Belatedly, blessedly, and not a moment too soon, the sensible branch of the conservative movement is moving away from Rick Santorum, whom it always sensed was a little bit out there, but not quite as far as all that.
Cause number one was a speech given in August 2008, in which he said American institutions were under siege by the devil, which had corrupted academe (an old story), the popular culture, and most of the Protestant church.
That popular culture was in disarray had been said often (by Bill Bennett and “Holy Joe” Lieberman), but they had not traced this to plots laid by Satan. Reagan, too, had used the word “evil,” but he had referred to the Soviet Union, which enslaved and killed millions, and not to his fellow American citizens.
Santorum also said many Protestants were no longer Christian. Who gets to decide who isn’t a Christian? Surely not he.
Cause number two was a series of talks in 2010 and 2011 in which he lambasted John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1960 to the Protestant ministers, (when Kennedy promised not to impose his own creed upon others), which he called a radical break from our civic tradition, an effort to drive the religious out of the national dialogue, to exorcise faith from the business of government, and force belief and believers from the great public square.
But if this were true, why did Kennedy say later on in his inaugural that rights come from “the hand of God,” not government, and end the speech saying that “here on earth God’s work” was our own?
A radical break? Not exactly. Kennedy’s words were identical in tone and almost in phrasing to things said before him by George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and both of the Roosevelts; and after him by Reagan, John McCain (an Episcopalian), Joe Lieberman (an Orthodox Jew), and the born-again Methodist, George W. Bush.
What all of them did was to extract the moral underlay of the Judeo-Christian tradition, establish it as the foundation of the democratic experiment, and use it to buttress such social and governing purposes as the keeping of order, the resistance to tyranny and/or persecution, and the right to equal protection and treatment under the law.
This is the proper use of religion in government, which involves principles that are universal, and which remain separate from matters of observance or ritual, and beliefs that are held by certain religions, not all.
What Kennedy meant was that he would uphold the beliefs and traditions on which the country was founded, while leaving it to each American to find and to follow the creed that best fit his own leanings.
This is the rock on which this country was founded. If Santorum can’t see it, it’s not Kennedy’s failing. It’s his.
Martin Luther King was a Protestant and a man of the cloth who invaded the province of politics, leading an army of faith that included Catholics, Jews, the unchurched and the unbelieving in an effort to alter the customs and laws of his country.
Kennedy did not complain nor find this unfitting; in fact, he used the language of faith in his own address to the nation, calling their struggle “a moral issue … as old as the Scriptures,” and a “moral crisis” demanding great change.
This is the way that faith works in a large, diverse nation, a fact which eludes this current contender. We have a candidate in Santorum who misreads the American premise. So is this a problem, or what?
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
