JFK : “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute”

Religion controls our political system like it never has before. The Republicans are quickly destroying the foundations of this country, choosing to dismantle the established separation of church and state. Fifty years ago, on Sept. 12, 1960, President John F. Kennedy gave one of the most important speeches on church and state in American history. Refuting charges that his Catholic religious affiliation would interfere with his presidential duties, Kennedy outlined the proper constitutional relationship between religion and government.

John F. Kennedy’s Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association delivered 12 September 1960 at the Rice Hotel in Houston, TX

 

Excerpt:

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, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept 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 led 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 apart 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 equals, where every man has the same right to attend or not to 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 the pastoral levels, 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.

And here we are fifty years later, and the real issues continue to be obscured by the attempts by the religious to dismantle what has been established by our forefathers and turn us into the United Christian Theocracy of America.