Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. D. G. Hart is distinguished associate professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He earned the master of theological studies from Harvard University before earning his PhD at Johns Hopkins University. His degree was in American history.
Professor Hart is a renowned historian of American history, he’s written 13 books on a range of topics, including American Evangelicalism, J. Gresham Machen, American Protestantism, but his most recent book is American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War, which chronicles the intersection between Roman Catholicism, American conservatism, and American nationalism at a crucial time in the nation’s history. His book, American Catholic is the topic of our conversation today. Professor Hart is a friend of many years, more than 30 years, and about 30 years ago, we co-edited a book together. I’m looking forward to updating our conversation. Darryl Hart, welcome to Thinking in Public.
D. G. Hart:
Thanks for having me, and it’s good to be with you.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I think it was now approaching 35 years ago that we found ourselves unexpectedly in a room together as part of an academic research project, and at that point, I wasn’t even myself 35 years old, I couldn’t imagine knowing people for more than 35 years.
D. G. Hart:
Yeah. I was going back over that with my wife either yesterday morning or this morning, thinking about when we first met, and the circumstances, and it’s been a long time.
Albert Mohler:
It has been. And the interesting thing is that back then, 35 years ago, we were considering together the future of religion in America, and now we’re living it.
D. G. Hart:
Right, exactly.
Albert Mohler:
You’ve been chronicling American religion as a very prolific author and historian, and your latest book is entitled, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War, and I want to tell you, even if you were not the author of this book, I would have pre-ordered it and waited with anticipation for it, because this is an issue that is very, very important to me, and I’m really glad you gave the attention to it.
D. G. Hart:
Well, thanks. I’m curious to know why that is, but I’ve been working in conservative circles for almost 20 years now, and Roman Catholics, to their credit, dominate that world considerably, and so I’ve been learning a lot about Roman Catholicism since then, and trying to figure out the connections to conservatism, and it’s been very useful for me, even for thinking about the ways that Christians in general, Protestants specifically, relate to the public realm.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I am what the 17th century Roman Catholic Church would call an obstinate Protestant. So, in other words, I am absolutely Protestant, but I think going all the way back to the Reformation, the big question for any legitimate Protestant is the Roman Catholic Church, and what it means, and a continuing conversation that preceded the reformation, but of course, came to a cataclysmic height in the Reformation itself. But as a young Christian myself, just trying to think these things through, and as a young conservative, I found myself reading Roman Catholics, William F. Buckley Jr., just to give one example, or a Catholic convert such as Russell Kirk, and trying to figure out what those connections were.
And then, when I did my doctoral work, I did two doctoral seminars in a Roman Catholic institution studying Roman Catholic theological method, trying to understand these things. And I would also say this, I think most conservatives today, most conservative evangelicals, let me put it this way, today would think that conservative Roman Catholics and conservative Protestants have been making a lot of the same arguments on moral and religious liberty issues for a long time, and that’s not actually the case. We are part of a conversation now that is unique, and can only be explained by history, and precisely, the history that you chronicle in this book.
D. G. Hart:
Right. And I would go back and just preface my response to saying, I am also deeply committed Protestant, I’ve become more so in studying Roman Catholicism. And that’s not to take anything away from the church, or the Roman Catholics that I hold in high regard as friends and colleagues, but salvation is a different matter from institutional Christianity, which is also different from how the church relates to public life. But even what you say about the conversation between Roman Catholics and Protestants going on right now, which is probably, I would say, about as old as when we first met, it may be a little bit older than that with evangelicals and Catholics together. Although, actually, that’s about the same time.
Albert Mohler:
That came after. That came after we met actually.
D. G. Hart:
Right. I’m thinking actually of Richard John Neuhaus’ book, The Catholic Moment, which was mid ’80s, and The Naked Public Square, which is also the mid ’80s, and he was still a Lutheran at that point. But my other work on evangelicalism and conservatism made me aware of how little evangelicals—which is a broad category that we could parse, but we’re not talking about them right now—but how little that they paying attention to people like Kirk and Buckley in National Review. And that’s still a mystery to me, in some ways, why a group of Americans who would have been quite naturally a readership, and a constituency, or an alliance with those earlier Catholic conservatives weren’t reading them, but they weren’t pretty much, I mean, it’s-
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Or at least they weren’t talking about it out loud. So, I can just tell you, in my personal life, I graduated from high school in 1977, and I was basically the singular reader of National Review in the high school library. But I was very thankful it was there. And basically, I didn’t have a bibliography, I just worked out of the magazine. So, I’d see a column by Russell Kirk, so I’d try to find a book by Russell Kirk, and the public library had a couple, and then William F. Buckley Jr..
