By Robert P. Lockwood

JFK, Obama and the role of religion in American politics

Kennedy felt forced to define his religion as purely private. Not Obama

When Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., spoke in mid-March about race, the speech was hailed as a watershed moment in American politics. Laudatory comparisons were made to John F. Kennedy's speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, where he addressed head-on the question of whether a Catholic could be considered for the nation's highest office.

Obama's speech focused on the issue of race itself in American politics, and was watched most carefully for mention of the incendiary comments of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. What received less attention was his reflection on and defense of traditional black churches in the life of the black community and America.

Obama portrayed a much different -- and largely unnoticed -- perspective than that of the first Catholic president on the role of churches in American political life.

The issue here is not whether one agrees with Obama's statements, supports his politics, supports or opposes his candidacy, or accepts or rejects his position on Rev. Wright's comments. The focus here is exclusively on how his speech highlights different approaches to the role of faith in American public life.

'His own private affair'

Kennedy's speech is usually portrayed as a classic defense of a strict secular separation of personal religion from public life.

When Kennedy gave his speech, he faced a very real problem of a normative anti-Catholicism in American culture. He faced a sizeable portion of the electorate and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership in business, education, religion and politics that was convinced that a Catholic was unfit to serve as president because of allegiance to the papacy and Catholic tenets.

His speech was meant to dispel these fears and must be understood in that context. Kennedy spent most of his speech not defending the role of religion in the public arena, but denying that his faith could or would play any role at all. "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be Catholic," he said.

While never denigrating or compromising his faith, Kennedy was at pains to explain that "I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair."

Oddly and ironically, it was just at the time of Kennedy's speech that the traditional black churches had been growing stronger and bolder in their leadership in the civil rights movement that would dominate American political discussion until it was overwhelmed by the Vietnam War later in the decade.

'Story of a people'

It is not surprising then that Obama's March speech, unlike Kennedy's speech, made no effort to deny the impact of his faith or his church on his public life.

But even noting the particularly incendiary statements by Rev. Wright, Obama defended not those views, but the man and the importance of his church in his life. "The man I met more than 20 years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor."

He then went on to defend the role of black churches in the community, and in his particular moral and political vision. Quoting from his own book, "Dreams From My Father," he said of his experience in that church under Rev. Wright:

"I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and the Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories -- of survival, and freedom, and hope -- became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. ... Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black ... the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about."

Obama then described the black American churches as embodying "the black community in its entirety -- the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. ... The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America."

The contrast with Kennedy's speech is astounding. Obama was telling the public that he was not going to minimize, excuse or reject the role of his faith and the role of his church in his life and the life of the community.

It's a difference that the Sunday morning television chattering classes missed, or simply ignored.

Robert P. Lockwood writes from Pennsylvania.