Religion and politics in the US

John Courtney Murray, one of the most important theorists of religious freedom that you may never have heard of

Garry Wills has a good article in the New York Review of Books, Romney and JFK: The Difference 12/19/07 (01/17/08 issue; publicly available as of this writing). He reminds us that liberal Democrats, then and now, have very valid concerns about the relations of the people's government to the churches. He writes:

The objections some have to Mitt Romney's religion are twofold, theological and cultural. Those against John F. Kennedy when he gave his 1960 speech in Houston about his Catholicism were more solidly political. The theological problems with Romney come from evangelicals, who know that his Jesus is not a member of the divine Trinity. ...

But theology is not what bothers most of those who feel uneasy about Mormonism. They object to its unfamiliarity. ...

The only objection to Mormons on political grounds would be their record of polygamy and racism, both of which have been officially abjured. But Kennedy's problem was precisely political. Catholics were familiar enough to Americans - there was no weirdo factor. (People wearing white hoods over their heads had little right to call others weird.) And Kennedy's opponents were not interested in theological questions like transubstantiation. But there were solid grounds for political doubts about Catholics. The Vatican had not, in 1960, formally renounced its condemnation of American pluralism and democracy. In fact, one of Kennedy's advisers on his Houston speech, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, had recently been silenced by the Vatican for defending religious pluralism.

I hadn't realized, or at least I'd forgotten, that Murray was an adviser to Kennedy on that speech. Murray is an important figure in Catholic Christianity. He was officially silenced by the hierarchy for proposing that the Catholic Church adopt a position consistent with democratic governance on the separation of Church and State. At that time, the Church wanted to be the official state church in, well, as many countries as they could get. The ideal Cathlic model for governance of that time came closest to realization in the Austrian Standestaat (corporate state) dictatorhip of 1933-1938 under Englebert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg. As Wills writes:

There was a cogently argued case against papal politics. Paul Blanshard had maintained, in the best-selling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1948), that Catholics were just pretending to be democrats till they could get into power and imitate such Vatican - approved regimes as that of Francisco Franco in Spain. A strong lobby, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, had continued to argue the Blanshard position. It had successfully blocked the sending of a full ambassador to the Vatican. The Protestant ministers who organized against Kennedy's campaign, under Norman Vincent Peale, feared the Pope's power more than his doctrines — just as they had when Al Smith ran for president in 1928. (my emphasis in bold)

Murray's story on that issue had a happy ending when his position was adopted by the Second Vatican Council. For more on Murray, see John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Religious Pluralism Woodstock Report Mar 1993(Woodstock Theological Center). The Time story from the issue imaged above is also available online, City of God & Man 12/12/1960.

But Vatican II came after Kennedy's death. Wills describes the essential difference between Romney's religion speech and Kennedy's famous one in 1960:

Kennedy had to convince people that he would not let the Vatican push him around. Romney has let evangelicals know that he would let them push him around. He not only has given them a theological formula on Jesus which he hopes they will accept - he implicitly has attacked Kennedy's absolute separation of church and state using the evangelicals' own slogan: those who think (like Kennedy) that "religion is seen merely as a private affair" are, Romney said, "intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong." That phrase has not been much noticed in public comments on Romney's speech, but it is a key statement for the evangelicals. Like George Bush's speechwriters, Romney has learned the code of Rightspeak - just as he learned Leftspeak when running for governor in Massachusetts.

That secularism is a religion is a position fiercely held by some on the right. They use it to say that separating church and state breaches the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a religion. In their topsy-turvy arguments, the First Amendment thus forbids the separation of church and state. Romney was speaking in that code. In his speech he made many other appeals to the religious right, as when he put "the breakdown of the family" in his list of most pressing national problems (another hit at Giuliani). He praised the use of religious symbols "in our public places." Though he did not specifically mention the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, he implied approval of their presence there. (He should be questioned on this matter.) The Bush administration and its lackeying Republican Congress would do anything for the religious right. When the right said "Jump!" on the Terri Schiavo case, the President and Congress said "How high?" Romney signals that he would act in the same way. (my emphasis in bold)

Alan Wolfe also wrote about liberals' concerns over the pre-Vatican II Catholic position on Church and State in Liberalism and Catholicism The American Prospect 11/30/02:

Despite conservative aspects of Church doctrine, American Catholics were an important component of liberal success in the years after World War II. Many union members were Catholic, and they offered an effective liberal counterbalance to southern conservatives, nearly all of whom were Protestant, in the Democratic Party. A disproportionate share of union leaders were Catholic, too, not only in the AFL-CIO, but even in more radical unions, such as the Transport Workers Union, that had close ties to the communists. Father Coughlin's foil during the 1930s was Monsignor John A. Ryan, the "Right Reverend New Dealer," as his opponents called him, whose arguments in favor of economic justice Americanized and brought up to date the social teachings embodied in papal encyclicals. Dorothy Day kept alive a Catholic pacifist tradition that would bloom in the 1960s among activists like Michael Harrington, the Berrigan brothers, and (from time to time) Tom Hayden. Still, postwar liberal intellectuals often wrote as if there were no such thing as a Catholic left wing - or even a Catholic center. They knew the Church from its spokesmen, and that was all they needed to know.

No American liberal symbolized this hostility toward the Church more than Paul Blanshard, whose American Freedom and Catholic Power became a best-seller in 1949. Blanshard defined what he called "the Catholic problem" this way: "What is to be done with a hierarchy that operates in twentiethcentury America under medieval European controls?" To drive his point home, he asked his readers to imagine what might happen if and when Catholics became a majority in the United States--a real possibility, he believed, since Catholics were "outbreeding the non-Catholic elements in our population." Blanshard envisioned the passage of a constitutional amendment declaring America a Catholic republic, the "capture" of public schools by the hierarchy, and the subjection of the entire American people to Catholic strictures on marriage and divorce. Was his picture fanciful?, Blanshard asked his readers. Anything but, he answered, for the Catholic Church did not even require a majority of Catholics to impose its plan. "In our individualistic nation," he wrote, the Catholic Church "may operate on the balance-of-power principle, which has been so useful in giving Catholic political parties in Europe a dominating position." The attitudes of such liberals constituted one of the sorrier chapters in the history of American liberalism, revealing strains of intolerance and misunderstanding despite liberalism's language of openness. At various points, such liberals as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lewis Mumford, McGeorge Bundy, and Reinhold Niebuhr all expressed concerns about the absolutist, hierarchical, or corporatist aspects of Catholicism as a threat to American liberalism. (my emphasis)

Tags: alan wolfe, garry wills, paul blanchard, romney, separation of church and state