The Religious Issue

...One—Given a generally healthful environment, bigotry is politically self-defeating...

...By their action the Conference leaders in effect subjected the issue to a national referendum in November that may appear, if Kennedy wins, to repudiate their position even though the result actually will turn on far graver matters...

...To be sure, one can cite many dismal local examples of improper Catholic influence on or through Catholic coun-cilmen, members of boards of education, and so on...

...The issue, on balance, has strengthened Kennedy in the place where the election will be Relics won or lost—in the Electoral College...

...Catholic leaders would not be worth their salt if they did not take positions on matters of importance to their Church and, one way or the other, let the politicians know how they feel...

...The first occasion was the publication of Kennedy's answers to questions by Look—in which the Senator asserted unequivocally that "whatever one's religion in private life may be, for the officeholder nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts— including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state...

...Six—The debate did produce one gleam of humor, with which I will close these comments...

...But nobody seemed to face up to the fact that the higher and more responsible the office, the more Catholics in office have resisted Catholic pressures on them and in them...

...In hitting back at the attack so directly, Kennedy has followed the opposite strategy of Al Smith, who debated the issue in The Atlantic in 1927 and then tried to ignore it the following year during the campaign...

...Three—The whole handling of the issue showed incredible political naivete on the part of the Conference leaders...

...In large JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS, professor of political science at Williams College, is the author of "John Kennedy: A Political Profile" and "The Lion and the Fox," a political biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Five—One unhappy result of the episode may be that Kennedy has been pushed too far toward a total divorce of religion and politics...

...as I write Norman Vincent Peale has severed his connection with the National Conference...

...Four—The whole case against a Catholic President was presented in the most arid, abstract, and rhetorical manner...

...and others who raised the issue now seem to consider it a hot potato to be dropped, at least publicly...

...Kennedy's forthright counter-attack seems to have been much more effective...

...But this is not the real issue, for all organized groups put pressures of one kind or another on men in office, Catholic or Protestant, as they have every right to do in a free society...

...Two—Many of the Protestant leaders who have raised the issue did so, of course, in good faith and on wholly "religious" and non-political grounds...

...They persisted in posing the issue "Would the Catholic Church put pressure on a Catholic President...

...To which Johnson replied that these days there ought to be one day a week when a man could get away from religion...

...it will no longer be discussed by the candidates or by their spokesmen...

...This year, I believe, the issue as a national issue will die away just as quickly as it did earlier in this campaign...

...Reinhold Niebuhr and other theologians have roundly criticized their Protestant brethren for loosing "the floodgates of religious bigotry," and the issue adorns the front page and editorial columns of every newspaper in the land...

...But one must then question their political judgment in publicizing the issue eight weeks before the election and in such a way as to hurt the chances of only one of the candidates...

...Nor do the two sides cancel out...

...In a highly publicized pronunciamento, the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom expressed fears that a Roman Catholic President would be "under extreme pressure" from the hierarchy of his church to align United States policy with Vatican goals...

...In the midst of the tempest over religion and politics Lyndon Johnson told a New York City audience that the previous Sunday his minister had approached him while he was sitting in church and had asked "Brother Johnson" to come up and help with the sermon...

...This interpretation was strengthened when it was discovered that some of the leaders of the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom were political conservatives stoutly ensconced in the Nixon camp...

...His address and his question-answering before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association were even more dramatic and decisive than the talk to the newspaper editors, although he said almost nothing of importance that was new...

...But on the other side it has also aroused defensive feelings among Catholics, including some Catholics leaning toward Nixon, and it has brought Kennedy support from some voters who do not care deeply about the issue of religion but do feel strongly about the requirements of fair play in campaigns...

...Millions of Americans interpreted the action—however sincere some of the instigators of it—as a political attack on Kennedy...

...It was in this speech, incidentally, that he rejected the suggestion of Walter Lippmann and others that he settle for the Vice-Presidential nomination...

...To be sure, the recent action of the Protestants has aroused or at least reinforced fears of the Roman Catholic Church among some non-Catholics...

...Even if it were true that the debate turned more voters against Kennedy than it swung toward him— which I doubt—it would still be true that Kennedy lost support in the smaller, rural states and gained votes in the big urban states where Catholics, like Negroes, labor, and other organized groups, have a major bal-ance-of-power role...

...Perhaps in calmer times ministers, priests, and rabbis will feel free to contend that our religious heritage, in its broadest sense, is too important to be shunted off from statecraft...

...part, I think, because Kennedy met it quickly and squarely, in prepared speeches and in answers to questions raised after talks...

...One would think, from the arguments, that this was a country where governors and Senators of the Catholic faith had used their offices to carry out the dictates of Rome...

...I base this prediction of the early demise of the religious issue partly on historical grounds...

...If, then, the issue has only historical importance, what lessons can we learn from the recent episode...

...None of the candidates wants to go on with it...

...The real question is, "To what pressures would Kennedy respond...

...One can believe in separation of church and state and still want his President and other political leaders to respond, in their hearts, to religious dictates...

...The current furore is not the first but the third time that religion has arisen as the most discussed issue of the present campaign...

...The second occasion occurred in April this year during the West Virginia Presidential primary, which followed hard on the Wisconsin primary that Kennedy had won, some asserted, because of bloc voting by Catholics...

...If our Judaic-Christian heritage has any meaning, it calls for qualities of charity, humility, decency, honesty, integrity, on the part of those in government as well as outside...

...There is a case for the unity of religion and statecraft just as strong as the case for the separation of church and state in formal decision-making—but the former case has not received a hearing in this debate...

...One would think that Al Smith, who was governor of New York for four terms, had turned the state into a papal enclave...

...I believe also—though this will be harder to test than the above—that religion will be a factor in November influencing a significant number of voters only in the Bible Belt...

...In the ensuing storm, all four candidates have discussed the subject while evidently wishing that it did not have to be discussed...

...In both these previous flare-ups of religion in the campaign, the issue quickly died down...

...On that occasion the situation reached such proportions that Kennedy interrupted his primary fight, returned to Washington, and devoted an entire speech (before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 21) to an eloquent, point-by-point refutation of the attacks on a Catholic President...

...For if Kennedy should win the election the results will be interpreted, however unfairly, as a repudiation of the arguments of these Protestants...

...But in all the endless debate, there was no reference to the actual transgressions of Catholic governors and Senators—there could be none—except for mention of an Ohio official under Governor Mike DiSalle, a Catholic, who turned out to have been appointed by a previous governor who was a Protestant...

...One wonders, indeed, if the Protestant leaders of this organization realized the gamble they were taking...

...and no candidate could have answered this question more categorically than Kennedy did...

...But it is precisely an American President, operating under the fierce white light of public attention, who would be most resistant to improper Catholic pressures—more resistant, I think, than many Protestant Presidents have been...

...such a suggestion, he said, "assumes that Catholics are a pawn on the political chessboard, moved hither and yon, and somehow 'bought off by the party putting in the second spot a Catholic whom the party barred from the top for reasons of religion...

...I am confident, however, that by the time this article appears several weeks from now, the religious issue will no longer be a national issue...

...and it will no longer be on the front pages of the newspapers...

...Lacking examples to support their suspicions of a Catholic President, the Protestant leaders had to resort to unhappy instances of anti-Protestant discrimination in foreign Catholic nations in order to produce a "parade of imaginary horribles" if a Catholic President were elected here...