I am a Christian, a believer that salvation is by Grace alone, through Faith alone, in Christ alone. But that said, I am also blessed and proud to be an American, a part of a civil and secular society that I love and prize as well. So on this day when religious hatred lead to chaos and death, I think its worthwhile to remember what another American -- also a man devoted to his particular faith -- had to say about the relationship between faith and nation. Two months before his first presidential election, Roman Catholic Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy finally agreed with certain of his advisers that he had to take on the often vitriolic and irrantional attacks being launched at him because of his Catholicism. (There will be a tunnel from the Vatican to White House, was one such notion.) Kennedy addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association (a convocation of Deep South Protestant preachers) on 12 September 1960. Kennedy is not and uncontroversial figure, but I think every word quoted below form that day is precisely on point: [B]ecause I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured -- perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So 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. 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. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all. For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been -- and may someday be again -- a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist. It was Virginias harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that led to Jeffersons statute of religious freedom. Today, I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you -- until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped apart at a time of great national peril. ... And in fact this is the kind of America for which our forefathers did die when they fled here to escape religious test oaths that denied office to members of less favored churches -- when they fought for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom -- and when they fought at the shrine I visited today, the Alamo. For side by side with Bowie and Crockett died Fuentes, and McCafferty, and Bailey, and Badillo, and Carey -- but no one knows whether they were Catholics or not. For there was no religious test there.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 15:59:50 +0000