Catholic and Citizen?

In comparison with yesterday's 20th anniversary of 9/11 and all the attention it has appropriately attracted, all other anniversaries must inevitably seem so insignificant. Today, however, is the 61st anniversary of John F. Kennedy's famous Houston speech, the meaning and legacy of which, along with its application for today, remain controverted and controversial.

September 12, 1960, happened to be John F. Kennedy's seventh wedding anniversary. Instead of spending it at home with his pregnant wife, however, he spent it in the uncongenial environment of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, which had invited him to discuss his religion in Texas on September 12.  “We can win or lose the election right there in Houston on Monday night,” campaign staffer Ted Sorensen said to a friend as that momentous Monday approached. Indeed, renowned religion writer Kenneth Woodward is of the opinion that "without that powerful and historic speech, it is unlikely that he would have won the election."

According to what became the classic chronicle, Theodore H. White's, The Making of the President 1960: "Originally the Kennedy strategy had been to wait, to hope that the [Catholicism] question could be addressed some time late in October, close to the election, when it could be most effectively dealt with. But decisions in a campaign are forced on one by timing of emotions over which no one has control. The prestige of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had now, in early September, given respectable leadership to ancient fear and prejudice." Peale was actually something of a surrogate for Billy Graham, who kept a relatively low profile, but was active behind the scenes, stirring Protestants to action against the threat that a Catholic president presumably posed to the values of real - i.e., Protestant - America. (Perhaps one of the worst "respectable" examples of liberal Protestant anti-Catholicism at that time was a particularly mean book by Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, which I myself can remember reading.) So candidate Kennedy did what he felt he needed to do and accepted the invitation to confront the issue with the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

The full text of Kennedy's famous opening statement is still worth reading, both for how it reflected the American religious situation at that time and for the clear contrast to that situation today - a situation so very different from the one Kennedy confronted in 1960. Indeed, if in 1960 it was some Protestant clergy who questioned whether a Roman Catholic could conscientiously serve as president of a pluralistic constitutional republic, it is now some Catholics who are making that argument against our country's second Catholic President, Joe Biden. In part, this reflects the recent redrawing of the lines of contemporary religious conflict. On the one hand, the old denominational distinctions between Catholicism and Protestantism as well as within Protestantism (and the theological issues which originally animated them) have become considerably less salient. On the other hand, a new, hard boundary separates two sides in a religious-cultural conflict, with "liberal" Protestants and their Catholic allies on one side and "conservative" Protestants and their Catholic allies on the other - with no real ecumenical efforts at "dialogue" or "reconciliation" by either side.

In 1960, Kennedy began by listing some of what he considered "the real issues which should decide this campaign," thus attempting to relativize the importance of the religious issue and relegate it to the periphery of prejudice. He then stated his belief in an America "where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote ... and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."

Sixty-one years later, we have long passed both those thresholds, both with politicians being told how to act and congregations being told how to vote, while "religious liberty" is increasingly invoked but in a significantly sectarian way that is increasingly less "indivisible." 

Of course, throughout American history - from the 19th-century Abolitionist movement to the 20th-century Civil Rights movement - clergy and other religiously motivated citizens have rightly acted to influence our public life, fully acknowledging their religious inspiration. When successful, it was usually because they were able to link their authentically religious motivations with wider public concerns. That was true, for example, even of Prohibition - an instance of a predominantly Protestant, religiously inspired, sectarian movement, which successfully connected with more broadly shared serious concerns about the social effects of alcohol abuse, but which then failed when that consensus collapsed and other social concerns acquired greater prominence. Prohibition then came to be experienced by many as culturally dis-unifying and socially burdensome, more like an anti-pluralist "Protestant Ascendancy" than something suited to American pluralist politics.

Obviously in the context of 1960, it was imperative for Kennedy to minimize what was then called the "religious issue." And, while Kennedy could probably have imagined the sorts of situations which he was assuring his Protestant audience would simply never happen in America, he could hardly have anticipated the ways in which American religion itself has since changed, in ways which in Kennedy's time might have been associated more with the integralist approximations of Francisco Franco's Spain or Eamon de Valera's Ireland.

