God in the White House:
A History
How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush
Randall Balmer
For Andrew
from his very proud father
Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, Riches take wing, and only character endures.
—HORACE GREELEY
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…
…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
Contents
Epigraph
Preface
Acknowledgments
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Randall Balmer
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
This book aspires to answer a relatively simple question: How did we get from John F. Kennedy’s eloquent speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston on September 12, 1960, in which he urged voters effectively to bracket a candidate’s faith out of their considerations when they entered the voting booth, to George W. Bush’s declaration on the eve of the 2000 Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was his favorite philosopher?
A simple question, perhaps, but the answer is rather more complex. Any responsible attempt to solve this puzzle must take into account the shifting tectonics of ethnic and religious prejudices, the extent to which religious convictions did (or did not) affect policy, various presidential scandals, the appeal of candidates viewed as outsiders to Washington, the politicization of evangelical voters, and the probity of individual presidents. Presidential politics over the course of these four-plus decades, 1960 to 2004, saw the election of the first Roman Catholic to the presidency, the first presidential resignation, the first man to ascend to the Oval Office who had never been elected either president or vice president, the first president who claimed to be a born again
Christian, the first woman and (later) the first Jew on a major-party ticket, the first all-Southern Baptist presidential and vice-presidential ticket, and only the second presidential impeachment in American history.
These forty-four years also saw some of the closest presidential elections in American history—Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Nixon-Humphrey in 1968, Bush-Gore in 2000, and Bush-Kerry in 2004—as well as some of the most lopsided results—Johnson-Goldwater in 1964, Nixon-McGovern in 1972, and Reagan-Mondale in 1984. Two successful candidates over the course of these four decades, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, offered themselves to the voters as redeemer presidents,
promising to cleanse the temple of the White House of the sins of their predecessors.
In other words, it was an eventful four-plus decades in presidential politics, and attitudes about religion, specifically about the candidates’ faith, have varied widely over that span of time, from studied indifference to careful scrutiny. Briefly, the narrative arc of these forty-four years looks something like this:
Kennedy, acting out of political necessity and seeking to displace the Protestant establishment in 1960, argued that a candidate’s religion was not a legitimate criterion for voting decisions, an argument that endured for more than a decade, until the Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Jimmy Carter, a Washington outsider who offered himself as a redeemer president, reintroduced matters of faith and belief into the arena of public discourse. For a variety of reasons, not least the rise of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, many of the same evangelical voters who had helped propel Carter into office turned emphatically against him four years later in favor of Ronald Reagan, who also claimed to be an evangelical Christian. Since 1980, with the single exception of the Clinton presidency, candidates who have made forthright professions of evangelical faith and who have enjoyed the support of Religious Right leaders have occupied the Oval Office. Even the Clinton aberration
might be explained by Bill Clinton’s extraordinary skills as a politician and by his ability to speak the evangelical language of sin and redemption—this despite the fact that leaders of the Religious Right utterly despised him and did everything in their power to discredit him. George W. Bush’s narrow victory in 2000 can be viewed as an attempt by voters to cleanse the Oval Office of Clinton’s personal transgressions, just as Carter’s election in 1976 represented an attempt to purge the nation of Nixon-era corruptions.
All of this is not to suggest that faith or religion played a singular, much less a decisive, role in any of these elections. Not at all. Every campaign—every presidency—rises and falls on the waves of political circumstances and historical vicissitudes as well as such nebulous factors as personal charisma, economic conditions, and the shifting sands of public opinion. Still, the fact remains that Americans were content to disregard religion as a criterion for voting in 1960, whereas by 2004 they had come to expect candidates fully to disclose their religious views and to expound on their personal relationship to the Almighty.
This book attempts to trace that transition.
I should also say a word about what this book is not. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of how religion has shaped the presidency or presidential campaigns from 1960 to 2004. I do not scrutinize, for example, how every attitude toward, say, civil rights or women’s rights or every policy decision affecting the Middle East might or might not be dictated by a president’s religious convictions. Nor do I devote much attention to polling data to determine popular attitudes. It’s not that I distrust polls or pollsters—well, maybe I do. As Mark Twain once observed, the world is rife with lies, damned lies, and statistics.
So much depends on how questions are formulated, and I think it’s especially dicey to determine people’s religious attitudes because nomenclature tends to be fraught—who is or is not a Christian, for instance, or an evangelical. I’ll leave the numbers to the statisticians and to the political scientists.
Nor do I talk much about civil religion,
the conflation of religious devotion with nationalistic symbols. It’s not that I dispute the existence of civil religion. It’s just that discussion of the matter long ago passed from exhaustive to tiresome, and I don’t think, frankly, that it adds all that much to this account.
I offer instead a narrative that tells the story not only of the politicization of religion in the final decades of the twentieth century, but also the religionization
of our politics. I reflect, finally, on the implications of this shift, which has reverberated in both worlds, religious and political.
