I'm with Rob Boston who observed that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's broadside against Sarah Palin's views on religion and politics and separation of church and state is both "definitive" and "devastating."
I hope that Townsend's extraordinary Washington Post op-ed signals a return to the values of religious pluralism and separation of church and state from which the Party has sometimes fled in recent years. It was just a few years ago that Jim Wallis and Mara Vanderslice were promoted as epitomizing the party's new approach to faith and politics while both were denouncing the separation of church and state and those who advocate for it.
Townsend is the niece of John F. Kennedy and a former Lt. Governor of Maryland. Here are a few excerpts from her important piece:
In her new book, "America by Heart," Palin objects to my uncle's famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he challenged the ministers - and the country - to judge him, a Catholic presidential candidate, by his views rather than his faith. "Contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for president," Kennedy said. "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic."
Palin writes that when she was growing up, she was taught that Kennedy's speech had "succeeded in the best possible way: It reconciled public service and religion without compromising either." Now, however, she says she has revisited the speech and changed her mind. She finds it "defensive . . . in tone and content" and is upset that Kennedy, rather than presenting a reconciliation of his private faith and his public role, had instead offered an "unequivocal divorce of the two."
Palin's argument seems to challenge a great American tradition, enshrined in the Constitution, stipulating that there be no religious test for public office. A careful reading of her book leads me to conclude that Palin wishes for precisely such a test. And she seems to think that she, and those who think like her, are qualified to judge who would pass and who would not.
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If there is no religious test, then there is no need for a candidate's religious affiliation to be "reconciled." My uncle urged that religion be private, removed from politics, because he feared that making faith an arena for public contention would lead American politics into ill-disguised religious warfare, with candidates tempted to use faith to manipulate voters and demean their opponents.
Indeed electoral politics is no place to take the measure of the faith (or lack thereof) of others or to debate religious orthodoxies. But Townsend also makes clear that faith can and does inform people's politics just as it did her uncle John F. Kennedy. Learning to navigate a political culture founded on religious pluralism and separation of church and state is one of the necessary skill sets for all Americans. A few years ago I wrote:
History is powerful... We need it in order to know not how the religious Right is wrong, but to know where we ourselves stand in the light of history, in relation to each other, and how we can better envision a future together free of religious prejudice, and ultimately, religious warfare.
We've seen how religious beliefs (and other ideologies) inspire people to view others as subhuman, deviant, and deserving of whatever happens to them, including death. It is the stuff of persecution, pogroms, and warfare. The framers of the U.S. Constitution struggled with how to inoculate the new nation against these ills, and in many respects, the struggle continues today. The story goes that when Benjamin Franklin, a hometown delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, emerged from the proceedings, people asked him what happened. His famous answer was "You have a republic, if you can keep it." To "keep it" in our time, we must appreciate the threat and dynamics of Christian nationalism, and the underlying historical revisionism that supports it. Then we can develop ways to counter it.
Townsend also wrote in refuting Palin:
But Palin insists on evaluating and acting as an authority on candidates' faith. She faults Kennedy for not "telling the country how his faith had enriched him." With that line, she proceeds down a path fraught with danger - precisely the path my uncle warned against when he said that a president's religious views should be "neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office."
In order for us to be able to address Sarah Palin's Religious Right-styled religious supremacism we need to be able to ascend the moral, historical and constitutional high ground that is right there and waiting. We can only do that out of authentic and profound conviction, actual knowledge, and a willingness to courageously engage. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend showed us how its done.
[Crossposted from Talk to Action]