But my conservative evangelical church life and my conservative intellectual, political, and philosophical life weren’t the same life until later when I came to understand the seamlessness, so to speak, of these issues together. But at a time when I was reading, I could find evangelicals who were reading William F. Buckley Jr., but they thought his Catholicism was just like an accident. In other words, they weren’t really connecting to the fact that there was Catholic moral theory and Catholic dogmatic history behind William F. Buckley Jr.
D. G. Hart:
Right. Although there were times when I think Buckley… And I don’t know when you want to get into the specifics of the book, but Buckley and those conservatives around National Review were not as theological, and the magazine wasn’t designed to be either as safe compared to First Things, which is sort of the other bookend to the narrative I’m trying to tell. But I mean, someone like Gary Wills, I think, was trained as a Jesuit, or at least for a time in a Jesuit seminary. And he, in some ways, is probably more aware of church teaching in ways than Buckley was. Buckley had just grown up in the church, was held on for a long time to the Latin Mass, and that kind of traditional piety.
But on the other hand, there are times when it seemed to me that he was not thinking as deeply about how to integrate his faith and his politics, and he was, in some ways, closer of all things maybe to Al Smith, who had not really spent a lot of time thinking about it either, but it’s later-
Albert Mohler:
Didn’t even know what a in the papal encyclical was.
D. G. Hart:
Right. But it’s later people like Neuhaus, and George Weigel, and Michael Novak who are much more, at least, trying to reflect on the tradition in relation to politics.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Try to speak carefully, it’s a Catholic tradition that produces a Buckley, even when Buckley’s not thinking in ways that are intentionally Catholic. But there’s a big story behind this, and a lot more interesting, I think, than most people could ever imagine, and I think the history is mistold.
So, let me just offer something, and then I want to get right to your book. And what I want to offer is this, that if you talk to the average member of the media—and I had that experience this morning talking to a very well-placed person in the national media—about even just some of these issues, or even an academic in many fields, the rationale that they will give for their understanding of the world comes down to their rendering of a Catholic history in the United States as being there once was a time when Catholicism had an awkward relationship to the Democratic project of the United States, but John F. Kennedy solved all those problems, and showed that there’s no basic conflict whatsoever. And then, you just fast forward to the fact that now there couldn’t be imaginable any condition in which there’d be a theological obstacle to Catholic participation in the United States.
And so, it was like John F. Kennedy, 1960, is the hinge that demonstrated there was no problem, but that’s not the truth at all. And first of all, it’s not the truth that there wasn’t a problem. One of your chapters is entitled, “Belonging To An Ancient Church In a Modern Republic,” but I mean, well into the 20th century, the official teaching of the Roman Catholic church was that the American experiment was heresy.
D. G. Hart:
Right. Or, at least, what was heresy was adapting the church… And adapt can be a broad term, was a heresy. And that’s going back to Leo XIII’s encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae, 1899, which is, in many respects, directed in some ways at debates among traditionalists in Europe than it is more to the American church, but-
Albert Mohler:
But American is cited as a heresy, which is, as you say-
D. G. Hart:
Yes.
Albert Mohler:
… is technically the adaptation of Roman Catholicism to an American Democratic ethos, but also to the Catholic settlement of not seeking religious supremacy of the American experiment.
D. G. Hart:
Right. And that’s what really drew me to this project, was the idea that Americanism was a heresy. In some ways, Americanism also got mixed in in 1907, I believe, with Pius X’s condemnation of modernism, and Americanism was considered to be sort of an outgrowth of modernism. And since I’ve studied Protestants, the fundamentalist, modernist controversy, I mean, there’s a similar work going on in the late 19th, but even a century before that, where Protestants and Roman Catholics are having to adjust to the modern world, and they’re figuring out ways to do it. Protestants aren’t institutionally situated or invested the way Roman Catholics are, so it may be easier in denominational or congregational structures to adapt, and not having a pontiff overseas.
But both are working with similar questions, and that’s also what made it very interesting for me not to look at this as merely, oh, this is a Roman Catholic problem, but this is actually a Christian problem that Protestants are also working through in different stages, in different iterations, or chapters.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Also, with a different ecclesiology, to say the very least-
D. G. Hart:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
And a different understanding of what will be the optimal relation of the church and the state, because up until Vatican II, actually… I mean, because you also have Pius IX, the longest serving Pope of all, who, with the Syllabus of Errors, identified modern liberal, which I mean democratic politics as heretical, and to be condemned by the church and opposed by all faithful Catholics. And then, you have Leo, as you said, then Pius X, and you’re well into the 20th century.
So, I think, to make your point, the Protestants in the United States kind of felt themselves in charge, and at the center of the culture, so that was a different situation. But the point I want to make is, that by the time John F. Kennedy arrives on the scene, the official teaching of the Roman Catholic church has not yet changed. You would hear people say that the Protestant concerns about a Catholic in the presidency were insane, but that’s an anachronistic, they certainly weren’t irrational.
