The Problem with Abdul El-Sayed’s JFK Analogy

T rying to put some distance between himself and the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, has taken to analogizing fears about his being a Muslim to the attacks during the 1960 presidential campaign on John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism.

If only.

While some biographers contend that JFK became more religiously serious in the wake of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the August 1963 death of his infant son Patrick, there is little evidence that Catholicism ever shaped Kennedy’s political thought. For JFK, Catholicism was more of an ethnic marker than a matter of personal conviction — a biographical fact that could be exploited in some contexts but that caused a lot of trouble in other circumstances. This was especially true in the old Bible Belt, but anti-Catholic prejudice was not limited to those quarters; its upscale WASP version was neatly articulated by none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1942, when he remarked to Henry Morgenthau that the United States was a “Protestant country” in which Jews and Catholics were present “on sufferance.” That was the hoary bias with which JFK had to contend in seeking the presidency in 1960, and the key moment in that drama was JFK’s famous September 12, 1960, speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association.

But what exactly did then-Senator Kennedy do in that famous address? Mythology aside, he described himself as an advocate of what Richard John Neuhaus would call, a quarter century later, the “naked public square”: an America not only where church and state were institutionally separated but also where religiously informed moral conviction had no place in public life. In reminding his audience of his war record and his years of public service, JFK ably turned the tables on the bigots in his audience and won a considerable amount of sympathy from the fair-minded Protestant majority in the country. He did so, however, by effectively declaring his faith a purely private matter of no consequence to his politics or policies. So while spiking the guns of the bigots, JFK also set the table for a successor generation of self-identified Catholics in public life — Mario Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden – who would treat Catholic teachings based on the moral truths that anyone can know by reason (such as the inalienable right to life from conception until natural death) as sectarian religious opinions that ought not be imposed on a pluralistic republic.

Had John F. Kennedy been as serious a Catholic in 1960 as Abdul El-Sayed is a Muslim today, Kennedy could have appealed to one of America’s most venerable Catholic churchmen in rebutting claims that a Catholic could not be trusted with the presidency because he owed a higher allegiance to the pope and would have to obey any orders sent him from Rome — a charge that took a bizarre form in some of the country’s fever swamps during the 1928 presidential campaign, when it was alleged that a tunnel would be dug between the Vatican and the White House if Catholic Democrat Al Smith won. (This quickly led to the post-1928 election intra-Catholic joke that Happy Warrior Smith, after being crushed electorally by Herbert Hoover, sent Pope Pius XI a telegram of two words: “Stop digging.”)

Yet as long ago as 1876, almost a century before Kennedy’s address to the Protestant ministers in Houston, Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore had written a bestseller, The Faith of Our Fathers, in which America’s premier Catholic mounted a spirited defense of the American constitutional arrangement on church and state, arguing that the Bishop of Rome had no civil authority in the United States and that any attempt by the pope to order an American public official to do such-and-such would breach the boundaries of the pope’s legitimate spiritual authority. Gibbons defended the necessity of the pope himself being subject to no earthly sovereignty and therefore needing some territory that no other sovereign could claim. But that was a matter of protecting the pope’s spiritual freedom as the universal pastor of the church, not a matter of the pope being, in the bigots’ term of art, a “foreign potentate.” The Faith of Our Fathers was still in print in 1960, but Kennedy made no mention of it, nor did he appeal to Gibbons’s well-established claims.

Kennedy might also have drawn on the church-state scholarship and Catholic political philosophy of American theologian John Courtney Murray, S.J., which helped prepare the ground in the 1940s and 1950s for the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. Far from being antithetical to the American experiment, Murray argued, classic Catholic political theory made an even stronger case for American democracy than Enlightenment liberalism or modern utilitarianism — an argument that eventually landed the urbane Father Murray on the cover of Time magazine (founded and published by the very Protestant Henry Luce) a few weeks after JFK’s election to the presidency. Candidate Kennedy wasn’t interested in arguing Catholic political theory in Houston that September night, though. He was interested in confounding the prejudices of his audience, and he did so in considerable part by putting as much distance between his public persona and his Catholicism as possible.

And therein lies the deeper problem with Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that he is JFK 2.0. For the form of Islam to which he seems to adhere has no Quran-based theory of church-state distinction, much less church-state institutional separation. Moreover, there is no verse in the Quran like Matthew 22:21 and its parallels in the gospels of Mark and Luke: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” — an injunction that sharply circumscribes Caesar’s authority and helps creates the public space in which religious freedom can be lived in practice, not merely asserted in theory.

El-Sayed is suggesting that his Islamic faith is as peripheral to his approach to public life as JFK’s Catholicism was to his in 1960 (which is what any non-mythologized reading of Kennedy’s Houston speech would lead one to conclude El-Sayed was asserting). But it would be more honest, and more conducive to the civil public discussion of an issue of consequence throughout the contemporary West, for the Michigan Democrat to take another tack: to tell the voters if and how Islam might underwrite religious freedom as the first of civil rights, and how the long-standing relationship of his family to the theocratic Muslim Brotherhood squares with the First Amendment, properly understood.

Those are entirely legitimate questions, and they have nothing to do with anti-Muslim bias. Rather, those questions take Islam and its truth claims with the seriousness they deserve as a powerful force, not only in the spirituality of pious and charitable individuals, but in public life throughout the world.