There's a great deal of valuable commentary online today after Catholic presidential contender Rick Santorum told George Stephanopoulos yesterday that John F. Kennedy's famous speech about separation of church and state made him want to throw up. He also informed reporter David Gregory yesterday that separation of church and state was not in the founders' vision. Alana Horowitz has a run-down of yesterday's events involving Santorum at Huffington Post (with video clips).
Two predominant themes are emerging in much of the commentary, particularly from other Catholics. The first is that Santorum represents a Catholicism of a decided flavor not shared by a majority of American Catholics. The second is that Santorum's Catholicism is essentially right-wing evangelicalism wrapped up in medieval Catholic phraseology.
First, for extremely valuable background, I highly recommend Frank Cocozzelli's recent "Santorum's Second Song" at both Open Tabernacle and Talk to Action. Frank notes that Santorum represents a resurgence of a Catholic neoconservatism that has never really left the stage of national politics, though it has waned in recent years. It's the neoconservatism of Richard John Neuhaus, Deal Hudson, Newt Gingrich and others.
It's a neoconservative Catholicism actively hostile to significant strands of Catholic social teaching. As Frank suggests, though some Santorum apologists including David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer have sought to depict him as the great savior of white working- and middle-class Americans, he has made himself a millionaire several times over in his political life, and earned $1.3 million last year--and embraces economic policies that serve the top 1%.
Regarding Santorum's Catholicism, Frank notes,
The mainstream press often describes the former senator as Catholic. But Santorum is a particular kind of Catholic, one who is often out-of-step with the beliefs of some sixty-million American co-religionists. While the clear majority of American faithful largely ignore the Vatican proscription against artificial contraception, Santorum has made his opposition a campaign issue. He has also opposed the federal funding and oversight of embryonic stem cell research.
Two of Santorum’s sons attend a private Opus Dei school in Washington, D.C. Beyond that, the former senator is well known as an Opus Dei cooperator. While not officially a member, being a cooperator offers plausible deniability to those who support the secretive organization’s goals of a more theocratic society built upon a foundation of ultra-orthodox Catholic notions of morality.
In 2007 he became a Senior Fellow with the Koch and Scaife-funded Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), the infamous neoconservative think tank.
He has used that position to advance a noxious culture war agenda demonizing liberals, gays and those who advocate a healthy separation of church and state. Indeed, his 2011 denunciation of JFK’s 1960 embrace of that fundamental First Amendment principle was a formal elaboration of a long held view. In 2002, while attending a Vatican celebration of the birth of Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, he told the National Catholic Reporter, President Kennedy’s position had caused “great harm in America.” He went to say, “All of us have heard people say, ‘I privately am against abortion, homosexual marriage, stem cell research, cloning. But who am I to decide that it’s not right for somebody else?’ It sounds good, but it is the corruption of freedom of conscience.”
What the former senator derides as “the corruption of freedom of conscience” was actually JFK’s pledge not to give in to the temptation of using government to invoke religious supremacy; something often visited upon Catholics in America’s past.
More brilliant analysis developing this theme of Santorum as a Catholic of a distinct (and unrepresentative) type is to be found at Alan McCornick's Hepzibah blog. Alan notes that when the media talk about the role of Catholics in American politics, they often fail to notice that there's been a significant realignment on the Catholic side of the political ledger in the last decade or so. That realignment has been one in which the top leaders of American Catholicism--notably the bishops--have overtly aligned themselves with evangelicals of the right, while the majority of lay Catholics have resisted this alignment and continue to define Catholicism according to its strong tradition of social teaching.
Alan writes,
The reason I think there is a strong case for putting culture above religion is that Catholics seem to have split themselves into evangelicals and mainstreamers in a form virtually identical to the way Protestants have evolved in recent years. With an interesting twist – the “evangelicals” are the upper level clergy, and it has become clear just how far apart they are from the “mainstream” majority in the pews.