D. G. Hart:
Exactly. And what you were saying earlier about whoever you were talking to in the media about this narrative…Since I teach religion in America here, and we have a fair number of Roman Catholic students at Hillsdale College, I mean, they don’t know this history either. They pretty much buy the same narrative that somehow Kennedy, or that era of Vatican II fixed it, but they don’t know anything really about the Syllabus of Errors. They don’t know about how hardline the papacy was from the French Revolution down to the Cold War era. And what priests, theologians, bishops know, I’ve discovered is they’re oftentimes very different from what the laity know as well.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And again, even academics, because I’m constantly confronted with, both in conversation, and in reading, the fact that there’s just this near consensus that it was wrong, like I said, almost irrational, unreasonable, unfair, prejudicial to think that there might be a problem with a Roman Catholic in The White House in the late 1950s, and in the election in 1960, when actually the Roman Catholic leadership in this country was as concerned about it as fundamentalist Protestants.
D. G. Hart:
Right. Well, and to get way ahead of ourselves here, but I know you’ve had Patrick Deneen on your podcast way back when, and the rise of the anti-liberalism, anti-America strain that, in some ways, Patrick represents, and the integralists… And I don’t know that Patrick would consider himself that, but I know he hangs around with people like Adrian Vermeule, a con law professor at Harvard. I mean, they are actually using arguments that Paul Blanshard was using arguments in 1949 against America and against liberalism now, and yet they’re Roman Catholics holding on to a more traditional view of the church, and its relation to the state.
And so, again, within the Roman Catholic world, even to this day, how as assimilated as it has become to the modern world post Vatican II, you still have strains, you still have bubbling of the effect of, no, we should have a more church dominant, church-centric kind of politics.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I will just say this—I want to go back in history right after I say this—but I did tell another reporter just recently, “You don’t understand the situation. American evangelicals are not afraid that a Catholic politician will be too Catholic, that was a concern in 1916. The concern now is that the Catholic politician is not Catholic enough.” And as we say, “We’re taking salvation out of that picture.” Talk about public policy. But the concern of American evangelicals about Joe Biden is not that he’s too Catholic in his moral convictions, but that he’s not Catholic enough. And to get to that flipped coin, it is a fascinating story. And I just want to ask you to begin it kind of like you begin the book, what’s the predicament of Catholics in the early American experience?
D. G. Hart:
Well, they were incredibly small, roughly 30,000… This is at the time of the founding. I think I get these numbers correctly, 30,000 out of three million, so it’s not as if the United States was huge by that point then, but they were largely centered in Maryland, Maryland having been a colony founded by English Roman Catholics, that changed over time in the 17th century, but a very English dominated church. And at that point, it made all sorts of sense for the Vatican not really to pay any attention to America, because America, it was basically a spin-off of England, a Protestant country, an English speaking country, and at that time, Rome had far more on its plate coming out of France in the French Revolution and Napoleon, et cetera.
So, it wasn’t until waves of immigration come to America, mid 19th century, large Irish, but also German populations, and then Easterns, Southern European in the late 19th and early 20th century, that you have this polyglot multicultural melting pot kind of church in America. And even then, the Vatican doesn’t pay America all that much attention, because it’s basically a former colonial society still dominated by Protestant, still English speaking predominantly. So, let the bishops sort of figure it out.
I mean, to make the story shorter, after World War II, when the United States becomes the leader of the free world, partly because European nations are no longer in a position to try to vie for that control, then Rome, which is also very anticommunist, looks to the United States much more seriously as a player in world politics, and a player that the Vatican needs to work with in some way. So, the United States between 1790 and 1950 is a dramatically different nation. And Vatican has always adjusted to world powers, and that you see that happen over the course of US history.
Albert Mohler:
You’ve been a guest in our home for a meal, and that house is a replica of Homewood.
D. G. Hart:
I do recall that, yes.
Albert Mohler:
Which you connect to, because you did your doctoral work at Johns Hopkins, and his house and lawn at Homewood basically became the center of what would become the campus of Johns Hopkins. But he was the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration. And it’s interesting, that even the architecture of his house says that as he was a Roman Catholic, he sent every signal of belonging to the Protestant establishment in terms of power architecture, et cetera.
D. G. Hart:
Right. Exactly. And I do think that the American Roman Catholics, perhaps because of some kind of benign neglect, were able, especially lay Roman Catholics, were able to operate in all sorts of American ways, and not have to think twice about, “Wait, am I a Roman Catholic, or am I American?”
