Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Faith and the Public Dialogue: A Conversation with Sen. John Kerry
The Pew Forum invited Mass. Sen. John Kerry to discuss the propriety of public inquiry into politicians' religious beliefs and how those beliefs influence candidates' views on the issues of the day. Kerry, a 2004 presidential candidate, also addressed the role of faith in presidential campaigns, his perspective on religion in the 2008 election, and the impact of religion on public affairs.
Kerry began his career in public service in 1982 when he was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Two years later he won election to the U.S. Senate and has been re-elected three times since. In 2004 he was the Democratic nominee for president. When he accepted his party's nomination, Kerry invoked John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan's public position on the privacy of one's faith: "I don't wear my religion on my sleeve, but faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday." However, in recent years the senator, a lifelong Roman Catholic, has discussed his faith more openly, including the connection between his formative Catholic teachings and his work as a public servant.
In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org
Moderator:
E.J. Dionne Jr., Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution; Columnist, the Washington Post; senior advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
E.J. DIONNE: The reason we very much wanted to have [John Kerry] at the Forum is that the senator, since the last presidential election, is actually engaged in an awful lot of study, a lot of seminars, a lot of discussions about the role of religion in public life. He has given a number of lectures on this subject, including a lecture at that well-known liberal bastion, Pepperdine University. So we really wanted to have him share with you his thoughts on the subject that is at the heart of the Pew Forum's mission. As a Red Sox fan and a guy who grew up in Fall River, Mass., it gives me great pleasure to welcome John Kerry.
JOHN KERRY: Thank you for taking time to share in this conversation, an important one and an interesting one in so many ways, no matter what your perspective or outlook or where you come from in terms of your religious foundation or lack thereof.
I found a little bit of roots and grounding in all of this discussion, which certainly interested me on a personal level. But it obviously interested me even more so in terms of the 2004 experience and where the country is and has been over the course of the last 25 years. Of course President Kennedy confronted a question about [his religion]. But President Kennedy's question was very different from the one that we face today in many ways.
But heading into an election year as we are, it's appropriate for people to really think about what's the proper fit here and where do we go. Questions about faith and values are, again, very central to the political dialogue. I think it's safe to say that this is an area where we have yet to get it right in the country. E.J. is right when he says that the fault lies with people on both sides of the political aisle, and it lies I think with a lot of people's assumptions about what is religious talk and what is not religious talk and where it fits into your platform/curricula vitae, and what is the distinction between an appropriate discussion versus a violation of the line we've drawn in our country of the "separation between church and state."
E.J. has written many things that are thoughtful, but [one particular] column wrestled with this question of how faith should fit in the public square. He said conservatives typically praise religious activism on abortion and homosexuality, but they dismiss liberal clerics who offer theological insights on economics or social spending. Liberals love preachers to speak out for civil rights and economic justice, but they see a church-and-state problem the instant anyone in the clergy speaks out for vouchers or against abortion or stem cell research. And I think he is right. There is this dichotomy and contradiction, and it doesn't serve any of us well to be holier-than-thou about that discussion.
The dilemma has been with us for a long, long time. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln described the Union and the Confederacy this way: He said, "Both read the same Bible, pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other." He goes on to say, "It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of another man's face, but let us judge not that we be not judged."
So it's all there, folks, a hundred-plus years ago, and even until today – strong convictions and the concern about using those strong convictions to judge others and to condemn them and to exploit. That is the dilemma today. Rather than use religion as a weapon or as a ploy, how do you use it to find common ground and where are the lines that you draw between what's appropriate in the political lexicon and what isn't?
I think it's important. I certainly probably made some mistakes with respect to this, and I think there are mistakes that one might say have been made by the Democratic Party over some period of time in this sense: Religion has to inform, if you are religious, who you are, or you're not religious. It has to have something that goes to the foundation of your value system or it hasn't affected you or you're not practicing whatever that is.
