Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Leadership
& Decision-Making
- JFK diffuses the
"religious issue"
- during the 1960
Presidential Campaign
- REMARKS OF
- SENATOR JOHN F. KENNEDY
- ON CHURCH AND STATE;
- DELIVERED TO
- GREATER HOUSTON MINISTERIAL ASSOCIATION, HOUSTON, TEXAS,
- SEPT. 12, 1960
-
I am grateful for your generous invitation to state my views. While the so-called
religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to
emphasize from the outset that I believe that we have far more critical issues in the 1960
election; the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers only ninety miles off
the coast of Florida - the humiliating treatment of our President and Vice-President by
those who no longer respect our power - the hungry children I saw in West Virginia, the
old people who cannot pay their doctor's bills, the families forced to give up their farms
- an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer
space.
These are the real issues which should decide this campaign. And they are not religious
issues - for war and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barrier.
But 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. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again - not what
kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of
America I believe in.
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 a Catholic) bow to act and no
Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote - where no church or
church school is granted any public funds or political preference - 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 him.
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 - and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act
against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed,
in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew - or a Quaker - or a Unitarian
- or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led
to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim - but tomorrow it
may be you - until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of
great national peril.
- Finally, I believe in an America where religious
intolerance will someday end - where all men and all churches are treated as equal - where
every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice - where
there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind - and where
Catholics, Protestants and Jews, both the lay and the pastoral level, will refrain from
those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the
past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.
That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the
kind of Presidency in which I believe - a great office that must be neither humbled by
making it the instrument of any religious group, nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding
it, its occupancy, from the members of any religious group. I believe in a President whose
views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation or
imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.
I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment's
guarantees of religious liberty (nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to
do so). And neither 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 if they
disagree with that safeguard, they should be openly working to repeal it.
I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all and obligated to none -
who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require him to
fulfill - and whose fulfillment of his Presidential office is not limited or conditioned
by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.
This is the kind of America I believe in - and this is the kind of America I fought for in
the South Pacific and the kind my brother died for in Europe. No one suggested then that
we might have a "divided loyalty," that we did not "believe in
liberty" or that we belonged to a disloyal group that threatened "the freedoms
for which our forefathers died."
And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers did die when they fled
here to escape religious test oaths, that denied office to members of less favored
churches, when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Virginia Statute
of Religious Freedom - and when they fought at the shrine I visited today - the Alamo. For
side by side with Bowie and Crockett died Fuentes and McCafferty and Bailey and Bedillio
and Carey - but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no
religious test there.
I ask you tonight to follow in that tradition, to judge me on the basis of fourteen years
in the Congress - on my declared stands against an ambassador to the Vatican, against once
unconstitutional aid to parochial schools, and against any boycott of the public schools
(which I attended myself) - instead of judging me on the basis of these pamphlets and
publications we have all seen that carefully select quotations out of context from the
statements of Catholic Church leaders, usually in other countries, frequently in other
centuries, and rarely relevant to any situation here - and always omitting, of course,
that statement of the American bishops in 1948 which strongly endorsed church-state
separation.
I do not consider these other quotations binding upon my public acts - why should you? But
let me say, with respect to other countries, that I am wholly opposed to the state being
used by any religious group, Catholic or Protester to compel, prohibit or persecute the
free exercise of any other religion. And that goes for any persecution at any time, by
anyone, in any country.
And I hope that you and I condemn with equal fervor those nations which
deny their Presidency to Protestants and those which deny it to Catholics. And rather than
cite the misdeeds of those who differ, I would also cite the record of the Catholic Church
in such nations as France and Ireland - and the independence of such statesmen as de
'Gaulle and Adenauer.
- But let me stress again that these are my views -- for,
contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am
the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.
I do not speak for my church on public matters - and the church does not
speak for me.
Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected - on birth control,
divorce, censorship, gambling, or any other subject - I will make my decision in
accordance with these views, in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the
national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictate. And no
power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.
But if the time should ever come - and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely
possible - when my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the
national interest, then I would resign the office, and I hope any other conscientious
public servant would do likewise.
But I do not intend to apologize for these views to my critics of either Catholic or
Protestant faith, nor do I intend to disavow either my views or my church in order to win
this election. If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the
Senate, satisfied that I tried my best and was fairly judged.
But if this election is decided on the basis that 40,000,000 Americans lost their chance
of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be
the loser in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of
history, and in the eyes of our own people.
