Religion in public life

Water into whine

  by J.F. | ATLANTA

AMONG Rick Santorum's less charming attributes is his unerring ability to take griping, seething umbrage at even the slightest quibble with one of his policy positions. It is no accident that Mr Santorum's rise in the polls coincided with a wide gap of time between televised debates. Gifted as he is at retail politics—which in this particular primary mainly involves convincing small groups of like-minded people that he is as angry as they are—when challenged on any of his beliefs or past actions he instantly turns defensive, hostile and indignant. That does not play well.
Witness, for instance, his gross mischaracterisation of a speech given by John F. Kennedy, America's first (and so far only) Catholic president in 1960. Anti-Catholic sentiment was hardly unusual in the mid-20th century, and Kennedy's speech was perhaps too strong a mollification of such sentiments, but it was hardly controversial. He simply said that he believed 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, 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."


Mr Santorum, however, said that the speech "makes [him] throw up", because Kennedy said that "people of faith...have no role in the public sphere." A president needs a stronger stomach; Kennedy said no such thing. He did not make an argument against religion; he argued against the domination of public life by officials of any one faith. As P.M. Carpenter points out, Kennedy was making claims neither about his conscience nor about whether public life could be influenced by religion. To do either would be absurd. And even if we grant Mr Santorum's wounded, hypersensitive interpretation, and pretend that Kennedy was in fact arguing that people of faith have no place in public life, that argument lost, and it lost resoundingly.
It often seems that only people of faith have a role in the public sphere. Professions of faith are de rigueur for most any candidate. In fact, eight states still officially ban atheists from holding public office. Congress has only a single avowed atheist, Pete Stark, and the White House won't contain one anytime soon. Americans are more hostile toward the idea of an atheist presidential candidate than they are to a gay, adulterous, marijuana-using or utterly inexperienced candidate. They are more likely to vote for a Muslim than an atheist, and they are as likely to vote for a Muslim as I am to sprout wings.
But, despite Mr Santorum's ignorant interpretation, this wasn't the point of Kennedy's speech. Kennedy's remarks celebrated not the banishment of religion, but religious pluralism and harmony, and it's tough to find fault with them.

I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end, where all men and all churches are treated as equals, where every man has the same right to attend or not to 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, at both the lay and the pastoral levels, 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.