And it doesn't have to be a religion, per se; it can be a philosophy, a way of life, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism. There are many different ways in which people choose to have a guiding set of values within their life, and for many it is organized religion; for many it is not. But I will suggest this to you respectfully: that no matter what philosophy or religion, organized or otherwise, people adopt, they almost all have a golden rule within them. And if you are legitimately practicing almost any of them and you are practicing them well, you will tend to be a pretty good citizen and a pretty good person.
What we see today in terms of Islam is a complete aberration. [Former Prime Minister] Benazir Bhutto said this the other day in going back to Pakistan. It may indeed have invited some of the violence that took place, but that's inevitable anyway in that situation. But there's nothing in Islam, nothing in the Koran that suggests suicide bombers are sanctioned by anything, nor even killing other people or innocent people, or children. So a true practitioner of the faith understands that distinction, and that is a tension within Islam today.
But let me come back to the practice here in the context of politics and so forth. Let me just tell you a little bit about myself so you have a sense of the context within which I come at this. I was raised a Catholic. My mother was a Protestant; my dad was Catholic. But the Catholicism that I grew up with was quite different from the Catholicism that we have today, and that is partly due to Vatican II and to a reevaluation within the church about how the church would reach out and talk to its flock. When I grew up, as we learned in Matthew, chapter 6, [when] you pray you go into your room and shut the door and pray in secret; and the Lord hears your prayers in secret and then he rewards you. Nowadays, it's much more evangelical, and by evangelical, something is evangelical when Christ is at its center and the Bible is at its center. Those are the two, in my judgment, qualifying distinctions.
So Vatican II changed a lot of that. Now the prayers that you have in the [Catholic] church and the liturgy that you have actually follow the protestant Episcopalian Church much more closely. You have liturgy that comes out of years and years of biblical passages and tradition. It's, in many ways, made it more relevant and I think more meaningful, and Catholics study the Bible more today than they used to; it's much more engaged and less separate.
Like everybody in life, I went through my ups and downs – you know, college years. Went to Vietnam. In Vietnam [I] had a very necessary and immediate relationship with God: You protect me and I'll be good; get me home and I'll be okay kind-of-deal. And then, of course, a return to all of the turmoil of those years and a more difficult relationship. I admired people of the cloth who put into practice the scriptures, like Martin Luther King and William Sloane Coffin, who acted on their values, their principles, as they interpreted their obligations, and it had an impact on me.
Then in public life, ultimately, I came to a much stronger, closer understanding of my own relationship and understanding of my responsibilities and my faith. I've been very comfortable with it ever since, until of course 2004 when we saw this exploitation and this wedge process played out in a very open and public and difficult way.
I think we're all badly served when the debate is reduced the way it was reduced during that period of time, and perhaps we should have just taken it on more publicly at that period of time. Because what I learned as an altar boy – and I was confirmed right over here at Blessed Sacrament, Chevy Chase; it was a period in my time when I was unbelievably immersed in my religion--{is] that it is important for us to know how to separate defining who we are … Let me phrase it this way: The presidency is largely about character. And your character has to be informed by your value system, by your beliefs. So what you believe or don't believe about some of these issues is fair game, in my judgment, in terms of making a judgment about your character and your beliefs and who you are and what you act on and what motivates you, what kind of person are you.
It is not obviously fair game in terms of deciding policies that are transferred directly from religion or on behalf of religion into the public square without regard to other people's beliefs and structures. I have always had some problems, frankly, with some of the folks who claim to be the most religious and the most legitimate in their expression of their faith and understanding of it, because in many cases, I find them wholly deficient in the expression of that faith, and on occasion ignorant and/or dismissive selectively and purposefully of the real teachings of, in this case, Christianity. But it doesn't have to be only Christianity about which we're talking.
So I went back and reread everything that I thought was relevant, particularly Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Acts, because those are the heart of the story of Jesus. All through [them], you will find quotes of the Lord himself which demand far more of you than simply words that express your faith. It requires allegiance; it requires a demonstration of acts and of behavior. You can find all through the admonitions of the Lord himself as quoted by those gospels – you can find his requirement that he states very clearly to the disciples and to people at large about what is required of them in terms of loving the Lord -- that you can only get to heaven through him, that you have to behave through him, so forth and so on. Your acts have to surpass those of the scribes of the Pharisees. You have to be out there, far more genuine in your performance.
