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A Catholic—Oh, I Mean a Muslim—for President?

[additional-authors]
September 22, 2015

CAIR (the Conference on Islamic-American Relations) today called for Dr. Ben Carson to drop his GOP presidential run because of his remark that: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” When asked whether Islam is consistent with the Constitution, Carson said: “No, I don’t—I do not.”

This comes on the heels of GOP front-runner Donald Trump not taking the opportunity to correct a New Hampshire rally attendee who raised questions about Barack Obama’s citizenship and religion, and said: “We have a problem in this country; it’s called Muslims.”

If Americans were minimally historically literate, they could learn something from history about this dustup. They may already know that JFK was the first (and only) Catholic elected president in1960. New York Governor Al Smith tried but failed in 1928 in the aftermath of a virulent surge in KKK-enflamed anti-Catholicism.

In 1960, on September 12, 1960, JFK gave a pivotal speech to an association of Protestant Ministers in Houston in which he said: “While the so-called religious issue is necessarily and properly the chief topic here tonight, I want to emphasize from the outset that we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election: the spread of Communist influence, until it now festers 90 miles off the coast of Florida; . . . the hungry children I saw in West Virginia; the old people who cannot pay their doctor bills; the families forced to give up their farms; an America with too many slums, with too few schools, and too late to the moon and outer space. . . . I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”

More so than most Americans remember, there was a lot of voting along religious lines in 1960. Kennedy won the 1960 Democratic primary in West Virginia, where voters were 95 percent Protestant, and with Lyndon Johnson on his ticket carried most of the Protestant South in November (which Al Smith failed to do in 1928). Yet in many places—from Ohio to Illinois to California—he lost or came close to losing because of Protestant backlash against a Catholic for president. At the same time, Catholics voted 80 percent of JFK, better than they had for any Democrat since FDR.

In some ways, Kennedy was lucky in his timing. The year he ran was just over a decade before the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which might have hurt him if abortion has been a polarizing issue in 1960. Also, the anti-Catholic movement—at least in “respectable” Protestant circles—was a almost a spent force. After World War I, Protestant intellectual Paul Blanshard was the last prominent intellectual to argue that the Catholic Church’s history of political reaction, especially in Europe, disqualified a Catholic from being fit to support for president.

Note the parallel here with those who argue today that Islam’s association with Sharia Law should disqualify an American Muslim from being elected president.

In 1960, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale—no intellectual but a popular Protest preacher—opposed JFK on religious ground, but much of the air was deflated from his criticism when Adlai Stevenson quipped: “I find St. Paul appealing but Dr. Peale appalling.”

Let’s be frank: the Catholic Church’s history of opposing liberalism and democracy in virtually all their forms was very real and very relevant, especially before 1900. This was when African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, a good Protestant, wrote that he opposed religious bigotry, yet viewed Catholicism as a “soul destroying” religion.

Those who today make believe that Sharia Law is not a relevant issue when discussing religion and politics in the modern world are practicing politically correct denialism.

On the other hand, there is no polling data I’ve seen indicating that anywhere near a majority of American Muslims would like to override the U.S. Constitution by imposing Sharia. Dr. Carson could and should have answered: “Yes, I can support a Muslim who’s a patriotic American—and conservative Republican!—and supports the U.S. Constitution without reservations.”

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