Although I recognize that no author can be entirely objective, I have tried very hard to be fair. For those anxious to sort out my sympathies, I’ll make it easy. I consider myself an evangelical Christian whose understanding of the teachings of Jesus points him toward the left of the political spectrum. I am no fan of the Religious Right, whose leaders, I believe, have distorted the gospel—the good news
—of the New Testament and have defaulted on the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelical activism, which invariably took the part of those less fortunate.
I am not arguing, however, that people of faith should not be involved in the political process. Far from it. I happen to believe that the arena of public discourse would be impoverished without voices of faith. And, although I don’t think it’s necessary, I have no particular problem with political candidates offering their religious views to public scrutiny. At the same time, however, I think there is a real danger to the integrity of the faith when it is aligned too closely with a particular political movement or political party, because the faith then loses its prophetic voice. My reading of American religious history suggests that religion always functions best from the margins of society, not in the councils of power.
That, I believe, is only one of the cautionary lessons from the final four decades of the twentieth century.
ONE
PROTESTANT UNDERWORLD
John F. Kennedy and the Religious Issue
On a Monday evening, September 12, 1960, the junior senator from the commonwealth of Massachusetts approached the dais in the ballroom of the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight,
John F. Kennedy began, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election.
The Democratic nominee for president had just completed another hot, exhausting day of campaigning across the state of Texas. Together with his running mate, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy had already visited El Paso, Lubbock, and San Antonio in what the New York Times characterized as the largest aerial campaign armada in history.
¹
Kennedy had been greeted by tumultuous cheers from many thousands of Texans
that day, but his reception at the Rice Hotel was noticeably more tepid. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish,
Kennedy continued, where no public official either requests or accepts 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.
²
Kennedy issued a ringing endorsement of the separation of church and state that evening—I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,
he said—but he clearly wanted to be addressing issues other than religion. And by standing before the gathered members of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the Democratic nominee had entered the belly of the beast. Houston was not exactly friendly territory for a Roman Catholic running for president, and the events of the preceding weeks clearly had frustrated the young senator, who had hoped that, by this late stage in the campaign, he would have been able to shrug off what was almost universally described as the religious issue.
Kennedy, of course, was not the first Roman Catholic in American history to run for the presidency. In 1928 Alfred E. Smith, the governor of New York, had won the Democratic nomination and the right to square off against Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce under Calvin Coolidge and the Republican nominee. In December 1923, as Smith was gearing up for an earlier run at the Democratic nomination, William MacDonald, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Queens, New York, had organized an anti-Smith rally. Five thousand people attended, according to the New York Times; MacDonald led the congregation in the singing of Stand Up for Jesus
as white-robed Klansmen processed into the auditorium. A particular Klansman, known as the Human Dynamo,
concluded his remarks by shouting, Thank God there are six million people in the United States who have pledged their lives that no son of the Pope of Rome will ever sit in the Presidential chair!
Several days later, two fire companies were summoned to tear down a flaming cross, twenty-five feet high and fifteen feet wide at the crossbar, near the site of the Klan rally.³
In the course of the 1928 campaign, Smith sought to defuse the issue of his religious affiliation with a speech in Oklahoma City, but his Catholicism continued to dog him throughout the campaign. He tangled with John Roach Straton, the arch-fundamentalist pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York City, who identified the Democratic candidate with the forces of vice, lawlessness and drunkenness.
Nativist groups charged that Smith would be a tool of the Vatican, and scurrilous pamphlets warned that as president, Smith would annul Protestant marriages and establish Roman Catholicism as the religion of the United States. Although the Democratic platform promised an honest effort to enforce
Prohibition, Smith’s long-standing opposition to the Eighteenth Amendment revived the nineteenth-century nativist associations between Rum and Romanism.
Hoover, on the other hand, defended Prohibition as a great social and economic experiment noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.
In the traditionally Democratic South, the Ku Klux Klan campaigned for Hoover, a Quaker, and against the Roman Catholic.⁴
When Hoover won decisively in the 1928 election—58 percent of the popular vote and 444 to 77 in the electoral college—popular lore had it that Smith sent a one-word telegram to the Vatican: UNPACK.
Protestant suspicions of Roman Catholicism, however, refused to abate. The fact that the sons of Catholic immigrants enlisted for military service during World War II demonstrated their patriotism, even though they sometimes fought against the countries from which their parents and grandparents emigrated. The G.I. Bill of Rights, passed by Congress in 1944, provided these same second-generation immigrants the opportunity to attend college and thereby to toe the first rung on the ladder of upward mobility toward the middle class.