And of course, if you read Mark, where he talks about not to be served but to serve, and Matthew 5, where he lays out the real heart, I think, of the Christian mission, which is the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, etc., you cannot come away from that without a responsibility for poor people, for sick people. You go back and just read the language, which talks about: I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me water; I was naked and you clothed me; I was lonely and you comforted me; I was in prison and you visited me. I think a lot of people miss on that.
This is something I have said at the prayer breakfast of the United States Senate to my colleagues. So I think that what's happened – what E.J. said earlier about people picking one or two issues and driving them as a wedge -- is something everybody's got to just work at getting rid of. That is not a true expression of religion.
So let me just talk about four areas where I think there is huge common ground, where we ought to be talking about the common ground, not the differences. The first of these is on the value of human life and the need to alleviate suffering, and that comes directly out of the passages that I just quoted you and many, many more. It comes out of not just the Christian book. It comes out of the Torah; it comes out of tikkun olam; it comes out of the Koran in the first paragraphs. And it comes out of every aspect of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and other standards guiding life.
So, the need to value human life and alleviate suffering – there are some people who have said life doesn't begin at conception and end at birth; it goes on through all of life. There's a lot of absence with respect to that ongoing obligation. It includes feeding the hungry, providing for the poor, treating the sick. We just passed the two-year anniversary of Katrina, and we can all remember the shock of that and the setback of it, but I think we have got a long way to go measured by that standard.
Twenty-one percent of our children live in poverty. One-sixth of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. One-fifth doesn't have safe drinking water. There are 40 million people with AIDS today. Last year, 3 million people died from the disease. I know that Jesus didn't say just heal the sick if they can pay for it. So we're missing something in this discussion. And you've got this genocide taking place in Darfur.
The other thing I want to talk about is the environment. For many of us, respect for God's creation translates into a duty to protect and sustain the first creation. Before God created man, God created heaven and earth. And as a graduate of St. Paul's School, I will tell you I am well acquainted with what our school's namesake wrote in Corinthians: "The Earth is the Lord's and everything on it." You can go to Genesis, you can go to any number of books, Isaiah, others, and find references to our obligations and responsibilities with respect to the Garden of Eden, nurturing, taking care of things around us.
Finally, evangelicals are starting to talk about creation care, and that is a very important and legitimate component, it seems to me, of that respect. They are espousing the principle that any damage you do to God's world is an offense to God. So whatever your faith, the scientific facts are clear. You don't have to be faithful to understand the facts: the droughts, the famine, the ice melting, the increased evidence. It's dramatic what is taking place – asthma. Twenty-five percent of the kids in Harlem have asthma. I can compound that case but I'll just summarize it by saying there was a recent headline in Time magazine that said, "How Do You Prevent the Next Darfur? Step One: Get Serious About Global Climate Change." So confronting manmade climate change is, in the long run, one of the greatest challenges we face, and I think there are religious implications in it that are very serious: stewardship and so forth.
The third area that we can find common ground is on the issue of abortion. It's been one of the most emotional and one of the most divisive of all, and I've seen that very up close and personal. I believe very deeply that it is not contradictory to be pro-choice and to be anti-abortion. I think many people are anti-abortion and legitimately so. The question is how do you talk about it? How do you lay this out to people?
I think we have been guilty in the party and individually at times of being overly pro-choice and this is the way it is and we're not going to do x, y or z, without honoring the deeply held beliefs that are legitimate that go to the question of the killing of a human being, depending on what you believe. And I understand it depends on what you believe. But if you believe it, I think you do have an obligation to say so in terms of wanting fewer abortions, of trying to say abortion is not good, it's not a good alternative, and what we need to do is make sure people have other alternatives and other options. That's where you can find a lot of common ground because there are 1.3 million abortions in this country, and I don't think anybody would disagree that that is too many.
As Bill Clinton framed it, I thought so effectively, in 1992, it ought to be rare, legal and safe. Rare has been missing from the debate. I think we need to figure out how we're going to do that, and do it in a more effective way.