In his monumental biography of Avery Dulles (Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ: A Model Theologian, 1918-2008, Paulist Press, 2010) Patrick W. Carey, recounted how Sorenson had pre-tested Kennedy's speech with Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, whom Kennedy as U.S. Senator had previously consulted in 1958 on the Roman Catholic understanding of the First Amendment. (In 1960, Murray published We Hold these Truths: Reflections on the American Proposition, and would later be brought to Vatican II by NY's Cardinal Spellman to advance the case for updating the Church's teaching on religious liberty.) Responding to Peale's attack on Kennedy's candidacy, Murray (who personally did not support Kennedy for president) said the source of such anti-Catholicism was "political and religious ignorance," resulting in "a disastrous confusion of politics and religion." 

Yet, for all the elevated philosophical and legal discourse, the "religion issue" in 1960 was in important respects largely a tribal conflict between a declining Protestant demographic group and a rising Catholic demographic group. In an era when American politics was still characterized by what political scientists liked to call "cross-cutting cleavages," not all Protestants or Catholics based their vote primarily on allegiance to their religious tribe but on other coexisting allegiances which divided the population along different lines - like being a union member or a businessman, or on which side one's ancestors had fought in the Civil War. Sixty-one years later, however, those cross-cutting cleavages are largely gone, and religion itself is increasingly subordinate to what seem to have become our primary tribal divisions - our two political parties. 

Thus, something as seemingly apolitical as getting vaccinated against covid has surprisingly become a marker of tribal identity. Earlier this year, for example, political scientist Seth Masket demonstrated the remarkably strong correlation between how a state voted in 2020 and the percentage of its adults who have received at least one covid shot. "And, while voting patters don't really shift much from election to election, vaccination rates are a better predictor of the 2020 election than the 2000 election is." (Cf. https://www.denverpost.com/2021/06/25/covid-19-vaccine-rates-donald-trump-joe-biden/)

That said, what Murray once called "a disastrous confusion of politics and religion" persists, because of which there remains this question concerning the compatibility of religion and citizenship in a modern, pluralistic, constitutional regime such as the United States. In 1960, in keeping with the corrosive individualism which has long permeated American politics, Kennedy unsurprisingly approached the issue individualistically, minimizing as much as possible the reality that most citizens are not isolated atoms but participate in society by and through their communal loyalties, which are, as it were, the molecules which make up civil society.

Kennedy made a point of saying that he was "not the Catholic candidate for President," but rather was "the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic." Through that formulation, he intended to shift the focus from his collective religious community to himself as an individual - and was successful in doing so. (Arguably, what he said could have been interpreted as prioritizing his communal political party identity over his religious community identity, something which arguably is what is increasingly the case with both voters and politicians today. But hardly anyone was thinking in those terms in 1960.)

In fact, however, the "religious issue" only actually arose because Kennedy was a member of the Catholic community (through the accident of tribal inheritance rather than any individual merit or fault of his own). And it was that collective character of that communal identity which was the theoretical cause for concern. In the then standard individualistic account of America (to which Kennedy and most Americans then subscribed), the issue was instead confined to Kennedy's individual behavior as a citizen and as a public official - the kind of America Kennedy (and most Americans) believed in - "the kind I fought for in the South Pacific, and the kind my brother died for in Europe." But, for more thoughtful critics of Kennedy's candidacy, the issue was rather the dissonant reality in a pluralistic society of cohesive communities which imposed (or at least were thought to impose) obligations upon their members prior to their obligations as citizens and public officials, obligations which allegedly might contradict the obligations of citizens and public officials.

In 1785, in his Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments James Madison wrote:

It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe: And if a member of Civil Society, who enters into any subordinate Association, must always do it with a reservation of his duty to the General Authority; much more must every man who becomes a member of any particular Civil Society, do it with a saving of his allegiance to the Universal Sovereign.

Madison advocated against religious establishment, but he started from a recognition that religions imposed actual obligations upon their adherents. Hence, religious citizens who participate in politics are already constrained by prior ("precedent") communal commitments. Of course, contrary to Madison's assumptions, we know from experience (e.g., in the UK, Norway, Denmark, etc.) that religious establishment per se does not present an automatic obstacle to citizens' freedom to participate in politics, while remaining faithful to their prior communal religious obligations. In First Amendment terms, this is a place where the "establishment clause" intersects and overlaps with the "free exercise" clause - concerning not just an individual's freedom to do whatever he or she believes, but also the state's duty to acknowledge the legitimacy of various religious obligations and their binding force on citizens by minimizing the state's inherently establishmentarian tendency to enforce an existing behavioral consensus. In U.S. history, this conflict was most famously experienced in the case of the only religious group that really was systematically persecuted by the Federal Government - the Mormons (on the issue of polygamy).

