The straight line of split morality from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter

History is often burdened by hoary myths that take on a life of their own, independently of what “really happened,” in order to establish a certain narrative. We’ll likely hear one such myth this April, as we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord: the “midnight ride of Paul Revere” which, while important, involved other characters. But that’s not the myth I want to explore.

I want to explore Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Historians cite it as a turning moment in the 1960 presidential campaign when Catholic JFK at least partially answered the mainstream Protestant protest that he’d be a Roman ruse in the White House.

Let’s reconsider that trope.

In 1960, there was still something of a Protestant consensus about the “whore of Babylon.” The Protestant “mainstream” was still largely the animating force of American civil religion. Ecumenism was a tiny flicker and Vatican II had not happened. American civil life still coasted on the gases of a Judaeo-Christian ethic that was broadly compatible with a Catholic worldview (although, by that time, important parts of the Protestant “mainline” had broken with the unbroken Christian consensus against contraception).

JFK to them represented a potential papal puppet and “Catholic schools” threats to “Americanism” (remember, public schools were still reading the King James Bible). And while abortion was considered abhorrent, many Protestants were comfortable with their contraceptives and were convinced JFK would take away those contraceptives.

While many argue that Kennedy’s election as a Catholic was a breakthrough, it was a setback for Catholics. We would have been better off losing with Kennedy than winning on his terms—an “absolute separation” of Church and state where a Catholic would not be informed by his faith but would be schizophrenically “personally opposed” to some things he’d otherwise push. A “Catholic” President would have one set of clothes on Sunday (or Saturday night in Wilmington) and another for the rest of the week.

In broad outlines, JFK was the prototype for Mario Cuomo, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and all the other (mostly) Democrats who would never let their religion get in the way of their politics (or poll numbers).

What happened? Within a decade, the “sexual revolution” occurred. Its melody would find its “Catholic” harmony in Charles Curran’s “dissent” against Humanae vitae, which created “Catholics but….” Within thirteen years, abortion-on-demand would be legal—but the Bible would no longer be allowed in public schools.

I wonder if anybody ever surveyed what became of the men gathered in Houston in 1960. My guess is they eventually split into two camps. The “mainline” Protestants (Baptists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians) gradually accommodated to the Zeitgeist or else found themselves in increasingly internally divided denominations. By 1972, for example, there was a “Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights” in which many of those “mainline” groups could be found. And all that would plant the seed for what Richard John Neuhaus called the “mainline” becoming the “old line” and, eventually, the sideline.

I’d bet the other half—probably more fundamentalist and evangelical types—began having doubts about America’s arc, convinced the nation was going to hell in a handbasket and trying desperately to pull the brake on America’s moral decline. Twenty years later, they’d be in Lynchburg, Virginia, rallying around Jerry Falwell and trying to ignite a “moral majority”.

But the Kennedy Presidency and its divided approach to religion should be seen in the light of another man and time: Jimmy Carter and his one term as President, from 1976 to 1980.

I suspect that most of the Protestant ministers who choked on Kennedy were willing to swallow Carter, silently convinced the Sunday School teacher from Plains, Georgia would be the brake on America’s moral decline. No, they didn’t explicitly say that but they likely believed a Georgia Baptist would have those views.

What they got was four years of a Protestant JFK: one who talked about his Bible while guiding most of his policies according to the secular priorities of the Democrat party. Sure, he occasionally dressed those policies up in religious terms—but the policies were at core secular, not religious. The fact most Evangelicals looked askance by 1980 at the failure of the Carter presidency to do anything to rein in Roe v. Wade (after making noises about it early in his campaign) soured them on the man from Plains.

Gentlemen of Houston, you got what you wanted: a Protestant with the split morality you extracted from JFK.

And that’s probably why many of those Protestants turned in 1980 to vote for a nominally Protestant Ronald Reagan who, nevertheless, had powerful Catholic influences in his background.

The anti-Catholic bigotry of 1960 Protestantism that extracted JFK’s bipolar commitment to not letting his religion guide his politics was predicated on crude anti-Romanism with the extremely attenuated vision that the Protestant “civil religion” consensus that largely tracked Christian orthodoxy would continue. It did not–perhaps to their surprise—and no small part of the Protestant “mainline” helped shuffle it off stage in ensuing decades.

This makes us go back to the historians to ask whether JFK’s Houston address was a benefit or a bane to America’s common good.

In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s death, there have been some revisionist attempts to rewrite history elsewhere, namely about Carter’s allegedly “pro-life” record. Ex-Congressman Daniel Lipinski–primaried out of office by the pro-abortion litmus test begun in the Carter Administration–tried to paint Carter as “the last pro-life Democrat president.” John Murdock tries to be more balanced/realistic by calling the 39^th President an “awkward abortion moderate.”

Their claims are based mostly on the fact that Carter defended the Hyde Amendment cutting off taxpayer funding of Medicaid abortions That was the least he could do. Both authors ignore the fact that, even in the late 1970s, Roe had still not become a “super precedent.” There were still mainstream challenges to it and–perhaps even more importantly–a pro-life group among Democrats, especially in the House. Carter was President, which also made him his party’s leader. He’d support Hyde, which helped defuse some of the opposition to Roe (back then, people objected to having to subsidize killing). But he’d also “balance” HHS’s Joseph A. Califano Jr. with feminists like Midge Costanza in the White House.

Carter could have chipped away at Roe; he decided, as a good Protestant JFK, that politics would—mostly—prevail over conviction. The preliminary design for such politics came, paradoxically, from the Popish plotter that Carter’s fellow Protestants distrusted sixteen years earlier.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But not “bonum” at the expense of veritas.