JFK’s Houston Speech and Us

This piece suggests that Rick Santorum would “reverse” JFK’s views about religion in public life.  This essay , by frequent FT contributor Michael McConnell, suggests that that would be a very good thing.

[C]onsider what Senator Kennedy’s absolute separation between church and state entails, as a practical matter: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote . . . .”  But is that really what the First Amendment says? I would have thought the opposite: Catholic prelates may tell the president whatever they wish and Protestant ministers the same. It is, of course, up to officeholders and voters what weight to give these pronouncements. The First Amendment does not begin “Prelates and Ministers shall make no pronouncements.” It begins “Congress shall make no law.” The First Amendment is not a limit on what churches or church leaders may say, and it is not a limit on what believers choose to agree or disagree with—quite the opposite. The First Amendment allows everyone, even church prelates, to speak their peace, leaving it to citizens to decide how to vote and officeholders to decide how to govern . . . .

In his haste to distinguish himself from Catholic teaching in opposition to strict separation, Senator Kennedy fell headlong into the misconceptions of his most bitter opponents. POAU might well think that religious authorities cannot attempt to influence public policy directly or indirectly, and that religiously affiliated schools, hospitals, orphanages, and social welfare activities must be excluded from the benefits of publicly funded programs, but Kennedy should not have agreed with them—and nor should the evangelical ministers in that room. Anti-Catholicism led many Protestants to take positions that no seriously religious or civil libertarian American should have espoused . . . .

The critique of Catholic officeholders published in  Nation and endorsed by John Dewey and others was not a critique just of Catholic officeholders or of Catholic influence on democracy. It was a denunciation of any seriously religious foundations for political action, and a denial of the right of religious institutions to share evenhandedly in the benefits of public programs. If it is improper for a Catholic politician to draw guidance on issues from the moral teachings of Catholic prelates, it is no more proper for Baptists or Presbyterians or Jews to do the same . . . .

We should not underestimate the importance of what he was saying. By running forthrightly, and not apologizing for his Catholicism, and winning, and showing himself to the world as a President of whom we all can be proud, John F. Kennedy won a great victory for inclusion and against bigotry. But we must not overlook the way in which he reduced religious belief to accident of birth, or more specifically, to baptism. The important question facing the nation was not whether forty million Americans baptized into a certain religion are excluded from the presidency, but whether many more millions of Americans are excluded from full political participation because they ground their understanding of justice and morality in the teachings of their faith. The intellectual descendants of Blanshard and Dewey are still raising this question. Those who spend time in philosophy departments and law schools will recognize its contemporary incarnations. And I am sorry to say that John F. Kennedy’s great speech in Houston provides these voices more ammunition than challenge.

As they say, read the whole thing.