The bishops obviously had to pay more attention having been appointed by Rome, and having to report to Rome in certain ways, and between both 1850 and even to this day, you have bishops who are cardinals or archbishops, who have large diocese, and are major players, but that really changed as far as their ability to manage their diocese, and their parishioners, and sort of make recommendations about what movies not to see, that kind of micromanaging of Roman Catholic life. That kind of Bishop, which was the case in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore fades away after Vatican II. So, even then, Roman Catholic laity have even greater freedom seemingly than they would have had before that.
But when it came to just operating in political life, people like an Al Smith, as I talk about in the book, he doesn’t know what an encyclical is, he’s never had to confront what this was. He’s been operating in New York City and New York State politics, a product of Tammany Hall, and he never thought anything was amiss with taking vows to uphold the US constitution, the New York State constitution. This is just living in the United States, what’s the problem?
Albert Mohler:
But the Al Smith candidacy did reveal the fact that Americans had a major concern about a Catholic as Commander-in-Chief, not as governor of New York, but as the nation’s Commander-in-Chief, Chief Executive. That seemed to be, I mean, not by a small margin, but by what probably shocked even voters at the time, that turned out to be a pretty conclusive judgment at the time.
D. G. Hart:
It was. It didn’t help Smith, excuse me, that he was also anti-Prohibition. And my first book on J. Gresham Machan, who was a Democrat and a libertarian of a kind, I still recall reading, was surprised when I was in the archives as a younger person, that here you had Machan supporting Smith in part, because he was anti-Prohibition, and it’s not that Machan liked to drink or whatever, but he didn’t think the federal government should have that kind of power. But anyway, that was another kind of strike in an ethnocultural mix of issues that could have hurt Smith, and it obviously did.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And yet, at the same time, you have pretty thundering statements coming from the Vatican about continuing concerns about American democracy, and for that matter, modern Western democratic forms of government. And so, the Roman Catholic church did not help Al Smith to be elected, you might say, that is, Rome did not help him in 1920.
D. G. Hart:
Right. And I think you’re right. And this fellow, James Chappel, I believe, or Chappel, who teaches at Duke has a book out called Catholic Modern, and it’s a study of Roman Catholicism in the 20th century in Europe. And I just finished teaching a course on Western heritage from 1600 to the present, which does a lot with Europe. And I continue to be amazed that European politics… It’s going to sound so naive, but they don’t have a Democratic and Republican party. Oftentimes, the options are fascism or communism, or royalism. And if you’re trying to sort out those options, it would be really hard for a church to identify with, which of these is the proper way to go politically.
And again, Roman Catholics in the United States are facing nothing on that order of real deep dilemmas about where to put your political support. So, again, somebody like Smith could just cruise along in Democratic politics, both city and state, and even, to a certain extent, national level. And I can also see why the bishops in the United States didn’t think it was terribly difficult to operate in an American environment, where they had great freedom, where even they had great freedom to set up parochial schools, even though that cost parents sending their children, or it cost the church something more to do that.
And of course, there was great opposition to Americans opting out of the public school system, which was the great institution for assimilating immigrants. But still the Roman Catholic Church could set those up and face some blowback, but still operate with a full spectrum of spiritual, and other services for their parishioners.
Albert Mohler:
I was just out of my own historical interest looking at American newsweeklies from the period of early ’60s, Newsweek as it developed over time, but basically, it’s Time, and then U.S. News & World Report, but Time Magazine most importantly. And just looking at Time, it’s evident behind the whole Henry Luce empire of Time, Life, Inc. there’s a shift that takes place, I would argue there, in the early 1960s, where it’s, at one point, big news that Americans might elect a Catholic president, and then after that, it’s, that was no big deal. That this is America, that’s the way it’s basically always been, let’s move on.
But in a period of real cultural, and moral, and political tumult, there’s a lot going on that requires some explanation. And in your book, you very helpfully look at one figure who’s indispensable to this, and that’s John Courtney Murray, Jesuit thinker, who was originally, basically, hated by Rome, and then more or less acknowledged by Rome, but without him, you can’t tell the story. So, I want to let you tell that story.
D. G. Hart:
Well, I don’t know a whole lot about his writing career before Paul Blanshard’s book, which was a bestseller in 1949, American Freedom and Catholic Power… Or maybe it’s Catholic Power and American Freedom, I can never get it right. But bestseller, Book of The Month Club, brought out all the old canards from Protestants, whether Orthodox or liberal, and Blanshard was himself barely a Protestant at that point, some kind of Unitarian.
But Murray wanted to defend Roman Catholicism, and he starts to write on church state relations, and he makes a case for the American founding coming out of a natural law tradition, and the Roman Catholic church representing that tradition, of course, through the middle ages and beyond. And so, he does an intellectual genealogy of that tradition to locate the founding there as one that is congenial for recognizing harmony between Roman Catholic traditions, political traditions, and the Anglo-American political ones as well.
