Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani is a Catholic, although—as this column by Richard Cohen points out—his marital history isn’t precisely what the Catholic church would consider ideal.

Cohen compares Giuliani’s recent answer to a question about his Catholicism with that of a man widely known as “the first Catholic President,” JFK. Giuliani told reporters his religion was his own private affair; JFK said it would not influence his policy decisions as President.

I remember hearing a lot about JFK’s Catholicism during the 1960 campaign. It’s hard to believe now, but his religion really was an issue for many people, who entertained the notion that his election might mean the Pope would be running the country by proxy.

Those sorts of ideas are way behind us. Or are they?

Think about it: JFK was indeed the first Catholic President, but so far he has also been the only Catholic President. A great many years have elapsed since 1960 and till now it’s been all WASPS (and male ones, at that), all the way.

Last June a Bloomberg/LA Times poll indicated that only 9% of respondents would be reluctant to vote for a Catholic, but it also revealed that 35% wouldn’t vote for a Mormon, with 14% unwilling to vote for a Jew, 22% for an evangelical Christian, and a whopping 53% for a Muslim.

On the face of it, this seems to be about bigotry. And no doubt for some it is. But there’s another angle to it, one touched on tangentially (and not very cogently) by Cohen in his column, and that is this question: how do religious beliefs inform decisions of conscience for a public leader? Can they be separated, and should they be?

Cohen characterizes JFK’s speech on the subject this way:

Kennedy’s speech was an affirmation of rational thought—a promise to deal with the great issues of state in a secular manner. Nowhere in the speech did JFK renounce his Catholicism or say it didn’t matter to him. But he did make clear that as president he would make decisions in “accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest.”

As is often the case, what Kennedy actually said was a bit more complex than that. Much of his speech was devoted to a description of how he supported the traditional separation of church and state and freedom of religion, and how the Pope would not be ordering national policy if he were to be elected. He asked that voters judge him on his Congressional record. And indeed, he did say:

Whatever issue may come before me as President, if I should be elected, on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject, I will make my decision in accordance with these views—in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise.

But JFK doesn’t seem to have been as naive as Cohen in thinking that those decisions can be totally separated from religion if a person is a believer. After all, religion does both proceed (at least partly) from moral beliefs and inform moral beliefs, and these things can influence what an individual thinks is in the national interest. As Giuliani points out, our religious beliefs are private, it’s true. But they are not utterly separate from our decision-making process, not walled-off in some ivory tower. There is feedback between the two.

In his speech, JFK added:

But if the time should ever come—and I do not concede any conflict to be remotely possible—when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do likewise.

So he is not throwing away his religious beliefs—what he refers to here as his “conscience,” although he is imagining that there is almost no possibility of conflict between them and the public interest (after all, he’s running for office here). If the two happen to be in synch, very well and good; that’s what he imagines will always be the case. But if they were to happen to disagree, he would be willing to go with “conscience” and resign the office.

Cohen writes:

For a lawmaker, gay marriage is and ought to be a policy matter: good policy or bad policy, fair to gays or unfair to gays. Once this or any other issue becomes a matter of religious conviction, it’s removed from the arena of public debate.

Yes indeed, it ought to be. But when a person decides whether something is “good policy or bad policy,” the decision is based on a host of things, most of which are intangible. After all, social science research can be spun and used by either side in matters such as gay marriage and almost everything else of a policy nature. Whether something is “good policy or bad policy” often does come down, in subtle ways, to a matter of opinion: whether a given person—and that means any person, including those who are atheists—happens to think it so, based on an entire belief system which may or may not be supported by convincing and objective evidence.

It’s not just the religious who have irrational beliefs, or who make decisions based on what we might call faith. No, that’s an equal-opportunity (and a human) phenomenon.

[NOTE: A fascinating book on how liberals and the Left might be considered a sort of faith-based community is Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed.]

~from Neo-Neocon

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