision–making.
This does not happen and cannot happen. A human person of mature age should be a more or less integrated character shaped and moved by all of the forces and experience of its past. Religious elements can’t be isolated, walled off or scrubbed out. Any effort to do so would distort the personality in unpredictable ways.
It is useful, even important, to know something of a candidate’s religious background and the history of his or her religion. But this information alone doesn’t take us far. We need to hear candidates speak of their hopes and specific plans. We need to know what they’ve done and how they’ve performed in the past.
We don’t test them on their religious faith but our testing of their life story and performance might very well tell us how well or deeply religious faith is an integrated part of life for them. It might be only a thin veneer. Is religion worn like a suit of clothes? Good for public appearance but with little meaning in the fundamentals of life?
Whether it is skin, bone and sinew of the person, only a public suit, or absent altogether, the religious story of political candidates is not, as Kennedy said, “important only to” the candidate. It is an element, one important element, in character and outlook that voters need to know in order to make good judgments about the people who would represent them in managing the secular affairs of life.
This editorial appeared in the June 19 issue of The Catholic Messenger, newspaper of the Diocese of Davenport, Iowa. It was written by Frank Wessling, the paper’s retired news editor.
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
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