Respecting Religion

Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Catholic bishops of the United States last spring, articulated a challenge to contemporary liberalism, saying, “Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted.... To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul.” The pope was not advocating a union of church and state. He was, instead, insisting that religion makes claims upon a believer’s entire life—public views as well as private feelings—and that arguments to the contrary are evidence of a kind of intellectual sloth or a superficial faith.

The idea that religion is strictly a private matter entered popular political thought in 1960. John F. Kennedy needed to put to rest some voters’ doubts about his Catholicism, so he gave a major address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office,” Kennedy proclaimed. His Houston speech had a specific and immediate goal: Kennedy wanted to assure Protestants that his Catholicism was nothing they needed to worry about, because it did not appear to worry him. Catholicism was something that happened to him, like Jackie being born a brunette, more a turn of fate than an act of faith. Kennedy went to Mass on Sunday, but he was not going to let his Catholicism affect his views. It tells you something about the high degree of anti-Catholic prejudice in 1960 that a group of ministers found such sentiments reassuring. Most of all, Kennedy wanted to change the subject. As he said throughout the campaign, he wanted to get past such questions so he could address the “real issues.”

As short-term politics, the Houston speech was brilliant even though it was demonstrably false: Catholicism bore a thoroughly public character in 1960. The vibrant culture of the Catholic ghetto was still a reality. In some cities, whole neighborhoods were identified by the name of the local parish. Ethnic and religious sensibilities alike were celebrated on saints’ days with Masses and street festivals or parades. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had concluded his very popular program “Life Is Worth Living” in 1957, but he would return to the airwaves in 1961. Catholic schools nurtured a Catholic culture among the young, while the Catholic press sustained that culture among adults.

This vibrant Catholic culture was not Kennedy’s. His ghetto was the intellectual ghetto of Harvard, where religion was a thing never discussed at cocktail parties and little studied at the library, and so more easily dismissed as “private.”

The political issues that would dominate the 1960s gave the lie to the idea that religion was a merely private affair. The civil rights movement was not only led by clerics, it was first and foremost a moral and religious vision. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s commitment to nonviolence was rooted in his specifically Christian belief in the redemptive power of suffering, which is not an ethical claim but a dogmatic one based on Christian teaching on the crucifixion. And in 1960 the people invoking “privacy” in the juridical sense as freedom from government interference were the segregationists.