Many American Catholics made that ascent in the postwar years, but not without resistance. In 1949 nativism once again reared its ugly head. In March of that year, Beacon Press, a liberal publisher in Boston, issued the first edition of Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power. When a church enters the arena of controversial social policy and attempts to control the judgment of its own people (and of other people) on foreign affairs, social hygiene, public education and modern science,
the author warned, it must be reckoned with as an organ of political and cultural power.
The book cited Catholic efforts to oppose birth control and divorce laws, noted the segregation of Catholic children into parochial schools, and suggested that the political muscle of American Catholics was being exerted to bring American foreign policy into line with Vatican temporal interests.
⁵
What made Blanshard’s treatise so remarkable was its provenance. Unlike the sensationalist nineteenth-century nativist literature, much of which salaciously conjured the supposed goings-on in Catholic convents, Blanshard was both a journalist and an attorney, educated at Michigan, Harvard, and Columbia. He viewed himself not as a reactionary nativist, but as a liberal who was concerned that a misunderstanding of the nature of tolerance
represented a real danger to the democratic way of life.
American Freedom and Catholic Power pointed out that the Catholic people are not citizens but subjects in their own religious commonwealth,
which rendered Catholicism inimical to democracy. The secular as well as the religious policies of their Church are made in Rome by an organization that is alien in spirit and control,
Blanshard warned, and Catholics are compelled by the very nature of their Church’s authoritarian structure to accept nonreligious as well as religious policies that have been imposed on them from abroad.
⁶
American Freedom and Catholic Power became a best-selling book; Beacon Press ordered eleven printings in as many months. So when a Roman Catholic senator from Massachusetts began mulling a run for the presidency in the 1950s, the experience of Alfred Smith and the lingering anti-Catholicism evident in the popularity of Blanshard’s book was very much on his mind. Paradoxically, Kennedy himself was not particularly devout, unlike his mother. His reputation for womanizing, both before and after his marriage in 1953, may not have been widely known, but it was locally known. I think it’s so unfair of people to be against Jack because he’s Catholic,
Jacqueline Kennedy said of her husband during the 1960 campaign. He’s such a poor Catholic.
⁷
Kennedy, having supported the nomination of Adlai Stevenson, flirted with the notion of being the vice-presidential nominee in 1956. Indeed, the idea had won some support from newspaper editorial pages, in part because Kennedy’s strong identity as a Roman Catholic, it was argued, might blunt some of the criticism directed at Stevenson for having been divorced. But other Democratic leaders believed that Kennedy’s religion would doom a Stevenson-Kennedy ticket.
According to Theodore Sorensen, the senator’s longtime aide and speechwriter, Kennedy was initially ambivalent about the vice-presidential slot, but, in view of a possible bid for the White House in the future, Kennedy did not want to be excluded from consideration solely because of his faith. Sorensen produced a document, which was artfully leaked to the media, showing that a Catholic on the national ticket actually could enhance Stevenson’s prospects. Sorensen later insisted that it was by no means an objective study; rather, it was a political answer to the sweeping assertions made against nominating a Catholic for Vice President.
Regardless of the outcome at the 1956 Democratic National Convention—Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee got the vice-presidential nod—the Bailey Memorandum,
as it was known (for political reasons, the Kennedy camp attributed it to John Bailey, chair of the state Democratic committee in Connecticut), at least reopened the previously closed assumption that a Catholic on the ticket spelled defeat.
⁸
As Kennedy considered his own run for the presidency, he was well aware that religion would factor into the equation and that he would have to pursue the nomination determinedly. If I were governor of a large state, Protestant and fifty-five,
he remarked, I could sit back and let it come to me.
Kennedy sought repeatedly to bracket the issue of his faith from his candidacy, offering assurances of his opposition to the use of taxpayer money for religious schools and emphasizing the presidential oath to uphold the Constitution. He cited both the First Amendment, which enshrined the notion of church-state separation, as well as Article VI of the Constitution, which prohibited any religious test for officeholders. In a letter to Harold Brown, president of the Oregon Council of Churches, Kennedy elaborated on his understanding of the disestablishment clause of the First Amendment: Under the First Amendment our government cannot—directly or indirectly, carelessly or intentionally—select any religious body for either favorable or unfavorable treatment.
⁹
As the prospect of a presidential candidacy by a Roman Catholic in 1960 began to look more and more likely, a group of Jewish and Christian leaders organized themselves into an entity called the Fair Campaign Practices Committee. The organization included prominent rabbis, Catholics, various Orthodox and Protestant leaders, and Carl F. H. Henry, editor of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism. The group also included George Romney, a Mormon and the president of American Motors, who would be elected governor of Michigan in 1962 and who would mount his own candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968. The Fair Campaign Practices Committee met at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on March 24–25, 1960, to prepare a Special Statement on Religion in the 1960 Campaign.
The statement articulated five simple principles which we hope will commend themselves to American voters.
The Kennedy camp could hardly have hoped for more. "It is proper and desireable [sic] that every public official should attempt to govern his conduct by
