Reflections

John F. Kennedy's church-state legacy

J. Brent Walker

June 2008

In this presidential election year, we continue to debate and strain to divine the proper blending of religion and politics. How do we: (1) uphold the institutional separation of church and state, (2) affirm the relevance of religious ethics to public policy and (3) honor the ban on religious tests in Article VI of the Constitution, all at the same time? Voters have had to confront the issue of Gov. Romney’s Mormonism and have been confounded by the curious specter of Democratic presidential candidates who seem more comfortable talking about their faith than the presumptive Republican nominee. We also have grappled with the guilt-by-association tactics involved in seeking to strap candidates with preaching and endorsements of pastors and other clergy.

It is helpful to remember that the issue of a candidate’s religion arose most prominently in modern American political history in the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy and questions about his Catholicism.

In his new book, titled Counselor, Ted Sorenson regales us with that religion controversy more than a half century ago. Sorenson, of course, was a Kennedy adviser, confidant and speech writer from JFK’s early days in the Senate through the end of his presidency.

In this fascinating memoir, Sorenson tells us that religion — not Kennedy’s youth and inexperience —was deemed to be his chief obstacle to election. Many regarded him as squishy on church-state separation and feared that, if elected president, he would be a pawn of the Pope. As a result, unlike many candidates today who want to emphasize the importance of faith in their lives and its influence in their public service, Kennedy wanted to downplay it.

Kennedy gave two speeches in the campaign to affirm his support for church-state separation and to disavow any allegiance to the Catholic hierarchy that would supersede his commitment to defend the Constitution. The more famous of these speeches was his address to the Houston Ministerial Association (including many Baptists preachers) in September 1960. In that speech, the Catholic candidate took the opportunity to state the importance of “not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me — but what kind of America I believe in.”

Kennedy then opined:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President … how to act, no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners how to vote … and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect.

Kennedy went on to say:

I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty….[N]either do I look with favor upon those who would work to subvert Article VI of the Constitution by requiring a religious test — even by indirection— for it.

Less known and appreciated was Kennedy’s speech earlier that year just before the West Virginia primary to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In that speech he said:

I want no votes solely on account of my religion. Any voter, Catholic or otherwise, who feels another candidate would be a superior President, should support that candidate ... there is only one legitimate question: would you, as President of the United States, be responsible in any way to ecclesiastical pressures or obligations that might ... influence or interfere with your conduct of that office? I answer that ‘No.’

According to Sorenson, and history confirms, that despite these articulate expressions of Kennedy’s views, the religion question persisted through the end of the campaign.

Kennedy also spoke out on specific church-state issues. He made clear his opposition to public aid for religious schools. He also opposed the appointment of an ambassador to the Vatican (something even Baptist president Harry Truman tried to do). Finally, Kennedy was measured in his reaction to the school prayer case in Engel v. Vitale in 1962, at least when compared to the vociferous reaction to the Court’s decision around the country.

According to Sorenson, Kennedy responded to a question about the case in a news conference: “We have in this case a very easy remedy that …. [w]e can pray a good deal more at home.”

Sorenson concludes his chapter on Kennedy’s religion by observing an ironic twist of history: many conservative Protestants who opposed Kennedy and his Catholicism relying on the separation of church and state to make their case are the same ones, more than a half century later, who are trying to infuse religion into the public square and tear down the wall of separation for their own political benefit.

Although for personal and political reasons Kennedy arguably may have embraced church-state separation in too stark and absolutist a way, it does us good to recall what he said and, in addition to appreciating his (and Sorenson’s) elegant prose, it serves as a counter-balance to those today who would do just the opposite — make religion a virtual obligatory handmaiden in our political process.