The biggest story in this year's otherwise uneventful presidential campaign has been the selection of Joseph I. Lieberman as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate.
Almost every American president or vice-president to date has been a Protestant Christian. Al Gore made history by choosing a Jewish running-mate. But the real story here is not Lieberman's candidacy. The real story is that his nomination has not created a major uproar.
Only four decades ago, the prospect of a non-Protestant president — let alone a non-Christian one — was enough to cause panic among many Americans. When John F. Kennedy ran for office in 1960, he had to confront anti-Catholic prejudice in both the Democratic primary and the presidential election. Neither party had nominated a Catholic candidate since Al Smith, a Democrat, had run (and lost badly) in 1928. In that election Protestant ministers, especially in the religiously conservative South, had denounced Smith from the pulpit, and much the same thing happened to Kennedy in 1960.
It wasn't just radical Protestants who objected to the idea of a Catholic president that year. A group of some of the country's most respected mainstream Protestant leaders met in Washington, D.C., in September 1960 under the leadership of Norman Vincent Peale. As Theodore H. White wrote in "The Making of the President 1960," they gathered "to question the loyalty of any Catholic candidate for the presidency and the wisdom of choosing any man of that faith for the high office."
It is a sign of how much the United States has matured since then that no similar group has met to publicly question Lieberman's loyalty. In fact, many of today's leading Protestant ministers — even the leaders of some of the most conservative congregations — have publicly praised Lieberman as a man of deep and abiding faith. The only apparent effect his religious beliefs have had on the campaign so far has been to prove that Republicans do not have a monopoly on displays of faith at political gatherings.
The only substantial dissenting voices to have made themselves heard belong to a handful of black activists. Lee Alcorn — who was the president of an NAACP chapter in Dallas — said in a radio interview that blacks should be "suspicious" of Lieberman because he is Jew. Louis Farrakhan has publicly suggested that Lieberman might be "more faithful" to Israel than the United States. But these comments have drawn a negative reaction from the most blacks as well as whites, and they represent a minority opinion even within the black community.
Another sign of how things have changed since 1960 is the different ways in which Kennedy and Lieberman presented their faith to the public. Kennedy took great pains to keep his religious beliefs and his political aims separate. He insisted that he would be his own president, and not the Catholic Church's. "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," he told a meeting of Protestant ministers in Houston in 1960. "I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affairs."
Today it seems that candidates for high office are expected to openly proclaim their religious beliefs. Certainly, Lieberman does not seem to think that his beliefs are "his own private affairs." On the campaign trail, Lieberman frequently mentions God, and do George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and to a lesser extent Al Gore.
In fact, as far as a sizable portion of the electorate is concerned, the "absolute separation of church and state" leads to moral decline and national ruin. Kennedy all but said that he would resign if his beliefs came into conflict with the duties of his office. Now it seems as if many voters want candidates whose beliefs will dictate how they carry out their duties.
Of course, it should be remembered that this time around Lieberman is only a vice-presidential candidate. The real test of whether or not Americans can fully accept a Jewish chief executive will come if Lieberman decides to run for president. Then we will be able to get a truer picture of how much we have grown as a nation.
Stephen A. Allen is a doctoral candidate in the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame and a writer for the History News Service.
[The Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556-5692. e-mail: Stephen.A.Allen2@nd.edu]
