Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [117]
“I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Kennedy stated. “Whatever issue may come before me as president—on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject—I will make my decision… in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”2
Kennedy did not say whether or how his conscience might have been shaped by his religious convictions. But he seemed to suggest that his beliefs about the national interest had little if anything to do with religion, which he associated with “outside pressures” and “dictates.” He wanted to reassure the Protestant ministers, and the American public, that he would not impose his religious beliefs—whatever they might be—on them.
The speech was widely regarded as a political success, and Kennedy went on to win the presidency. Theodore H. White, the great chronicler of presidential campaigns, praised the speech for defining “the personal doctrine of a modern Catholic in a democratic society.”3
Forty-six years later, on June 28, 2006, Barack Obama, soon to become a candidate for his party’s presidential nomination, gave a very different speech on the role of religion in politics. He began by recalling the way he had dealt with the religious issue in his U.S. Senate campaign two years earlier. Obama’s opponent, a rather strident religious conservative, had attacked Obama’s support for gay rights and abortion rights by claiming he was not a good Christian, and that Jesus Christ would not have voted for him.
“I answered with what has come to be the typically liberal response in such debates,” Obama said, looking back. “I said that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can’t impose my own religious views on another, that I was running to be the U.S. Senator of Illinois and not the Minister of Illinois.”4
Although Obama easily won the Senate race, he now thought his response had been inadequate, and “did not adequately address the role my faith has in guiding my own values and my own beliefs.”5
He proceeded to describe his own Christian faith and to argue for the relevance of religion to political argument. It was a mistake, he thought, for progressives to “abandon the field of religious discourse” in politics. “The discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms.” If liberals offered a political discourse emptied of religious content, they would “forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice.”6
Religion was not only a source of resonant political rhetoric. The solution to certain social problems required moral transformation. “Our fear of getting ‘preachy’ may… lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems,” Obama said. Addressing problems such as “poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed,” would require “changes in hearts and a change in minds.”7 So it was a mistake to insist that moral and religious convictions play no part in politics and law.
Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history