Repairing the Damage, 50 Years Later
by Fr. Roger Landry - March 5, 2010
Fifty years ago this September, while campaigning for the presidency, John F. Kennedy went to Houston to try to convince the Protestant Ministers of the Great Houston Ministerial Association, and through them the Protestant majority in the United States, that they had nothing to fear from electing a Catholic to the highest political office in the land. There the future 35th president of the United States said, "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, where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source. I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. I do not speak for my church on public matters; and the church does not speak for me."
On Monday, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver was invited by Houston Baptist University to come to assess the legacy of that historically noteworthy address. In a speech entitled, "The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life," the shepherd of the Rockies declared that Kennedy's speech has certainly had an enduring impact, but one that is fundamentally negative.
"Fifty years ago this fall, in September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association," Archbishop Chaput said. "He had one purpose. He needed to convince 300 uneasy Protestant ministers, and the country at large, that a Catholic like himself could serve loyally as our nation's chief executive. Kennedy convinced the country, if not the ministers, and went on to be elected. And his speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate — and wrong. Not wrong about the patriotism of Catholics, but wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation's life. And he wasn't merely '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."
Archbishop Chaput openly admitted that his were "strong words," but went on to back them up by showing, first, how Kennedy misunderstood or misrepresented the meaning and consequences of the First Amendment and, second, how Kennedy's principles led him and so many after him to moral and political incoherence.
Analyzing Kennedy's position in favor of an "absolute" separation of Church and state, Archbishop Chaput said that the then-Massachusetts Senator seriously misread the Constitution. "The Founders and Framers didn't believe [in an absolute separation of Church and state]. And the history of the United States contradicts that [claim]. Unlike revolutionary leaders in Europe, the American Founders looked quite favorably on religion. Many were believers themselves. In fact, one of the main reasons for writing the First Amendment's Establishment Clause — the clause that bars any federally-endorsed Church — was that several of the Constitution's Framers wanted to protect the publicly funded Protestant Churches they already had in their own states."
He went on to describe how the Founding Fathers not only opposed an absolute separation between Church and state but actually believed and promoted that government should strongly encourage the practice of religion. "Their reasons were practical," Archbishop Chaput asserted. "In their view, a republic like the United States needs a virtuous people to survive " and it was clear to them that "religious faith, rightly lived, forms virtuous people." He clarified that the drastic misunderstanding of the separation of Church and state was basically unknown in American civic consciousness until Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, in 1947, "excavated it from a private letter President Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802." The following year the U.S. bishops demonstrated in a pastoral letter how Black's 1947 opinion was "an utter distortion of American history and law" and a "shibboleth of doctrinaire secularism." Archbishop Chaput noted that, even though Kennedy mentioned the bishops' pastoral letter in his 1960 speech, "he neglected to mention that the same bishops, in the same letter, repudiated the new and radical kind of separation doctrine he was preaching."
Not only did Kennedy's speech popularize an erroneous notion of the First Amendment that has had negative consequences for churches and American public life ever since, Archbishop Chaput insisted, but it also did enormous damage to the conscience formation of citizens and those engaged in public life.
He gave Kennedy credit for stating both that he would resign his office if his presidential duties should "ever require me to violate my conscience or violate the national interest" and that he would not "disavow my views or my church in order to win this election." However, the prelate added, "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.'" The end result was that he "secularized the American presidency" and "privatize[d] presidential religious belief — including and especially his own — in order to win that office." That had enormous "atheistic implications for public life and discourse," which have gone a "considerable way toward 'secularizing' the American public square by privatizing personal belief."
"Fifty years after Kennedy's Houston speech," Archbishop Chaput continued, "we have more Catholics in national public office than ever before. But I wonder if we've ever had fewer of them who can coherently explain how their faith informs their work, or who even feel obligated to try. Too many Catholics confuse their personal opinions with a real Christian conscience. 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." He said that Kennedy "didn't create these trends in American life" but "his Houston speech clearly fed them."
The Archbishop went on to describe, in contrast to Kennedy's principles and basing himself heavily on the thought St. Augustine, the authentic vocation of a faithful Christian in public life. He said that a believer's relationship with Christ must have public consequences if Christianity is not to become merely a "word game and a legend." There is a need to "live and prove our love [for God and others] by our actions in the public square." Since human law forms the character of citizens and since politics is the exercise of power, both have "moral implications that the Christian cannot ignore" if he is to remain "faithful to his vocation as a light of the world."
Rather than a separation between faith and life, he sketched out the proper harmony that is supposed to exist in American Catholics with regard to faith and public life at the beginning of his speech, when he said, "I'm here as a Catholic Christian and an American citizen — in that order. Both of these identities are important. They don't need to conflict. They are not, however, the same thing. And they do not have the same weight. I love my country. I revere the genius of its founding documents and its public institutions. But no nation, not even the one I love, has a right to my allegiance, or my silence, in matters that belong to God or that undermine the dignity of the human persons He created."
It was an outstanding statement that deserves to be read in full. Let's hope that, in fifty years, Americans will be able to look back and say that this Houston speech has had as much an impact for good as, looking back now over the past half-century, John F. Kennedy's speech has had for public and private ill.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