But if, on the other hand, I should win this election, I shall devote every effort of mind
and spirit to fulfilling the oath of the Presidency - practically identical, I might add,
with the oath I have taken for fourteen years in the Congress. For, without reservation, I
can, and I quote, "solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution, so help me God."
- from Theodore White's The Making of the President 1960:
There was, as the Kennedys had learned in West Virginia [an early
Democratic primary against Hubert Humphrey], only one way to separate the bigots from the
honestly fearful -- and that was to face the issue of religion frankly and in the open,
stripping it of the darkness, incense and strange ritual that so many Protestants feared.
The question, tactically, was when. Originally the Kennedy
strategy had been to wait, to hope that the 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 fears and prejudice. If the emotions of
millions of Americans were left to crystallize under such leadership, positions might be
fixed so rigidly that nothing later could shake them.
Again, now, as he was moving swiftly about the country from Maine to
Alaska to Michigan to Idaho to California, decision happened in Kennedy's mind: to accept
an invitation from the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to discuss his religion, on
September 12th, at Houston, Texas.
He would make an opening statement, then submit himself, live, to any
questions they might choose to ask. Thus all the while he was finding his way to the
future as he traveled the Pacific Coast, his mind focused on the past.
Together at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles over the weekend, he and
Ted Sorensen - Unitarian - shaped the draft of what he must say. "We can win or lose
the election right there in Houston on Monday night," said Sorensen to a friend
during the Los Angeles weekend.
The ministers had assembled in the pink-and-green-carpeted ballroom of the Rice Hotel in
Houston by 8:30, 300 strong with 300 spectators. At five minutes of nine, the youthful
Democratic candidate dressed in dark suit and white shirt, sat down beside the chairman,
the Reverend Herbert Mezia (Presbyterian), and faced them.
Kennedy had been barnstorming since early morning that day across Texas
- from El Paso through Lubbock through San Antonio. But if he was tired it showed only in
the thumbs working nervously over his clasped hands and in the occasional rubbing of his
lips with his fists.
His speech was short and in his best clipped style [see above].
The questions followed, reflecting all the areas of Protestant concern over Catholic
policy:
Why had he not, twelve years before, attended the consecration of an interfaith chapel in
Philadelphia - did his religion forbid it, would it so forbid a President? Kennedy cleared
the record: he had been invited on that occasion, not as a Congressman, nor as an
American, but as a spokesman of the Catholic faith. This role he could not accept; but if
it were a question, said he, of "whether I, as Senator or President, could attend a
function in your service connected with my position of office, then I could and would
attend."
What would he feel as President about the persecution of Protestant missionaries in Roman
Catholic countries of South America? He replied, "I would use my influence as
President of the United States . . . to encourage the development of freedom all over the
world .... One of the rights I consider to be important is the right of free religious
practice, and I would hope that the President would stand for these rights all around the
globe without regard to geography, religion, or..." (Before he had finished, the
audience broke out in applause.)
He was asked whether he would ask his hierarchial superior, Cardinal Cushing of Boston, to
forward his endorsement of separation of church and state to the Vatican. He replied
sternly, "May I just say that as I do not accept the right of any, as I said,
ecclesiastical official to tell me what I shall do in the sphere of my public
responsibility . . . I do not propose also to ask Cardinal Cushing to ask the Vatican to
take some action. I do not propose to interfere with their free right to do exactly what
they want."
Would he accept Church direction in public life? He spoke deliberately in answer. "If
my church attempted to influence me in a way which was improper or which affected
adversely my responsibilities as a public servant sworn to uphold the Constitution, then I
would reply to them that this was an improper action on their part, that it was one to
which I could not subscribe, that I was opposed to it, and that it would be an unfortunate
breech - an interference with the American political system. I am confident there would be
no such interference."
In short, he said, if he found any conflict between his conscience and the responsibility
of the Presidency, he would resign that office.
When he had finished, he had not only closed Round One of his election campaign - he had
for the first time more fully and explicitly than any other thinker of his faith defined
the personal doctrine of a modern Catholic in a democratic society.
How much effect he had that evening no one could tell. He had addressed a sullen, almost
hostile audience when he began. He had won the applause of many and the personal
sympathies of more; the meeting had closed in respect and friendship. But how far the
victory in this hall would extend its glow no one could measure. The national TV networks
were to broadcast his performance the next day in fragments around the nation. Kennedy
volunteers were to use the filmed record over and over again in both Catholic and
Protestant areas of the country for the next seven weeks...
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