I think it's important to honor those beliefs. You may never get over that hurdle. You can't say, oh, it doesn't matter, the science hasn't changed, viability is not necessarily narrowing in its window. I think you've got to have an honest discussion. But that doesn't mean that that becomes a legislative effort that men ought to make for women instead of women and their doctor making that decision in the light of those questions that still remain out there, legitimately, with a lot of people. So you can be honest and true to the notion that you want to try to minimize abortion and you don't think abortions are a great option, but it's not up to us legislatively to dictate that. That is the traditional and honest pro-choice position, but it has not allowed us to find the common ground on other things.
The fourth and final thing I'd mention, which is a big opportunity is that people of faith need to accept the common challenge on issues of war and peace. Whatever your philosophical differences all of us of different faiths have a universal sense of values and ethics and moral truths that honor and respect the dignity of all human beings, and that applies too when you go to war.
I mentioned earlier that everybody shares some version of the Golden Rule. Go look at these different faiths – you'll see it leaping out at you. But the struggle to balance the legitimate self-defense need against those highest ideals of justice and morality have been with us for thousands of years, folks. One of the greatest early Christian sources of wisdom on this was Saint Augustine, who laid the foundation for a very compelling philosophical tradition, which we actually apply, no matter what your religion, in many ways to the public debate of our country about war.
He laid out the principles that, No. 1, wars of choice are generally unjust wars. War should always be the last resort. War has to always have a just cause. War and those waging war need the right authority to do so. And when [Augustine] talks about authority, he's not just talking about a bill that's passed or a declaration of war; he's talking about the moral authority of the people and the general authority of the population and the nation.
He also wrote about how the military response must be proportionate to the provocation, and indeed in our military theory we have proportionality as part of our thinking today. Finally, war has to have a reasonable chance of achieving its goal, and it must discriminate between civilians and combatants. I think more than ever, those principles are at issue in terms of what is going on in the world today, and we can see value in Saint Augustine's principles and the vision behind it.
So for all the division that comes out of mixing religion inappropriately and not being able to draw that line between what's the appropriate inquiry about where religion fits in somebody's life [and] its excessive impact on politics itself , public service in the end is based on the notion of coming to serve, not to be served. I think that it's really important for people to have a legitimate discussion about this as we go forward, not one of these totally self-serving, unbelievably ideologically driven, exploitative and in many cases co-opted efforts that does a disservice to the foundations of all religion and its relationship to our society.
So hopefully we'll be smarter about it in '08 as we go forward, and hopefully everybody will [make the] distinction between making a judgment about somebody's formative years and character and value system versus the state and religion issue itself.
So let me throw it open for some questions and comments and thoughts.
RAY SUAREZ, NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER: A lot of things are put on candidates from externalities, from reporters, from issues that come out of the day's news. So how much of this is really in your control? When the Catholic bishops decided – well, when some Catholic bishops decided to pronounce you persona non grata at the [communion] rail, that was something that was put on you rather than something you chose to talk about publicly. I don't know how candidates, if they're fighting against each other for one office, can agree to handle this in a different way, but so far we've got people twisting themselves into all kinds of pretzels trying to answer these questions when they come up.
KERRY: Yeah, there are externalities – there always are; that's the nature of politics. But on the Catholic bishops thing, we could have again probably done – I sort of always take responsibility for some of the things that maybe we could have done or not done because I think we could have. But you never know at the time; you're moving 100 miles an hour and you've got all kinds of externalities affecting those options. But only four bishops out of 180 said anything.
And in fact, Cardinal [Theodore] McCarrick and others were very clear in the letter that came from Rome that it is not in canon law that you can deny people [communion]. That is an argument made by Bishop [Raymond] Burke down in Missouri, and you've got about four – [Bishop John] Myers in New Jersey and a bishop out in Chicago, and [Bishop Charles] Chaput in Colorado --they make the argument, but it's not a church position. What we didn't do was make sure that the church position was out there and known to people as effectively as it should have been. We did have a Catholics effort; we did have a religious outreach effort. We had something that was unprecedented in campaigns; we had a whole religious outreach effort and a person specifically hired and people engaged in this.
