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A Faith that Is Personal, Not Private

by Joshua Mercer

Nearly fifty years after Jack Kennedy gave his famous speech on Catholicism in America to 300 Protestant ministers in Houston, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver traveled to what one commentator called “the scene of the crime.”

For it was there in Houston where Kennedy said, just weeks before Election Day:

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials.

At Houston Baptist University earlier this month, Chaput offered a bold critique of Kennedy’s speech: an address he called “sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong.”

Said Chaput:

[Kennedy] warned that he would not “disavow my views or my church in order to win this election.” But in its effect, the Houston speech did exactly that.  It began the project of walling religion away from the process of governance in a new and aggressive way. It also divided a person’s private beliefs from his or her public duties.  And it set “the national interest” over and against “outside religious pressures or dictates.”

At a time when anti-Catholicism was still palpable in the American mainstream, Kennedy was trying to allay Protestants’ fears of a Catholic president’s faith interfering with his duties in the office. He routinely referred to religious voices in the public arena in a negative light, speaking of “pressures,” “dictates” and a church seeking to “impose its will.”

“I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair,” he said.

Chaput thinks this goes too far. Of course faith is personal, but it’s never private.

Too many live their faith as if it were a private idiosyncrasy – the kind that they’ll never allow to become a public nuisance. And too many just don’t really believe. Maybe it’s different in Protestant circles. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I say, ‘I doubt it,’” Chaput told the Baptist college audience.

This does not in any way downplay the very real anti-Catholicism that Kennedy and other Catholics faced.

It was only a few decades earlier in 1928 when New York’s Democratic governor Al Smith became the first Catholic to win a major-party nomination. Smith’s Catholicism became a major issue in that campaign, and many Southern states voted Republican for the first time in decades instead of supporting the Catholic Smith. (In fact, it was the first time Texas had ever voted Republican!) As reporter Frederick William Wile said, Smith was defeated by “the three P’s: Prohibition, Prejudice and Prosperity.”

That prejudice still lingered in the 1968 presidential campaign, and Kennedy was right to state: “Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured — perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this.”

But to convince these ministers (or the American public), Kennedy appealed to a strict separation of Church and State: a phrase, as Chaput noted, that does not even appear in the Constitution, but rather a private letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association.

Since when should our nation’s laws be based on one founder’s correspondence? (By the way, it was also Jefferson who wrote in a letter to Horatio G. Spafford: “In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”)

And while it’s true that the Founding Fathers wanted no national church, they were perfectly fine with state churches. Not only did Massachusetts have a state church until 1833, it actually required all male citizens to belong to some church.

Thankfully we no longer have state established churches or taxes used to finance a religious denomination. But let’s not rewrite history and pretend that our nation has been secular since 1776.

Justice Hugo Black pulled Jefferson’s famous phrase from a dusty history book and inserted into our nation’s laws in the Supreme Court’s Everson v. Board of Education decision in 1947.

Our bishops were quick to respond, releasing a pastoral letter in 1948 called “The Christian in Action.” According to Chaput, the Bishops strongly endorsed American democracy and religious freedom, but they took aim at Justice Black’s radical secularism."

“‘It would be an utter distortion of American history and law’ to force the nation’s public institutions into an ‘indifference to religion and the exclusion of cooperation between religion and government,’” Chaput said, quoting from the bishops’ document. “They rejected Justice Black’s harsh new sense of the separation of Church and state as a ‘shibboleth of doctrinaire secularism.’ And the bishops argued their case from the facts of American history.”

He continued:

Kennedy referenced the 1948 bishops’ letter in his Houston comments. He wanted to prove the deep Catholic support for American democracy. And rightly so. But he neglected to mention that the same bishops, in the same letter, repudiated the new and radical kind of separation doctrine he was preaching.

Kennedy worked hard to assert that Catholics have a right to participate in public office, free from religious prejudice. But in doing so, he also helped to usher in an age where public officials are expected (or in many cases happy) to place their faith safely in a private box so as to have no noticeable impact on their actions.

It needn’t be this way.

While governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson (who regrettably supports abortion) specifically cited the lobbying of his state’s bishops for his decision to sign a law ending the death penalty. History tells us of the close relationship President Reagan had with Pope John Paul II in confronting the Soviet Union. There are countless other examples of men and women of faith lending their voices to the public square in order to promote the common good.

Religious ministers and their congregations should be free to petition their government free of prejudice. As Chaput said so eloquently, “We live in a country that was once – despite its sins and flaws – deeply shaped by Christian faith. It can be so again.”

Amen.

Joshua Mercer is Director of Communications and co-founder of CatholicVoteAction.org, a grassroots organization that provides a voice in politics for hundreds of thousands of lay Catholics. Previously, he served as Chairman of Students for Life of America and also Washington Correspondent for the National Catholic Register. Joshua lives with his wife Lori and three children in Michigan.

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The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.