The Touchy Issue

Even before the Los Angeles roar acclaiming Massachusetts' Senator John F. Kennedy, the Houston Post got a hint of the kind of journalistic problem it might have to face. Getting word that an itinerant preacher had hit town with a warning against electing a Catholic to anything from President on down to dogcatcher, the Post reported one of his meetings. Recalls Post Managing Editor William P. Hobby Jr.: "We soon got all sorts of hell from ministers of his denomination." A delegation of Church of Christ preachers, complaining of the deprecatory tone of the Post's story, demanded that Hobby print a statement supporting the evangelist's position. In their argument to Hobby was an implicit threat: "We take a lot of advertising in your paper." Bill Hobby* refused to print the statement.

The problem that confronted Houston's Hobby has since perplexed many another U.S. editor, most of all in the South, where the religion issue seems to have aroused the most passion. The often-criticized Southern press generally scores high marks in its wrestling with this delicate issue. How should an editor treat the touchy subject of religion in politics--by avoiding it, denying it, minimizing it or going after it?

Editorial Viewpoints. The editorial pages of Southern newspapers reflect near unanimity on at least one point: the religion issue exists and will continue to bulk large in the 1960 campaign. A few papers, such as the Charleston, S.C. News & Courier, argue that Kennedy's Catholicism is a vital and valid political issue. More typical is the Columbus, Miss. Commercial Dispatch: "It is regrettable that what ought to be at most a relatively minor concern is overshadowing such major issues as foreign aid, economic growth and civil rights."

Some papers simply thought that Jack Kennedy was getting a bum religious rap. Wrote the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "Senator Kennedy seems to us to have demonstrated admirable independence on this issue, since he has voted at least twice contrary to what we believe to be the position of his church. He voted against the use of public funds for parochial schools and against sending an ambassador from the U.S. to the Vatican." Some papers seemed to think that the whole religion issue was a Republican plot. Said the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: "Regardless of how it has been raised, religion has definitely become a major issue . . . Some foes of Mr. Kennedy's candidacy are masquerading behind it, though they evidence no religious convictions of their own."

The more violent forms of hate-peddling came in for general attack by major Southern papers. Wrote the Greensboro, N.C. News: "Organized efforts on the part of respectable Protestant churches to inject venomous, and in many cases false, prejudice into the presidential campaign are in themselves violative of the American tradition of separation of church and state." Said the Charlotte News: "If the Catholic Church must be an issue, surely it is only fair that IT be discussed --not some vestige of another era. The forefather of all Presbyterians was not above burning Servetus at the stake. The point is that it happened in the 16th century." Said the Raleigh News & Observer: "Certainly to hold John Kennedy responsible for the Spanish Inquisition is to say the least a little ex post facto."

Several top Southern papers editorially duck the religion issue on the ground that to talk about it is to stir up more trouble. Admits one editorial writer of the Dallas News: "I guess we're afraid that we'll ruffle too many feelings." Editor James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News-Leader says he avoids the subject editorially because "it does about as much good telling people to be fair about religion as it does telling them to be safe on highways."

News Coverage. Most papers try not to cover the subject until it hits them in the face. Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News & Observer states the case baldly: "We wouldn't dream of going out and trying to stir up more debate." Many Southern papers exposed the dissemination in their areas of the phony Knights of Columbus oath (TIME, Aug. 22). The Charlotte News recently ran a six-part news report on the religion issue by the paper's top political reporter; the News also invited a leading North Carolina Catholic educator to use its pages to reply to the anti-Catholic campaign. The Richmond Times-Dispatch is getting up a symposium among ministers and lay readers about both Kennedy's Catholicism and Richard Nixon's Quaker beliefs.

In covering the news of the religion issue, Southern newspapers discover that a great chunk of the anti-Catholic propaganda comes from Protestant pulpits. Some Southern papers are all too happy to explain that they have never really "covered" sermons--and that they certainly do not intend to start now. When are such sermons news? Answers Editor and Publisher Millard Cope of the Marshall, Texas News-Messenger: "I would say it depends on the importance of the minister, the importance of his church, the size of his congregation and the scope of his sermon. It makes a lot of news difference whether the minister is speaking to 1,000 people or to 20." It is in that spirit that both Dallas newspapers cover the sermons of the Rev. Dr. W. A. Criswell, strongly anti-Catholic pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, whose 14,000 members make it the U.S.'s largest Southern Baptist church.

And Then: Letters. The section that causes most concern to Southern editors is the often-neglected letters-to-the-editor column. With religion an issue, newspapers are hearing from crackpot letter writers and bigots. How much or how little of this to reflect poses a question among editors who feel a conscientious duty to provide a public forum. Nearly all papers edit out of their letters such nonsense as the claims that the Catholics ordered the assassination of Abraham Lin coln. To avoid becoming a daily platform for anti-Catholicism, the Houston Post saves all its religion mail for one day. The Greenville, Miss. Delta Democrat-Times and the Knoxville News-Sentinel ban all letters about the religion issue. Explained the News-Sentinel in an editorial: "This newspaper has come to the conclusion that, as a general policy, publication of these letters contributes a minimum amount of light on the issue and a maximum amount of bad feeling. We do not like to say to any reader that our columns are closed to him on any subject. But when the subject boils down simply to the expression of religious intolerance, we feel that such action is justified." The Charlotte Observer has come up with perhaps the most sensible rule of thumb for all: it declines to run letters "in which members of one faith attempt to recite what members of another faith believe. There are practical reasons for this. We are not prepared, for one thing, to check the authenticity of statements attributed to Catholic authors or clerics. We want to know what our letter writers think, not what our letter writers believe that someone else thinks."

*Son of Oveta Gulp Hobby, wartime head of the WACs, and of the Post's Board Chairman William P. Hobby Sr.

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