Posted on 02/28/2012 8:14:16 PM PST by Mariner
No so clear as you think. Article VI says that there can be no religious test for office. It does not provide for an established church. But there was nothing to keep Eisenhower from appointing a prominent Mormon leader to his cabinet.
Ah yes! Our Father who art in Congress! LOL!
As it happens, I worked in the building where Drinan had his district office (400 Totten Pond Rd, Waltham). I was a kid trying to break into the computing field, which back then involved submitting "jobs" encoded on punch cards to the operator of a main frame computer and waiting to receive printouts after a considerable delay.
The building had a cafeteria, equipped with sandwich vending machines, etc. I remember repairing to said caf while waiting for "jobs" to be run and discussing same with colleagues. This odd but congenial gentleman joined our conversation about jobs. Of course, he meant jobs, in the sense of employment (and votes). That was Father Drinan.
Actually, there was one other priest in Congress in the timeframe. That would be Father Cornell, of Wisconsin, also a Donk.
Both Drinan and Cornell retired at the end of the seventies, on the orders of il Papa, John Paul II.
Not only that, but he appointed John Foster Dulles Secretary of State. Dulles was a Presbyterian.
The church plays a prophetic role measuring the policies and actions of the state against the word of God and speaking out to affirm or decry what it sees. Because if it doesn't, then the state becomes a church unto itself and it's supreme leaders become a pantheon.
Rick is his own worst enemy. His comments, however correct, are too much “inside baseball” for the average voter. Allegedly, in a desperation move, Gingrich is targeting Santorum in the South. Continuing to split the vote means Romney will be the nominee.
As a conservative you have to presume the media is against you. All candidates make gaffes, but part of a winning campaign is your ability to dodge and weave. So far only Romney and Paul have shown a solid ability to do so. When Gingrich gets near the levers of power he loses his head. Santorum, desperate to beat Romney in MI and give a big boost to his campaign, over played his hand. He had conservatives solidly in his camp, he needed to play the economic card to win it. If the polls are to be believed he lost a double digit lead. If we want to beat Obama we need a candidate (really the candidates team) that can stay on message.
Clinton did it and admirably so. He played the media like a fiddle and danced around scandal after scandal during the Primary. Romney has the political team, the fundraising and the focus to win. That’s what a primary proves. It’s frustrating, but unless Super Tuesday goes solidly to either Rick or Newt it’s already over.
I bought the Washington Times and had it delivered at home during the Clinton Admin. Pruden decided to let Hillary write for his paper. It is the last time I ever listen to that idiot again. It still is true today.
Important qualifiers need to be added to this statement. I'm going to write more on this subject than I otherwise would because it looks as if even here on Free Republic, too many people have uncritically accepted a liberal narrative of the religious origins of the United States which simply is not in accord with the facts of history. (And no, I'm not primarily referring to Gusty or Robowombat with that statement, but rather the secularists on Free Republic whose idea of “conservative” would have the effect of excluding faith from the public sphere.)
A straight line cannot be drawn between the beliefs of Baptists of the late 1700s and early 1800s and conservative evangelicals today. A good case could be made that Jerry Falwell, Al Mohler, and other modern conservative Baptist leaders might take very different positions from those advocated by America's earliest Baptists, who had more in common with the Anabaptists than with the modern conservative Christian movement.
It's true that in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Baptists were agitating for disestablishment of the state-supported churches of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire — tax-supported religious establishments which, it needs to be noted, not only predated but continued for a number of years after the adoption of the Constitution. There are reasons the text of the Constitution says the **FEDERAL** government, not the state governments, cannot establish a religion. Most of New England still had tax-supported Congregational churches at the time the Constitution was adopted and most of the Southern states had only recently disestablished their tax-supported Anglican churches. It needs to be added that disestablishment in the South during the time of the American Revolution was connected more to patriotic animosity toward a largely pro-British clergy in the Anglican churches and to rural backwoods Presbyterian animosity toward the wealthy coastal plantation aristocracy than it was to any anti-religious spirit.
