Boston
SO JOHN KERRY will try to make himself better known to the country tonight when he gives his acceptance speech. Presumably, the Kerry that we Americans have seen so far isn’t the real Kerry, or at least not the Kerry that he and his campaign want us to see. Apparently, there is more of him to grasp, parts of him that have been out of view. Might one of those parts involve religion?
Not a few Democratic strategists here in Boston are hoping that it does. These Democrats know that voters who go to church at least once a week tend to vote Republican. They also know what recent polls show–that 70 percent of Americans want their president to be religious but that only seven percent of them think Kerry is a person of strong religious faith.
It’s easy to see why so few people see Kerry that way. For whatever reason, he’s seldom talked much about his own faith, and when he talks about religion, he usually defaults to talking about not only “separation of church and state” but also the more comprehensive “separation of religion and politics.” For Kerry, it would seem that religious values shouldn’t affect politics.
Now, though, we may be about to watch a conversion of sorts as Kerry reintroduces himself to the nation. How might religion work its way into his speech?
Yesterday I posed that question to Rev. James Forbes of Manhattan’s famously progressive Riverside Church–himself a convention speaker. Kerry “will be who is,” says Forbes. Which is what? “He will not mimic the voices of particularistic language,” by which Forbes means such language as, “Christ, because he changed my heart,” the answer George W. Bush gave to the question of who his favorite philosopher is in a primary campaign debate. Forbes expects Kerry will talk about “the impact of policy” upon “our neighbors here and around the world.” In other words, he’ll talk about the second great commandment, whether he names it or not. What’s interesting, of course, is that Bush talks a lot about “Love they neighbor.”
My guess is that Kerry, whose speech is expected to have some autobiographical chunks, will relate how his Catholic faith (pace Forbes, he’ll have to be at least a bit “particularistic”) gave him strength when he served during Vietnam, and has given him strength ever since.
That could be true. It would definitely fit the convention theme, “A Stronger America.”
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