I think the church also was uncomfortable with some of what went on. I'm not sure it wants to have that kind of a dialogue again that way. But it's important for us to help them not feel compelled to by making sure we're drawing those distinctions appropriately between what we do believe, and why and how, and what's legitimate to talk about, without translating it into some kind of legislative effort.
I will share with you that I went and met, after the election, with a number of cardinals. I had a discussion with one of them who is now in Rome. But I said to him you have a position on abortion but you don't have a policy. My obligation is to have a policy. I have to deal with the 15-year-old daughter of a parent, single parent, who is raped by her uncle and pregnant, and I've got to have a policy for that. You don't; you have a position that life begins – And I tell you, he said that's true, you're right. Our job is to teach, and our job is to assert the morality. You have to go out there and sort out how you apply it on a day-to-day basis.
I'll give you another example of where this falls apart, on the partial-birth abortion thing. I don't like partial-birth abortion; it's a terrible, horrible kind of procedure. It's not even a real procedure, in a sense, because the term partial-birth is a conjured-up term to deal with a specific medical procedure that never had that name. It was done specifically to kind of help drive the issue. But anybody who's had a child or is a parent, who's listened to that first heartbeat five weeks, six weeks in, or who's seen the ultrasounds and goes through that, who's been present at a birth, you can't come away from that without a sense of the miraculous and the extraordinary nature of it, and what it means in terms of the development of that child. And to think of it in third trimester as something that you can just go and – I tell you, is anathema to most people.
But the difficulty for us in the Senate was we wanted a compromise. We were trying to find a way to honor that difficulty and say it isn't our choice as a legislator to tell the doctor what he can or can't do and the woman what she does or doesn't need if she faces the prospect of never having a child again or dying. They ought to make that choice, recognizing its complexity and their own relationship to God in the process. Well, we wanted to codify that by having two doctors with separate opinions and a grievous bodily injury standard. We couldn't even get a vote on it. We weren't allowed to have a vote because it was reasonable. It sort of murkied it up, and they just wanted that clear-cut, you're for it or you're against it.
ANTHONY BIRCHLEY, BBC: A colleague of mine once went to ask Tony Blair about his religion and whether he had prayed with George Bush. And the prime minister's press secretary took him aside and told him in no uncertain terms that "we don't do God."
KERRY: We don't what?
BIRCHLEY: We don't do God. Do you think in this country, politics would be easier, efficient, if this country didn't "do God"? (Laughter.)
KERRY: Well, I don't think we do God. I don't know, I sort of resent – I don't like the cynical, casual dismissal that is contained in that. I think that globally, there are unbelievable numbers of people of faith. And incidentally, there are many leaders from Europe and from Asia and elsewhere who come over here to our prayer breakfasts who may not be viewed as publicly – in Russia I've met with them, Russian leaders, others, who wish they had a greater level of practice of religion in their countries.
Does it complicate things? Of course it does; it always has. Since the beginning of time, it has complicated things. Go back to the Romans and their gods or the Greeks and their gods or the Aztecs or the Incas or anybody. Civilization has always struggled with the issue of creation. It's very interesting – the Chinese have no theory of creationism. [But] we have always struggled with it.
In fact, it is very interesting that many physicists, astrophysicists and others, who spend a lifetime trying to study the origins of the universe and the Big Bang theory and creation, etc., actually become more religious as they study rather than less because of the power of these unanswerables. So I don't get trapped into the sort of do we do it or don't we do it? I'd rather have a better discussion about it. I know there are cynical people around who view it that way. Europe, obviously, has increasingly become a place with fewer practitioners, empty churches. It's not the first go-around Europe has had with this kind of reaction. Nietzsche and early thinkers in the 19th century in Europe killed God abruptly and totally.
This has been a great tension in many parts of the world. It will continue to be long after we have gone. People make their bet. You can decide what you believe or don't believe. But I don't think one should question the legitimacy of people's beliefs that way or be sort of dismissive of them.
Read the full transcript at pewforum.org