Back to the Baptist situation in New England — particularly in Connecticut, where Yale continued to produce conservative ministers well into the 1800s (unlike Harvard, where Unitarians formally took over ministerial training by 1805, and had been producing theological liberals for many years previously), the state churches were definitely orthodox. The people clamoring for their disestablishment were a mix of unbelievers who objected to tax support for churches, Baptists who objected on principle to tax support for churches, and Episcopalians who didn't object in principle to tax support for churches but who in New England had become a refuge for people angry at what they believed was overly conservative preaching in the state churches.
It also simply is **NOT** true that Baptists and Episcopalians were having their rights trampled on by the state churches at the time the Constitution was written. The First Baptist Church of Boston was organized in 1665 and efforts to shut it down ended fifteen years later. It's true that the first president of Harvard had been forced to resign his position due to denial of infant baptism about a half-decade before the organization of First Baptist Church. However, the Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard had been endowed by a wealthy English Baptist in the 1720s, that position was at the time the main professorship training future ministers in New England. The terms of the endowment specifically stated that denial of infant baptism would not disqualify a candidate from holding that professorship, and while all of the early Hollis Professors of Divinity did affirm infant baptism, the acceptance of that stipulation by Harvard pretty clearly indicates toleration for a Baptist position.
The practice by the late 1600s in New England was to allow people who had religious objections to the Calvinist orthodoxy of the established state churches of New England to “sign off” the rolls of the state church if they could prove they were members of another church recognized as legitimate by the civil authorities and were paying tithes to that church. Early on, that meant Presbyterian or Episcopal churches, and eventually Baptists were also allowed to “sign off” the rolls. By the time of the First Great Awakening under Jonathan Edwards when a number of churches split, some forming “Separate Congregational” churches which were quite antithetical to the existing state-supported churches and generally became Baptist, it was a long-accepted principle that people who were more conservative than the established churches could form their own congregation in New England without too much trouble.
The final disestablishment of the state churches in Massachusetts didn't happen until the 1830s, and happened there not because liberals were upset by the orthodoxy of the state church but because many of the large and wealthy churches of the Boston area had been taken over by the Unitarians and orthodox Congregationalists were upset by having to “sign off” the rolls of Unitarian parishes when in the rural churches farther inland, they controlled the parishes.
It probably should be pointed out that even after most of the states had disestablished their state churches, religious tests remained in place for many years in a number of the states requiring various types of doctrinal tests to be a candidate for public office. The most common of such tests was a requirement than candidates not be deniers of the Trinity, which had the effect not only of disqualifying Jews from civil office but also barring Unitarians from civil office; one by one, those state tests were repealed on the state level rather than being struck down by the US Supreme Court. As late as the early 1860s, the founders of the Confederacy were still having arguments over whether the Confederate Congress should be legally barred from enacting laws contrary to the Bible, and a prominent Jewish member of the Confederate government was being criticized on the grounds that non-Christians should not be eligible for office in the national government of the Confederacy.
My reason for going into this level of detail is not because I advocate formal establishment of an American church. I do not, and I firmly believe that Roman Catholics and Jews both can and should hold civil office based on the crystal-clear original intent of the Founding Fathers to accept help during the American Revolution from both Catholics and Jews. My intent, rather, is to make clear how ridiculous it is for liberals to say that some sort of absolute separation of church and state was intended by the Founding Fathers. The intent of the Founders was not in any way whatsoever to separate faith from government, but rather to prevent any of the individual denominations from controlling the federal government the way they controlled several of the state governments at the time the Constitution was written, and had controlled many of the colonial governments just a few years earlier.
I am a firm believer that state establishment of a specific denomination is a bad idea; even a convinced Puritan like Oliver Cromwell was willing to allow religious toleration for other Calvinist groups in England who shared his faith but not his views on church government. However, the United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and while liberty was certainly present for dissenting minority groups such as Catholics and Jews, the Founders did not in any way plan to create an anti-religious or secular government.
