Is Separation of Church and State Anti-Catholic, Anti-Christian, Atheistic?

 My first introduction to anti-Catholicism was not from the Ku Klux Klan, although it had a presence where I grew up.

I had read about anti-Catholic sentiment when I was in elementary school, in a book which depicted the campaign of Al Smith for President, and the role anti-Catholicism played in defeating him.

But all of that seemed remote and unreal to me. 

Although not Catholic myself, many, if not most, of my friends were. There were pictures on the walls of their houses showing Christ opening his chest to show his heart well before cardiac surgery was feasible, and I asked my parents about these and they responded cryptically, a little uncomfortably, that they were religious and left it there. I had no better luck asking them about the bloody Christ on the cross artifacts on the walls.  

I knew in my seven year old mind there was something different about my family from Sean O'Rourke's family, but whatever that was it didn't seem to matter when Sean and I went out to throw a football or explore the neighborhood with our friends, or have sandwiches his mother made in her kitchen. She always smiled at me and she and my mother would sit on the porch and laugh and chat.

No, it wasn't until I was 13 and John F. Kennedy ran for President that I heard that in some parts of the country his being a Catholic was a problem. 

"But Sean's Catholic and he's going to run for President and I'm going to be his Vice President," I told my mother. 

"And why aren't you running for President?" my mother asked. 

"It was Sean's idea," I explained. "He has Dibs."

Seeing Kennedy campaign in the South, in West Virginia, in the Baptist Bible Belt, and looking at the way those Southerners looked at him, the wariness, the distrust, brought it home to me.

But I loved the way Kennedy went right at the problem, directly, courageously telling them, "Don't vote for me because I'm a Catholic, but don't vote against me because of that."

His famous statement, below, thrilled me.

"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again—not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me—but what kind of America I believe in.

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—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference...

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.

For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

I was even more moved when he won, when he faced down that prejudice, that hate, and emerged victorious and put to rest all those suspicions. 

Even now, that Joe Biden is Catholic never comes up as a reason to suspect he is under the power or sway of the Pope.  The current crops of crazies find other reasons to hate Biden, but the Catholic thing simply has no resonance any more. 

Kennedy did that, as far as I'm concerned.

Real Hate

In my mind, JFK vanquished anti-Catholicism. All that was just a relic of some dark age.  Catholics were glamorous, open minded, looking to the future, modern, unencumbered by  past doubts.

My friends married without a thought about religion--Jews married Catholics, Catholics married Protestants with hardly a mention, at least in America. 

In Ireland, Catholics and Protestants still hated one another, which baffled me and my friends. It was hard to imagine that could be true, to us Americans. Here in America, with our Constitution, religions simply did not clash, not any more.

I've seen plenty of marriages performed by Catholic priests where the groom steps on a glass wrapped in a cloth napkin, as is the tradition at Jewish weddings. 

All that business about "mixed" marriages is just a relic now. It might have meant marrying "outside the faith" once upon a time, but now it means a Democrat marrying a Republican.

But whenever we discuss separation of church and state, in Hampton, in 2023,  there is a certain element of the Catholic parish who respond that whoever favors drawing a barrier between the church and the state is anti-Catholic, hates Catholics, wants to discriminate against Catholics. 

Because, if you saw the Church properly, you'd know it is a good institution, a wonderful source of joy and truth and morality and bonding of humanity, so why would you ever want to exclude the Church from the benefits of social organizations like the government? Only those hostile to religion, like Thomas Jefferson, would want to draw a line between the Church and the state.

But Kennedy can hardly be said to be hostile to the Church and he was, as anyone can plainly see, emphatic about drawing that line.

Actual Anti Catholicism 

Could it be he saw that drawing the line protects the Church as well as the state, that it allows people to retain the benefits of religion, just as a Catholic wife does when she goes to mass and leaves her husband home watching a football game? 

It gives everyone much needed space.

Now, in Hampton, we have a group which insists separation of church and state persecutes the Church, is motivated by the most vile and hateful motives.

And roving goons drive by in cars and shout obscenities at mothers who have signed petitions in favor of separation of church and state, while  children look up from their play in their front yards. 

We do not know who those goons are, or even if they are members of the congregation, but we can have no doubts it was the opposition to the warrant article that sent them rumbling through town. They are part of the blinded crowd.

THE FEAR

We had Kennedy who brought us so far, and now look what that blinded crowd has done. Oh, how far we have fallen...