Religion & Politics

Nobel Prizewinning Novelist Albert Camus, with his Frenchman's taste for the epigrammatically provocative, once wrote: "A government, by definition, has no conscience." With this as his text, Associate Professor of Religion Warren B. Martin of Cornell College (Iowa) examines Presidents and their religions in the Protestant weekly, the Christian Century. He comes to an odd conclusion. Because a U.S. President must be tough, shrewd, and even ruthless to be effective, writes Professor Martin, his church affiliation is unimportant only so long as he is "predictably nominal in his faith." Religion, he adds, only "becomes a relevant and divisive issue whenever the candidate shows himself to be devout in his faith."

A U.S. President, according to Professor Martin, "must greet and support men and governments that flagrantly violate Christian and democratic principles." He must use coercion in the interest of order, "participate in the dissemination of propaganda that is at best only partially true and is, moreover, the stuff that feeds suspicion and hate." He must also be tolerant, and "faith loses force as tolerance grows." Concludes Martin: "It follows that a determined Christian would be a weak President and that a strong President must be (and historically has been) a weak Christian."

To defend this thesis. Martin digs into history, suggests that "strong" Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt were all only nominal Christians. Even Lincoln, says Martin, was a practical politician who "drew a line of separation between his personal ethics and the ethics of responsibility."*

Professor Martin does not say how his thesis would apply in the cases of France's President Charles de Gaulle and Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, both of whom are notably devout Christians, and notably not weak leaders. The editors of Christian Century felt bound to offer a rebuttal of their own contributor. "We sympathize with (Martin's respect for competence in politics," they wrote, "but cannot accept his implication that vital faith necessarily constitutes an insuperable obstacle to such competence." The editors insist that though Lincoln was not a churchgoer, he was a devout Christian who "humbly subjected all his judgments and decisions to the will of God." A President's religion, continues the editorial, is very much an issue, since it will guide his actions and form his convictions. But, says the Century, the issue is weakened in the 1960 campaign because neither candidate has strong religious ties: "Mr. Nixon is a Quaker who works at Quakerism so little that he could be a naval officer in World War II. Mr. Kennedy is a Catholic who has repudiated so many of the official positions of his church that he has been attacked repeatedly in the Catholic press.''

A transatlantic view of Kennedy's religious convictions appeared recently in Britain's weekly Spectator. Tory M.P. Christopher Hollis. Roman Catholic son of an Anglican bishop, and an editor of the British Catholic weekly Tablet, wrote that he had known the Kennedy family since Father Joe was Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. As a close friend of Jack's late sister Kathleen, Hollis had ample opportunity to observe the Kennedy youngsters as they grew up. "Their father had an attitude toward religion that is not very uncommon among Irish Americans who have risen from humble origins to wealth," remembers Hollis. "Since Catholicism is the family religion, it is a matter of honour to maintain the practice of it. On the other hand it is also necessary to learn to rub shoulders with other people who are for the most part not Catholics. Therefore such a father ships his children off punctually to Mass on Sunday, but, in spite of the advice of the hierarchy, he sends them to non-Catholic schools." Such a family may send its daughters to parochial schools, but not its sons (Jack Kennedy spent one year at Canterbury, a Catholic boarding school, got most of his education at Choate and Harvard).*

Hollis has heard it said that Jack Kennedy avoids the company of clerics for political reasons. Nonsense, says Hollis: "The implication that if he were not a political candidate, Senator Kennedy would spend his time talking to priests and nuns is far from the truth. They would have little language in common, and he would find it difficult to know what to say to them ... I say this in no derogation to Senator Kennedy, but the image that has been presented of him to the world as a deeply instructed, fanatically obedient Catholic is richly comic."

* Said Lincoln in 1862: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it ... What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union." * Another example of nonparochial schooling: James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre of Los Angeles, who attended New York's municipally owned City College and Columbia University.

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