And so in debates about issues like contraception, gay rights, or freedom of religion, we see two distinct types of Catholicism at play in the American public square today, just as we see two very distinct types of religiosity in general at play: one seeks to infuse the public conversation with values that help frame the conversation without coercing anyone, while the other seeks to impose the specific religious teachings of a right-wing minority in an overtly coercive way on all citizens, and it seeks to accomplish this, ironically, in the name of religious freedom.
Alan states,
What’s missing when the media talk about "religion" is that when we say theological, or religious, we are referencing authoritarian, power-centered, judgmental religion, not “Sermon on the Mount,” pastoral, compassionate religion. Our battle over church and state is not over whether the secular (read: atheistic) unfeeling state rides roughshod over the rights of our citizens for their love-of-God religion. It’s over which power group gets to call the shots and whether religiously conservative folk can impose their ways – their opposition to women’s rights, abortion, gay dignity and rights, denial of evolution, global warming – all in the name of freedom of today's kind of religion.
In Santorum's comments about John F. Kennedy, we see the two types of political Catholicism in sharp relief. Kennedy has long been an icon for many American Catholics (and for many American citizens in general) precisely because his understanding of his Catholicism prescinded from the kind of dead-end, shrewishly defensive Catholicism of the ghettoized tribal Catholicism of the pre-20th century in some parts of the U.S. His frank avowal of the doctrine of church-state separation and his strong defense of that doctrine opened the way for Catholics who had previously been met with suspicion in American political life to enter the public square and make significant and specifically Catholic contributions to the public conversation--without being perceived as sectarians trying to impose peculiar sectarian values on the majority.
As Joan Walsh notes at Salon, it's with ill grace that Santorum now seeks to trash this valuable legacy--and Kennedy above all--in his zeal for political gain. In his attack on the legacy of JFK and the notion of church-state separation, Santorum (and the bishops with whom he's colluding in these attacks) are threatening to reverse years of important work by many Catholic political leaders and political thinkers for whom Kennedy opened a critical door with his affirmation of the separation of church and state. Santorum and the U.S. bishops are threatening to re-ghettoize Catholicism, to place it back on a defensive tribal reserve in which it will be regarded by many Americans as out of touch with and even dangerous for core American democratic values.
At his Daily Dish site, Andrew Sullivan offers a similar take. His conclusion:
He is best seen, it seems to me, as the articulate uber-Catholic veneer for an intellectually bereft evangelicalism. He provides the most reactionary Catholic arguments for their evangelical convictions. He gives their panic at modernity the balm of a 13th century natural law.
And at National Catholic Reporter, Ken Briggs notes that Santorum pits Catholic against Catholic, as he seeks to impose the minority views of right-wing evangelicals and their right-wing Catholic co-belligerents on the nation as a whole, in the name of defending "religious freedom":
Catholics have been a vital, vigorous component in national politics as individuals and as coalitions promoting moral values. That is a proud tradition which was given fresh impulse by Kennedy's assurance that Catholics only wanted to play by the same rules as everyone else. Santorum wants to turn the clock back to favoritism rather than affirm First Amendment principle.
As I've been saying for some weeks now, when this election cycle is over and done with, there's going to be some hard work to do in the American Catholic church for anyone who continues to care about the viability of the church and its ability to contribute in constructive ways to the public square. Messrs. Santorum and Gingrich, the U.S. Catholic bishops, and the liberal co-belligerents who immediately signed onto the bishops' "religious freedom" war with such unthinking tribal glee: they're doing very serious damage to a tradition that many significant Catholic thinkers and a large percentage of lay Catholics in the U.S. had worked very hard to build up following John Kennedy's courageous and prophetic defense of religious freedom.
The fractures that the Catholic right, working in alliance with right-wing evangelical extremists, are producing in the American Catholic church at present run very deep. And they won't heal automatically following the coming elections--particularly not if Santorum emerges as the kingmaker he's vying to become as the nomination process is finalized.
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