Unimposing Kerry
A certain sort of politician is most annoying when he stands up straight, squares his shoulders, looks out into the distance, and starts lecturing his critics on the separation of church and state and declaring, with the tone of a man giving up a fortune to keep his integrity, that he cannot and will not Impose His Values Upon Others. He is far less a defender of American pluralism than he is a man profoundly ignorant of his calling as a legislator, and a man promoting an intellectual confusion destructive of our common life.
“I don’t tell church officials what to do, and church officials shouldn’t tell American politicians what to do in the context of our public life,” John Kerry told Time magazine earlier this year. Of course, one notes with a sigh, Mr. Kerry was in that very statement telling church officials what to do: specifically, to stay out of politics, to treat religion as a private matter with no place and no value in public affairs. One does not hear him telling the unions to stay out of politics, or the newspapers, or the American Civil Liberties Union, or the activist groups, or, for that matter, the Catholic bishops when they support social welfare legislation.
Only the church, and in fact only the church when it speaks against the laws and policies required by sexual liberationism, is denied the right to speak for its principles in our political life, for reasons Kerry has never explained. Behind his assertion is, as far as one can tell, no coherent idea of the nature of principle in public affairs.
And as a matter of fact he does seem comfortable with politicians and judges telling the churches what to do. At least, he has not been heard defending the churches’ rights to provide for their workers only such medical coverage as is consistent with their teaching. He has not insisted on the separation of church and state when the state tells his church to pay for its workers’ contraception, which is to say, when the state tells the church to pay for their committing what the church believes is a mortal sin.
Most Pressing Question
But the most pressing church-state question this year is whether the churches should “tell American politicians what to do in the context of our public life.” Put another way, not Kerry’s, but I think more to the point, the most pressing question is, from what sources are Americans allowed to take the principles that govern our life together and on what grounds are religious principles allowed or excluded? The incoherence of Kerry and company’s arbitrary exclusion of religious principles from public affairs promotes the confusion so destructive of our common life.
One thing should be made clear before we go on. In the matters at issue in our public life, the churches assert no sectarian doctrine and demand of their politician members nothing resting upon their authority alone. They only say aloud what is taught by natural law—in other words, they tell their members to support what everyone knows, but many have forgotten or have refused to see.
Killing the unborn, the aged, and the sick is wrong, and no politician should need the church to tell him so. So with the nature of marriage, and so with embryonic experimentation, and so with cloning. Of course, sexual liberals will deny this, and there is no neutral authority to which we can appeal to show them that such beliefs are indeed true. But the sexual liberals’ denial of reality is no excuse for the Catholic politician’s doing so.
Kerry—now the poster boy for the secular and unconstitutional definition of “the wall of separation between church and state”—represents all those politicians who profess allegiance to churches that expect their members to represent their teachings in their individual callings, but who refuse to do so. Most of them are Catholic, but some are Orthodox and some even (at least in the last administration) Southern Baptist. Most are Democrats, but the Republicans have a goodly number as well.
Here I will take the Catholic politicians as the example, because one of them wants to be President of the United States and because the Catholic Church has spoken most clearly on this matter, most recently in the Vatican’s doctrinal note on “The Participation of Catholics in Political Life” and the American bishops’ “Catholics in Political Life.” As Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard put it:
The Doctrinal Note marks at least the beginning of the end of the Vatican’s toleration of what the pope’s biographer George Weigel has called “Cuomoism” in the American Church: the effort to finesse abortion by declaring oneself personally opposed but politically supportive of laws allowing abortion. Catholics have a “duty to be morally coherent,” the Doctrinal Note declares, and the Catholic fight on the life issues—abortion, euthanasia, and cloning—is not some merely prudential question, to be decided by political give and take. The Catholic Church doesn’t take political positions—except when politics intrudes into something, like the right to life, that ought to be beyond the power of politicians.
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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more from the online archives
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A Critical Memoir of Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey by Patrick Henry Reardon
18.4—May 2005
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