Now, if you go deep into the literature—and I haven’t gone real deep, I have gone into this maybe four foot part of the pool with Murray, and thre’s a lot—how he was interpreting Leo XIII, and he makes some moves of a historicist nature to say that Leo is writing at a particular time, and Roman Catholic statements on church-state relations emerge out of particular historical contexts, but the church is now in a different one in the 1950s. That’s an argument that oftentimes modernist, or liberal Protestants, and the same for Roman Catholics, would make about church teachings in theology as well.
So, I could understand why some may think that Murray was doing something that was maybe dangerous, borderline dangerous, at least. But still, he makes a very prominent case, and it is the case for Americanism, or Neo-Americanism, maybe a better way of putting it, that people like Richard John Neuhaus, when he founds First Things, George Weigel, and those writers at First Things, up until maybe recently—and I saw you had Rusty Reno recently on your podcast, and I really, really want to hear that. But Murray really does dominate for about, you could argue, 30 to 40 years, the way Roman Catholics in America reconcile themselves to the American political tradition represented in the founding itself.
So, he’s a huge figure, and he prevails in many respects at Vatican II. There’s a question of whether the Vatican will even allow him to be a theological advisor at Vatican II, but the American bishops prevail, and he’s very influential. He’s not the only voice, but he’s very influential in the Vatican II statement on religious freedom, which again is a huge breakthrough in Roman Catholic teaching about church-state matters.
Albert Mohler:
Yep. So, may I try to summarize this, because Murray is a thinker of fascination to me, in the same way that Karl Barth is, so to speak. I wrote my dissertation on the evangelical response to Barth. And I am profoundly not a Barthian, but you can’t tell the story of 20th century theology without Barth. And I would say that, in a lot of ways, John Courtney Murray is a Catholic likened to Barth, and people sometimes refer to Barth and that whole movement as Neo-orthodoxy. Wouldn’t exactly fit Murray, but what he does is this, he basically says, if I’m a traditionalist Roman Catholic, I’m going to say, he makes a place for Catholic politics, but he basically eviscerates Catholic faith. I know he’s not here to defend himself.
If I’m a Catholic liberal, then I think, well, he’s kind of an entry way, but he doesn’t think the argument far enough. But his argument, as you said, was based in natural law, but it comes down to this in the political moment of the 1950s, and into the ’60s. It comes down to the argument that a Catholic in the American order may work for public good, for human goods, even transcendent goods, but on a completely secular basis. And that’s exactly what Roman said could not happen.
In other words, the Catholic had to be self-consciously Catholic making Catholic arguments that were subject to approval, or disapproval by Catholic authorities. And John Courtney Murray comes along and says, “No, in pursuit of the common good, as revealed by the natural law,” he would say, “A Catholic politician, or a Catholic figure may function in a democratic government in order to try to work within a consensus to bring about good, rather than evil.
D. G. Hart:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
But that’s a thundering argument, because it basically is the rejection of, oh, I don’t know, 1500 years of Catholic teaching.
D. G. Hart:
Right. I mean, the phrase that was often used against Murray, at least to represent the position that was opposed to Murray, which was the idea that error has no rights, meaning that if you’re going to grant religious freedoms, other kinds of freedoms, you don’t want to give people the freedom to do things that are sinful, and therefore that are going to lead their souls to everlasting punishment. I mean, I think there’s a certain way in which Protestants can also resonate with that, and until the late 18th century with the American founding, the British and other European countries also make provisions in some ways for dissenting groups to find their place into the political order.
But in some ways, I think Protestants would try to agree with that, and I think the Puritans also believe that in a way. Of course, they were much farther back toward a more Christendom sort of model of, basically, we want to deny people the right to do things that are sinful. But Rome holds onto that much longer, and it’s only in Vatican II that the church revises that teaching, and it does make me wonder—just talking out loud here—I mean, I do know that theologians like a Calvin or an Edwards, you have a distinction between primary virtue and civic virtue. Primary virtues are the ones that come from a sanctifying faith, that lead to genuinely good works, whereas civic virtues are ones that are more external and outward.
And I don’t know the tradition of that in Roman Catholic teaching, but I could well imagine if you have this position going on as long as it did, of error has no rights, it would be hard to formulate a civic virtue kind of position out of that. And it does also make me now wonder, sometimes, about ways in which certain bishops and the pope himself these days can sound awfully universalistic in his affirmations of public truths, or goods, that sound like he’s also saying, “These are saving in a way,” which I don’t think he really means to say, because there is a difference between salvation kinds of goods and public ones.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think that it’s not just this current pope, Pope Francis, but other Catholic authorities and theologians who’ve intentionally confused that, and making arguments about more universal goods, rather than speaking more overtly about what previous popes sort of called the economy of salvation. But I want to tell a story, and get you to relate this. And I want to take it a little bit further than you do in your book, by the way, because I can’t help with biography and autobiography intersecting here as well. So, as a young boy, as a Baptist growing up in a tall steeple Southern Baptist church in the Protestant establishment, and a church very much connected to Southern Baptist establishment, tied to the larger Protestant establishment, I was taught a narrative about the separation of church and state, and what amounts to a rather radical secularism.