To deny that is to deny plain historical facts. The Founding Fathers — even the most liberal among them, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — advocated a civic morality which was considerably more conservative than what quite a few people even on Free Republic seem to think is appropriate.
Facts are stubborn things. Those who think America was founded on atheistic or irreligious principles have confused the American Revolution with the French Revolution. There are important differences between the two revolutions, and I happen to think the American Revolution took the right track and the French Revolution went seriously wrong in its earliest days.
The reason he left the Harvard presidency was that he refused to have his children baptized after becoming convinced of Baptist views, which at that point were being tolerated under Oliver Cromwell in England but were still unacceptable in Massachusetts. Dunster left Massachusetts and accepted a pastorate in one of the churches of the then-separate Plymouth Colony.
Being forced to leave Boston and move to a more friendly colony is not exactly what I'd call serious persecution, especially compared to what was happening in Europe at the same time.
One can only imagine the role Romney has planned for the LDS. It won't be a small one!
Pruden’s entire basis for his argument is false. Puden does not understand the history of the period.
When Kennedy was running for president in 1960 he emphasized his Catholic faith and presented himself as someone who was a victim of religious prejudice. In 1956 an analysis had been done by the Democrat Party showing that Catholics were leaving the Democrat Party and were needed if the Democrats were to win. Sam Rayburn is reported to have said at the time, “If we have to have a Catholic, why can't we have someone like John McCormick instead of that pissant Kennedy?”
In 1960, the Kennedy campaign encouraged Catholics to vote for him because he was a Catholic. The Kennedy campaign arranged for Kennedy to speak before leading Protestant ministers in 1960 and told them not to regard religion as as a reason to vote or not vote for a candidate. This was part of the 1960 election campaign by then Senator Kennedy not a speech in 1963 by President Kennedy as Puden wrongly states in the article.
Santorum is 100% correct that religion has always been part of the public debate and part of the principles of that make this country work. Kennedy's speech was a campaign speech. It has since been falsely elevated into a statement of profound governing principles.
And you and I agree
It better be NO ROLE.
And Romney should be asked the question.
Well put, and what a crazy thing to think, this Madison. He only had a thousand or so years of history from which to draw his conclusions.
Also, let's not forget that in this neck of the woods, for a considerable period of history, Catholics were the blood enemies of this nation. Guy Fawkes Day was used as "cover" for a lot of radical unrest, especially in Boston, during pre-Revolutionary times. It really wasn't until the latter half of the 19th century, I'd estimate, that Catholics began receiving a seat at the table.
Kennedy was saying what a lot of non-Catholic religious people wanted to hear from him: were he elected President, he wouldn't be taking his orders from Rome. The US wasn't going to become the Holy Roman Empire West.
Great stuff. Thanks for the education.
Catholics like Santorum often push Catholic charities for government socialist program funding. It’s a bad idea. The government will control the church through this error - not the other way around. You would think Santorum would have figured this out with socialized medicine. First thing Obama does when he gets the power is order the church to give women morning after abortion pills....
Rick is a social justice kinda guy. He does not see the consequences.
That is why I don't think Romney should be nominated...he can't serve two masters.
Ezra Taft Bensen was also a bishop.
Such things are not inevitable. Where the Church has been remiss is not understanding who they are dealing with. Fear of communism and dislike of Roman authority blinded many German clergymen to the nature of the Nazi movement. Both Rome and the German Church also under-estimated Hitler because of his low social origins. Many American Catholics overestimated Obama. Because of his smooth manners, they thought him honest.
The Catholic church is not all one thing. The Marxist part of the church is very dangerous to liberty and the faith of Catholics and Christians. It is always a struggle and Rick doesn’t get it beyond the social struggle.
Centralized control for the redistribution of wealth (social justice) often moves ahead while the social conservatives in the church have managed to hold their own for the time being on pro life issues. Economic marxism will defeat the social conservatism in the name of separation of church (Chritian morals) and state (amoral humanism).
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