Wall between church, state breached

Once upon a time in America, there actually was a palpable wall between church and state. It was a time when politicians didn’t need to profess their allegiance to one church or another to win national office.

It was a time when Christian dogma did not seep into federal policy nor federal funds into church coffers.

That time was not so long ago. For proof, pick up a copy of Sen. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on religion to Southern Baptist leaders in Texas.

References to that speech have been omnipresent in the media recently as reporters made comparisons between Kennedy’s talk and Mitt Romney’s mea culpa on his Mormon faith.

Kennedy’s speech was a watershed event in American history for two reasons. First, Kennedy’s words helped him win election as the nation’s first Catholic president. Second, the tone of his talk makes vividly clear the stark contrast between American attitudes toward the relationship between church and state then and now.

Could any one of the presidential candidates today make the following statement?

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote. ...”

This is what Kennedy told those church leaders in Houston. Yet in today’s era of church-sponsored voting guides, any candidate who dared make such a statement would be laughed out of the race. Just last month American Roman Catholic bishops approved a list of principles, which, according to The New York Times, are “intended to guide Catholics in choosing whom to vote for ...”

And if you think back to the 2004 presidential race, in February of that year, St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke forbade Democratic candidate John Kerry from taking communion while campaigning in the area. This dogma-driven censure was punishment for the senator’s supportive stance on abortion rights and stem-cell research. Such an action would hardly have flown in Kennedy’s America.

Kennedy also said he believed in an America “where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ...”

Sex education funding

In post-Bush America, federal funding for faith-based programs not only seep, they flow almost unabated. Religiously driven abstinence-only sex education, although it has been proven largely ineffective, has received well more than a half-billion federal dollars since 2001.

Just this week, a federal appeals court ruled that tax funding of an evangelical Christian rehabilitation program at an Iowa state prison violates the separation of church and state and must end. Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued to stop a federally funded prison conversion program. The program at issue in this case is called the InnerChange Freedom Initiative, operated by Charles Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries. But it was a rare court victory for Americans United. Plenty of similar groups continue to receive federal funds from President Bush’s faith-based initiative.

One last quote from candidate Kennedy’s talk: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

X Bonnie Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service.