So, I became acquainted as a teenager with a group that, sometimes, I’d see their magazine, Americans United for Separation of Church and State. And it was assumed that right thinking, evangelical Christians, and especially Baptist holding to a traditional religious liberty, would agree with this position. But that was originally not so innocuously named. It wasn’t originally Americans United for Separation of Church and State, it was Protestants and Others United for Separation of Church and State, and it was the source of the most virulent anti-Catholicism. And then, I tried to track that back, I realized that it includes people going all the way back to Ulysses S. Grant, and then the Blaine Amendments.
I mean, you got Ulysses S. Grant saying that one of the greatest dangers to the United States is Roman Catholicism. We got to stop these parochial schools, we got to make sure that we starve them to death financially, because those are incubating chambers for totalitarianism, and European totalitarianism. And then, you fast forward to Al Smith and all the rest, that Protestants and Others United for Separation of Church and State actually led much of Protestantism into a position of irrational secularism that frankly, the Protestant left has never recovered from.
D. G. Hart:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, and it’s a fascinating history. And the latest iteration of Americans United, of course—and I follow them on Twitter, not as obsessive as I follow some other things—but they’ve now turned to, people who favor religious freedom are actually totalitarian. I mean, it’s quite a dramatic thing.
Albert Mohler:
Christian supremacists.
D. G. Hart:
Right. And to have a Roman Catholic now in The White House—and they don’t seem to pay any attention to this—but even going back to the point about public schools, and what Grant said about parochial schools, John F. Kennedy, when he ran for president in 1960, and he explained himself to Protestant ministers in Texas in that famous speech, he says he believes in the absolute separation of church and state, and he says dramatically that there will be no federal aid for parochial schooling, which used to be a very big deal. Now we’ve gone many iterations from that, and now charter schools are an option, and other kinds of homeschooling and whatnot. It’s remarkable, the change in the landscape of education right now.
But, no, that’s a fascinating piece of Protestant and secular opposition to Rome, and seeing a danger there that—I guess from the perspective of European Roman Catholicism, maybe it looked that way—is certainly not on the ground in the United States.
Albert Mohler:
So, I want to test something with you. You go back to the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy not on his own, so to speak, not to deny his political skill, but due to the unbelievable ambition and determination of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy and others, he is catapulted into this position of national prominence. People forget that he was very disappointed that four years earlier, he had not become the vice presidential nominee, although that probably saved him from a disaster, so that he would gain the Democratic nomination in 1960, all kinds of things having to do, and Catholicism played a role in that, just as Hubert Humphrey, who was branded as an anti-Catholic in West Virginia, in order to garner sympathy for John F. Kennedy.
But when Kennedy goes to speak to that Ministers Association in Houston, which it’s sometimes identified as the Southern Baptist Pastors Association… And that’s basically the nucleus of how that event came to be, Kennedy was taking the bull by the horn, so to speak, and he went there and knew the question was going to be asked about whether or not he would have a final ultimate allegiance to Rome, rather than to, say, the US constitution. He knew the rumors were out there, and frankly, his advisors, as I understand, were basically split on the issue, but he decided, he’s going to go, and he’s going to say this.
Now, what I want to set up is this, people say that was a great moment for American Catholicism, and again, kind of following the Murray argument. He says, he’s an absolute proponent of separation of church and state, he’s a candidate for president who happens to be a Catholic, and this is the ultimate liberation. I’m not sure that changed the American Catholic posture in the United States all that much, it was massive, for sure, but I think what it did do was give Americans far beyond Catholicism, and I think of liberal Protestants, in particular, an argument that they could use to basically secularize all of politics.
D. G. Hart:
Interesting. I mean, because one of the consequences of… I mean, there’s a real… Actually, just to go back to that speech, there’s a genius to it how much Kennedy himself was responsible… Or his speech writers, Ted Sorensen being among them. That he reminds his audience… And if there are a fair number of Baptists among them, of the kind of persecution that Baptist faced in 18th century Virginia. It’s a really smart move, and it’s really good. I love using that speech in my classes here, because it ties moments together in American history.
But you were mentioning Luce earlier, and the magazines from that era, the person who’s on the cover roughly three weeks of time after Kennedy’s election is John Courtney Murray. And this is still pre-Vatican II. I mean, I think by this point, John XXIII, who’s Pope, has called for the Council, but they’re still planning it, it doesn’t begin until 1962. Murray is on the cover in December, 1960. And Kennedy also becomes a vehicle for Murray to become a prominent member of discussions among Roman Catholics about their place in American life. This could go back to your earlier point, that what Murray was doing was comparable to Barth, in some ways, maybe selling out the church and its teachings in a certain way.
