Religion & The Presidency

On February 26, 2012 on ABC’s ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulos’ Rick Santorum was asked about a speech that John F. Kennedy gave in Texas in 1960 to the mostly Baptist pastors at a time when Protestants openly wondered whether a Catholic US president would take orders from the Pope. In his speech Kennedy said "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".  Kennedy said, just weeks before the general election "I do not speak for my church on public matters and the church does not speak for me, the separation of church and state is absolute". Santorum said – “to say that people of faith have no role in the public square, you bet that makes you throw up, what kind of country do we live in that says only people of non faith can come into the public square and make their case, that makes me throw up.” George said almost half of the voters in Michigan actually agree with Santorum.

According to a February 28, 2012 Newsday article Kennedy insisted his policies would be based on his conscience, not church teaching and the speech would become a model for generations of American Catholic politicians. Catholic lawmakers paraphrased Kennedy; they said Kennedy was arguing that even if faith shapes policy, the outcome still had to be acceptable to the wider public. Former New York Governor Cuomo, a Democrat, in a much-quoted 1984 speech on abortion at the University of Notre Dame spoke of "the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others." Democrat John Kerry, the party's 2004 presidential nominee said: "I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America." As years passed after the Kennedy speech, the church and society underwent changes that led many Catholics and conservative Christians to conclude they were being pushed from public life. The US Supreme Court ended sectarian prayer in public schools and legalized abortion. As a result, many Catholics and other Christians saw themselves surrounded by a hostile culture. At the same time, the global church was opening up to the modern world through the Second Vatican Council, prompting an internal Catholic split over whether the council's reforms were going too far. American Catholics -- better educated and more integrated into American life -- fractured along religious and political lines. Once a solid bloc of mostly Democratic voters, Catholics became swing voters and Catholic Republicans, a rarity in Kennedy's day. For them, the speech took on new meaning. For conservative Catholics and other conservative Christians these comments were infuriating. They argued religion should be the source of an unchanging morality that guides all aspects of life including governing. Archbishop Charles Chaput in a 2010 speech at Houston Baptist University called Kennedy's address "sincere, compelling, articulate and wrong, his Houston remarks profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics but of all religious believers in America's public life and political conversation, today, half a century later, we're paying for the damage."

In the Editors article of the Bloomberg News on February 28 it said - But the United States is not that kind of country and Kennedy's point was close to the opposite of Santorum's summary. We are a country whose Constitution prohibits any "religious test" for public office. The very point of Kennedy's speech was that he as a Catholic had as much right to be in "the public square" as any Protestant or nonbeliever. In fact, the only Americans who are effectively excluded from running for president because of popular prejudice against them would be "people of non faith" as Santorum calls them.

According to the PEW Forum on Religion & Public Life only three US presidents-Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were unaffiliated with a specific religious tradition and John Kennedy remains the only Catholic to have held the nation's highest office. We’ve had: 11 Episcopalian–George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, William Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Chester Arthur, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford and George HW Bush; 8 Presbyterian–Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland (22nd & 24th), Benjamin Harrison, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan; 4 Baptist–Warren Harding, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; 4 Methodist–Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley and George W Bush; 4 Unitarian–John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore and William Howard Taft; 2 Disciples of Christ–James Garfield and Lyndon Johnson; 2 Dutch Reformed–Martin Van Buren and Teddy Roosevelt; 2 Quaker– Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon; and 2 Congregationalist–Calvin Coolidge and Barack Obama (the United Church of Christ to which he was a member for over 20 years is of the Congregationalists family within mainline Protestantism.)

The Catholic Church wants you to think it’s a victim but their hypocrisy of go to confession–go to mass–start your dirty tricks all over again violates God’s rules-the 10 Commandments. I say they need to straighten up their act and not be given an exception to the Constitution; they should not be trying to reduce our country from being the melting pot of the world and make us no different than any other country’s dictatorship.