Those of us old enough to remember when JFK was running for office (I was just a wee slip of a girl, myself) can recall the furor about his Catholicism. Kennedy’s allegiance was to the Vatican! was the cry. He was going to be run by the Pope! Kennedy was so bombarded with questions and criticisms about his Catholicism that he felt obliged to declare his support for separation of church and state and the fact that his decisions would be his own.
Of course, Kennedy became our first Catholic president. What’s less well-remembered is that, so far, he’s still our last Catholic president.
Except for Mormon Mitt Romney, all the candidates for president this year are Protestants, as well. But religion is an issue, and not just for Romney; there’s a lot of talk about Rick Perry’s religious views, for example, and potential-candidate Sarah Palin’s religion has long been a bone of contention.
In discussions of Romney (or in previous discussions of whether Obama is really a closet Muslim), the controversy is something like the traditional furor over JFK’s Catholicism: how much will their religion (or supposed religion) give them different values from mainstream America, and do they have some sort of dual loyalty? (This latter, by the way, is a commonplace objection to Jews running for high office.)
But in the cases of Perry and Palin, it’s not so much about the denomination to which they each belong as it is about their religiosity in general, and especially how it affects their view of science and/or what it says about their intelligence itself. There are huge numbers of Americans who are mostly secular, and who distrust religious people as a whole, and particularly anything that smacks of evangelicalism. For example, even though it is a relatively mainstream Republican position now to distrust the theory of anthropogenic global warming, and such a stance does not depend on a religious orientation at all, candidates who are religious and who also distrust AGW come in for special scorn.
The equation “religious=stupid” is an all-too-common one, especially among intellectuals today. It’s not especially valid, nor was it always the case. I quote William F. Buckley, a rather formidable conservative intellectual who was also a believing Catholic, from his book Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997):
In my [earlier] book I had quoted a sentence from the inaugural address (1937) of historian Charles Seymour, who served as president throughout my own residence at Yale. “I call on members of the faculty,” he had said, “as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism. If we lose that struggle, judging from present events abroad, scholarship as well as religion will disappear.”
That was a Christian mouthful, and Mr. Marsden is correct in suggesting that such sentiments could not safely be uttered today by an incoming president of a nondenominational university of good standing. In the opinion of Professor Marsden, my book (whose prescriptions he disagrees with), “presented a formidable case…that a Yale education was more likely to shatter a person’s commitment to Christianity than to fortify it.”
The earlier book to which the passage refers is Buckley’s own God and Man at Yale, written in his senior year at the university and published in 1951. The conflicts between intellectualism and religion which he recognized then (and reiterated in his 1997 book) have only become more extreme over the ensuing years.
Looking back at Seymour’s address, it certainly does appear to exclude nonbelievers and non-Christians from its charge, and to assume that all the professors he’s addressing are Christians. Or does it? Might it not just be asking people to understand that this is still a predominantly Christian country, and that the basic principles and values of Christianity (not the dogma, and not the faith) are part of what this country is based on, and that Christianity is not inherently incompatible with learning but often complements and supports it?
[NOTE: During the 2008 campaign, questions about Obama’s longstanding attendance in Wright’s church were not mainly about religion (although those questions did exist, but they were a separate issue and not limited to his attendance at that particular church). The controversy was about Wright’s politics. Wright preached a great deal of anti-American and anti-white rhetoric from his pulpit, and the questions for Obama involved why he stayed in a church in which the preacher espoused such views, and whether Obama was lying about his own lack of exposure to and knowledge of those views.]