But I guess the other factor I would throw in here is, after World War II, as America was suburbanizing, and many Roman Catholics were moving outside of the old ghettos in the cities that the bishops had dominated during that one era of Roman Catholic life, I mean, Kennedy is sort of a exclamation point about making it in America, and being comfortable in America, and if he could do it… And of course, he’s an exceptional American by almost any standards, almost as more exceptional than even… Someone Buckley comes from a very prominent background. But anyway, if he could do it, then Roman Catholics can.
And since you’ve been autobiographical, I’ll also just mention… I mean, I was alive then. I don’t know if you were alive when Kennedy… You may have just been born in ’61?
Albert Mohler:
No, I was born in ’59.
D. G. Hart:
’59. We had Roman Catholic neighbors, and I was a fundamentalist Baptist then. And we sort of knew that there was a difference, they went to parochial schools, but there wasn’t [inaudible 00:44:26]. And my parents were very devout, and very conservative and Republican, but there wasn’t any sense of crisis, at least, in the home, that somehow America had lost its bearings by this.
Albert Mohler:
But one of the things I do, Darryl, is that when I’m teaching, especially undergraduate classes, sometimes I will take the platform of the Democratic Party, 1960, the platform of the Republican Party, 1960, and take the cover pages off, and dare students to figure out which is which. It’s nearly impossible. You have to know some really technical issues of debate in 1960 to be able to pick out the one from the other, that’s how close the two parties were.
D. G. Hart:
Yeah. No, that’s good.
Albert Mohler:
I want to come back to the 1960 speech by Kennedy, because I was really curious… And I don’t remember when this happened, but sometimes, I’m looking at a question, I’m reading, and then I think, “I really got to figure this out.” So, a few years ago, I was looking at someone like Gary Wills, actually… I’m pretty sure it was Gary Wills, looking back at his treatment of the 1960 speech by Kennedy. And I thought, what’s missing from any of this analysis is the Catholic response to Kennedy’s speech.
D. G. Hart:
Right.
Albert Mohler:
And I thought, that’s a question I really want answered. And I could not find any books that readily got to that, so I decided, “Okay, I’m going to have to go back and look at the primary source material.” So, I went back in and started looking at it, and I saw immediately after Kennedy gave that speech, that there were Catholic references in the Catholic periodical literature saying that Kennedy was in direct conflict with the statement of the American bishops. And I thought, well, wait, just a minute, what statement of the American Bishop? So, it took me a while, and I actually had to call some Catholic friends in order to figure this out, but I found that statement, and I’m going to read it to you. It’s in the form of a dubium, a question asked and the bishop’s answer.
Here it is. “Could a president have one Catholic conscience for his private life, and another public for his official life? The answer is negative, because the demands of integrity require him to be answerable to God for all his actions, whether private or public. The reply would be negative in reference to any president, whatever his religious faith may be.”
D. G. Hart:
When was that, Al?
Albert Mohler:
Oh, it’s in the 1960 National Catholic Almanac. So, if I understand it correctly, that was published before Kennedy gave his speech, and that’s why I saw people saying that’s in conflict with the Bishop’s statement. So, anyway-
D. G. Hart:
That’s fascinating, because I’ve also been curious now with President Biden in office, and it’s much easier to follow now, thanks to social media, how the bishops are reacting, and how the press is covering the bishops’ reactions to the president. And I’ve done some searching in some of the online sources for what magazines could pick up, I haven’t gone in depth into Roman Catholic sources, but Vatican II is also important for the ability of national conferences of bishops to form prior to Vatican II, as I understand it. The Vatican was very much reluctant to give national structures of bishops some kind of… Certainly not a conciliary structure. There were efforts after World War I for the American bishops to form something like that, and the Vatican said no. And so, what you now have is a conference of bishops [crosstalk 00:48:16]-
Albert Mohler:
Not allowed to be called a council.
D. G. Hart:
Right. So, even then in ’60, ’61, with Kennedy’s election and inauguration, it’s not as clear that the bishops would have had a kind of vehicle that they now have [inaudible 00:48:35]. And so, I’ve actually looked some too in biographies of some of the prominent bishops, and especially the Archbishop of Boston with whom Kennedy had relations, and it’s really hard to find anything in the biographers of any kind of spiritual council, direction, disapproval of what Kennedy was doing as president.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I think it was very quiet. And again, I think if I follow the chronology correctly… This is the 1960 National Catholic Almanac, it cost me more than I wanted to pay to get. So, it’s published in 1960, but it has the calendar for the church to follow in it. So, I think it must have been much earlier in the year, if not… It does say, “Copyright 1960.” But I went to sources at the University of Notre Dame just to ask them, “And what does this mean?” And it was there that I came to understand that this document is actually approved by the Catholic bishops. In other words, this carries the official status of being approved by the… And as you say, that conference doesn’t quite exist yet, so I’m not sure how that was indicated.
