The New Yorker June 7, 2004 NEW-TIME RELIGION by Hendrik Hertzberg Issue of 2004-06-07 Posted 2004-05-31 It isn’t every day that the Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party is a junior senator from Massachusetts who was educated at an élite boarding school and an Ivy League college and whose political career was founded on his war heroism as a young Naval officer in command of a small boat and who has family money and a thick shock of hair and a slightly stiff manner and beautifully tailored suits and an aristocratic mien and whose initials are J.F.K. So rare is this phenomenon that the last time it happened was fortyfour years ago, way back in 1960. That was also the last time that the nominee of the Democratic Party—or of either major party, for that matter—was a Roman Catholic. There are plenty of other similarities between now and then, each of which comes equipped with its own corresponding difference. Here’s one: in 2004 as in 1960, a large number of evangelical Protestant ministers have been alerting their followers to the danger posed by the man from Massachusetts. The difference is that last time they were against him because they were afraid he might be subservient to the Vatican. This time they’re against him because they’re pretty sure he won’t be. Here’s another: in 2004 as in 1960, there are prominent Catholics who find it worrying or alarming or otherwise upsetting that their co-religionist is on the ballot for the office of President of the United States. In 1960, though, these prominent Catholics were mostly politicians, some of them the hard-bitten but cautious bosses of big-city Democratic machines. They loved John F. Kennedy, but they loved winning even more, and they feared that the time was not yet ripe to defy the bigotry that had traumatized them thirty-two years earlier. The crushing 1928 defeat of Al Smith, the only other Catholic who had ever run at the top of a major-party ticket, was exactly as distant in time, and as fresh in memory, as the crushing 1972 defeat of George McGovern is today (and the pols who saw McGovern when they looked at Howard Dean are the direct descendants of the ones who saw Smith when they looked at Kennedy). In 2004, the most prominent Catholic worrywarts are conservative prelates. Their fear is not that the candidate who happens to be Catholic will be defeated but that he will be elected. Theodore Sorensen, the Unitarian who was President Kennedy’s closest aide, wrote that while his boss faithfully attended Mass on Sundays, “not once in eleven years—despite all our discussions of church-state affairs—did he ever disclose his personal views on man’s relation to God.” John Forbes Kerry, who also attends Sunday Mass, has been similarly reticent about the intimate details of his spiritual beliefs. Nevertheless, Kerry’s biography contains hints that his Catholicism is somewhat more devout than was that of his political hero and role model. Kerry was an altar boy, and as a youth he considered the seminary and a career in the priesthood. There is no evidence that any such thoughts ever crossed the mind of the first J.F.K. Yet, because Kerry opposes the recriminalization of abortion and supports stem-cell research to find treatments for such diseases as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, a bevy of bishops have all but called for his defeat. The archbishop of St. Louis has said he would refuse to let Kerry take Communion, the central sacrament of Catholic inclusion, and lesser bishops in Boston, New Orleans, and Portland, Oregon, have chimed in with similar sentiments. The bishop of Colorado Springs has gone further, declaring that anyone who votes for a candidate who favors abortion rights or stem-cell research (or gay marriage or assisted suicide) will be denied Communion in his diocese. Of course, there are still lots of bishops, probably a majority, who think that using the Eucharist as a political bludgeon is a bad idea. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, of Los Angeles, to name one, has said that Kerry is welcome to take Communion in his diocese. There is plenty of disagreement within the Catholic Church and plenty of debate in the Catholic press. The salient division in American political life where religion is concerned is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, if it ever was, or even between believers and nonbelievers. It is between traditional supporters of a secular state (many of whom are themselves religiously observant), on the one hand, and, on the other hand—well, theocrats might be too strong a term. Suffice it to say that there are those who believe in a sturdy wall between church and state and those who believe that the wall should be remodelled into a white picket fence dotted with open gates, some of them wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer full of federal cash through. President Bush is the leader of the latter persuasion, and his remodelling project has been under way for more than three years. This project goes beyond the frequent use of evangelical code words in the President’s speeches; beyond the shocking and impious suggestion, more than once voiced in the President’s approving presence, that he was chosen for his position by God Himself; beyond the insistence on appointing judges of extreme Christian-right views to the federal bench; beyond the religiously motivated push to chip away wherever possible at the reproductive freedom of women. It also includes money, in the millions and billions. The money is both withheld and disbursed: withheld from international family-planning efforts, from domestic contraceptive education, and from scientific research deemed inconsistent with religious fundamentalism; disbursed to “abstinence-based” sex-education programs, to church-run “marriage initiatives,” and, via vouchers, to drug-treatment and other social-service programs based on religion. Though Congress has declined to enact the bulk of the President’s “faith-based initiatives,” the Administration has found a way, via executive orders and through bureaucratic novelties like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Compassion Capital Fund. “The federal government now allows faith-based groups to compete for billions of dollars in social-service funding, without being forced to change their identity and their mission,” the President boasted a couple of weeks ago, in a commencement address at a Lutheran college in Mequon, Wisconsin. He did not mention that “their identity and their mission”—their principal purpose, their raison d’être—is often religious proselytization. On September 12, 1960, Senator Kennedy, under pressure to confront what was quaintly known as the “religious issue,” appeared before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. “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,” he said that day. 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) 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. . . . 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 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. With a bit of spiffing up for gender-pronoun correctness, it is just barely possible to imagine such a speech being delivered today by Senator Kerry. Could the same be said of President Bush?