Santorum and the Truth About Kennedy's Religion Speech

There has been much ado in the past few days about Rick Santorum's comment on JFK's famous 1960 speech on religion in public life. When asked about his thoughts on the speech, Santorum told ABC News that the speech made him want "to throw up."

Now I respect Rick Santorum and I agree with him most of the time. I admire his earnestness and his willingness to engage in dialogue on complex and controversial topics. His manner when addressing religious and social issues, however, can come across as sanctimonious and pompous. He also tends to treat any question, no matter the subject, as an opportunity to provide a seminar on the given issue and correct foolish conventional wisdom.

And so it was with his crude and politically unwise description of his feelings about the JFK speech. The media, of course, was scandalized by Santorum's reaction. After all, the JFK speech is regarded as a thoughtful exposition on church-state relations and a politically-savvy move to put to rest fears about the influence that the Roman Catholic Church might have upon the Catholic Kennedy.

While it may not have been in Santorum's interest to delve into the matter, in truth, the Kennedy speech was a sad political pander. Worried about anti-Catholic prejudice, Kennedy basically disavowed the Church by insisting that his faith was wholly irrelevant to his political life and would have nothing whatever to do with his conduct as president.

"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, 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."

The point was to convince southern Protestants that he was no papist. His faith and its Roman masters would have no role in his governance, rest assured. He certainly was not going to aid those subversive Catholic schools!

What is great about this? Kennedy wanted the votes of the people in his audience and their followers, so he told them what they wanted to hear. The speech was supposedly politically necessary due to anti-Catholic bias and so it is celebrated for smartly allaying prejudicial fears. But would we similarly celebrate a 50 year-old speech of a black candidate to a white audience in which the candidate distanced himself from the civil rights movement in order to secure election? Or the speech of a Jewish candidate in which he felt compelled to promise that the Israeli government would not set U.S. policy?

The answers are clear. The Kennedy speech should not be viewed as a serious analysis of the role of religion in public life or the place of "faith" in political decision-making. It was a calculated attempted to remove an perceived obstacle to election--anti-Catholicism. Fifty years on, we ought to see the speech as a sad example of the prejudice that a Catholic once had to endure in order to win the presidency, and not as a sharp political maneuver and brilliant rumination on religion in the public square.