But nonetheless, this is treated, in the United States, as a document with not magisterial authority in Rome, but at least Episcopal authority in the United States. But the thing that I was looking at again is, what did Catholics think when Kennedy said, “You could split this?” Because the other thing that I remember is 1984, when… And Mario Cuomo went to University of Notre Dame and gave his address on being a Catholic and public life, and he went arguably far beyond Kennedy, because he explicitly addressed the abortion issue, which the Kennedy family is conservative on.
Senator Edward Kennedy was officially pro-life in 1971, I mean, right down from the moment of fertilization onward, but this shift had taken place. Again, it was Jesuit thinkers we now know, who met with the Kennedy family to help kind of negotiate that. But Mario Cuomo comes out in 1984 with this fact that you can basically have a duo life as a Roman Catholic politician. And the thing is, is that even then, there were prominent cardinals and archbishops of large diocese who condemned Cuomo as basically being openly heretical.
D. G. Hart:
Right. I mean, I’ve been curious to see that Cuomo’s… The Cuomo in the news, of course, is his son, the Governor of New York State, not that speech. And I’ve been waiting for someone in the Biden [inaudible camp to pull it out. I mean, it’s right there ready for the pickings for a current Roman Catholic president to try it out. I mean, even Ken Woodward, the longtime news reporter for Newsweek has been writing for First Things off and on, and he wrote a piece from 2015 or so about his interactions, interviews with Cuomo after that. It’s a fascinating piece, and it seems like only someone like Ken Woodward remembers that Cuomo gave it. It’s hard to believe.
Albert Mohler:
Or evangelical Protestants like ourselves, because, to me, I thought, okay… Here again, this is what I grew up with seeing in the form of Protestant liberalism. This is the very argument that was being made back then. Yes, the Bible teaches this, but I’m not under an obligation to hold to that position in my public life, in my government stewardship, and then Cuomo comes along and says it. But arguably, right now, with a far more liberal Democratic Catholic president, the second Catholic president in United States, I mean, the Vatican just days ago had to warn the Catholic Conference not to condemn the Catholic president of the United States. I mean, that’s pretty astounding.
D. G. Hart:
It is. But going back to Kennedy’s speech too, one of the things that I do recall… I can’t cite it chapter and verse, and it’s a hypothetical, but I think to Kennedy’s credit, he did say, “If there comes a point at which my faith is out of line with what I need to do as president, I will resign the office.” And that’s not something you hear much from any politician these days, that their personal beliefs could actually require them to leave public life.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Fascinating stuff. I was kind of surprised that you had devoted so much time and scholarly attention to this question, I’m very pleased, and really enjoyed the book. But I mean, you only have so many books in you in a scholarly career, this was a major investment.
D.G. Hart:
I’m still fascinated by it. I mean, and having a Roman Catholic president now keeps that interest alive. And part of it is that I think I’ve become a better Protestant by studying Roman Catholicism, because I can figure out areas in which I disagree, and why, and whatnot, but it’s also just a very curious aspect of American life. I mean, when I teach religion in America, I devote sections of courses to Jewish Americans, and Muslims, and Mormons, and everybody has a story of how they have to work out some kind of negotiation with American public life, Protestants less so, because Protestants were sort of here to set the agenda, but then after that agenda is set, later, Protestants have to come along and still make negotiations. That’s a big part of history of America. So, this was another chapter of it.
Albert Mohler:
So, what are you working on now?
D. G. Hart:
Oh, another politics and religion book, it’s Presbyterian Church government, of all things, and British politics in both the UK, and then North America. And it’s sort of trying to figure out the degree to which Presbyterians, my tribe, were responsible for the American Revolution or not, which is something that King George said, and I think there’s a lot of overstatement in that. But Presbyterians did help to execute a king, or their arguments did at least, in 1649 with Charles I. So, there’s a difficult relationship of Presbyterianism in British politics that keeps resurfacing, and I’m trying to figure that out.
Albert Mohler:
Sharing mutual interests for a very long time, here’s one Baptist is looking forward to your next Presbyterian book.
D.G. Hart:
Well, thanks.
Albert Mohler:
Thanks for joining me, Darryl. I appreciate you joining me for Thinking in Public.
D. G. Hart:
Well, it’s really good to be with you, and good to talk to you again, Al. It’s a friendship that goes back a long way, and I appreciate it.
Albert Mohler:
I do as well. God bless you.
D. G. Hart:
You too.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Professor D. G. Hart for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you can find more than 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com, under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, go to boycecollege.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.