The Mormon case was an extreme instance, but less extreme conflicts abound between generally applicable norms, which reflect the existing consensus (or "civil religion") and the prior obligations religious communities counter-culturally impose on their members. To the extent that (as in the Mormon polygamy case) religious communities self-consciously deviate from the existing social consensus, whether within their internal communal institutions or in the way they present themselves in the public square, the prospects for serious conflicts increase, and tolerance for a religious exception from the existing consensus cannot be assumed.

First Amendment jurisprudence generally tries to reduce this to a conflict over individual rights - either prioritizing the prevailing consensus against the individual (e.g., Antonin Scalia's 1990 ruling in Employment Division v. Smith) or  trying to recalibrate the balance in favor of the individual (e.g., the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was a reaction against Scalia's decision). 

Framed that way in individualistic terms, First Amendment jurisprudence seems condemned to oscillate back and forth, forever negotiating among apparent irreconcilables, all the while appearing less attentive to the communal character of religion and how religious communities can and/or should address such issues.

Meanwhile, what should religious communities themselves be doing either to exacerbate conflicts with the existing social consensus or to minimize (and maybe even avoid) such often unwinnable conflicts? Kennedy in 1960 could count on the fact that, whatever the Catholic Church's official stance on church-state relations and religious liberty at that time, the actual attitudes and behavior of American Catholics were quite compatible with the existing consensus, and were so perceived by much of mainstream American society. On particular policy issues that were actually in contention, Catholic positions (e.g., on divorce laws or birth control) were controversial but were also still sufficiently congruent with declining but still significant segments of the general public's attitudes. In other, less explicitly doctrinal and hence less contentious kinds of cases (e.g., state aid to religious schools, an American ambassador to the Holy See) sectarian Catholic positions were not perceived as particularly threatening, in part because they were issues on which Catholic opinion was itself divided. (Kennedy himself was opposed to both federal aid to Catholic schools and an ambassador to the Holy See.) Kennedy in 1960 probably could never have envisioned either the plethora of potential policy conflicts today, or the change in the prevailing consensus that has made such conflicts more likely, or the increasing appeal of a counter-cultural public stance among some Catholics that may make such conflicts even more probable.

Nor, of course, could Kennedy have envisioned the end of cross-cutting cleavages and the resulting polarization of society into two mutually hating tribes - and the increasing subordination on both sides (but perhaps especially on the Republican side) of ostensibly religious commitments to politics.

All of this puts the burden on religious communities carefully to evaluate how they interface with whatever the prevailing social consensus may be at any particular time and the consequences of allowing political priorities to redefine religious priorities. Thus, for example, in "Giving Up on God: the Global Decline of Religion," Foreign Affairs (September October 2020), Ronald F. Inglehart argued that politics in particular accounts for some of religion's decline in the U.S. Indeed, he argued, where "it once was generally assumed that religious beliefs shaped political views," now the opposite may increasingly be the case. Indeed, that latter phenomenon may be the most problematic legacy of the so-called "religious right," in its increasing subordination of religion to politics and the pursuit of political power.

One complication in the case of Catholicism is the traditional Catholic commitment to the concept of shared public reason, often understood in terms of "natural law," whereby positions which were once arguable in the public square in more universal terms are now increasingly marginalized as sectarian positions with diminished credibility in a radically transformed public square. That traditional understanding of shared public reason must now reckon with this significant change in contemporary secular rationality - not unlike what moral theologian James Bretzke, for example, once termed "cultural invincible ignorance" [cf. A Morally Complex World: Engaging Contemporary Moral Theology, 2004].

During last year's election season, Bill McCormick, writing in America (“Whether Trump or Biden wins, the church will keep losing. Where does that leave Christian voters?”), worried whether for many Americans, ”Christians’ political activity is the public face of Christianity. As the number of Americans attending religious services, identifying with religious bodies or even having religious friends continues to decline, the number of Americans who will know Christianity through its public engagement will increase. They will have to judge Christianity and Christ himself through those fruits."

[Photo: JFK Addresses Greater Houston Ministerial Association, September 12, 1960.]