Founders Or Unfounded?

by Steven Gussman

        In high school history class, as is often the case with issues of identity in the 21^st century, I was given the impression that a significant front opposed Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy on the grounds that he was religiously Catholic (despite his ultimately winning the election). This was presented as a mere (if somewhat tame) expression of bigotry from a country with an ugly history of such attitudes (not to mention practices and laws). In part, it surely was. It had been argued by some that J.F.K. would take his orders not from the American people, but from a foreign actor in the Pope of the Catholic Church in Rome. Ridiculous, for sure, but in reading through some of America's founding documents, I was met with a piece of philosophical history that left me with a slightly more nuanced opinion of this particular opposition to J.F.K.

        The early British-American colonists are often described in terms of their religion. Oft mentioned is their notable Protestant work-ethic as a mechanism for their resilience in the New World. Perhaps even more often, they are described as philosophical refuges escaping the religious illiberalism of European Catholicism (to give the devil his due, the Protestant colonists really did suffer at the hands of Catholic institutions). Taken together, the Puritans can be seen as beginning the American trend of the underdog eventually culminating in the framer's unexpected winning of the American revolutionary war against Britain. While the original Puritans have a reputation for being stuffy, hard-working farmers, the later founders (originally a minority of the colonists, to be sure) are Enlightenment figures: philosophers and thinkers, as much as do-ers. While they tended to be Protestant themselves, their relationship to religion was different, likely due both to the earlier Protestant-refugee culture, and due to the influence of the Enlightenment (and its re-surfacing of the great philosophies of antiquity). At least two founders (Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine) make reference not to Protestant religious belief, but to the difference between the “protestantism” and “popery” of processes. They conceptualize the 'de-Popery' or 'Protestantization' of Christianity to be the taking-back of the interpretive powers from the ivory tower of the Catholic Church. In this context, religion is no longer about blind-faith in an “official”, external interpretation of the Bible, but is up for the readers to interpret and debate amongst themselves (essentially, the same lower-case P-R peer-review that scholars have followed since antiquity). Indeed, many founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, were likely deists: for them, god's role was reduced to the setting-off of the universe, the initial condition for the newly understood laws of physics (and nature, more generally) to carry out (or otherwise for the free-will of man to intervene instead of a deity). In the small-L liberal / libertarian spirit of the Enlightenment, Paine saw 'de-Popery' as a generalizable philosophical process, and made mention of their 'Protestantization' of politics (that is, while their predecessors escaped for them the theocratic tyranny of the Catholic Church, they were now escaping the political and legal tyranny of the British Kingdom). Such were the beginnings of the enduring American focus on individual freedoms and local government (a point that is made over and over again by the founders is that the British Parliament, let alone a King, could not know, nor be properly incentivized to know, how to properly govern the British colonies all the way across the Atlantic).

        Suddenly, a deeper understanding clicks: opposition to J.F.K.'s Catholicism wasn't necessarily only an outgrowth of a history of bigotry dating back to the first British-colonial enslavement of Africans, and continuing with the subsequent hazing of every minority group that found their way through Ellis Island. It may also have had some genuine (if by the time of J.F.K.'s campaign, hazy) philosophical roots in the “Protestant” (read: libertarian) localism of the founders' philosophy of American governance. I am not sure if anyone by the 1950s and 1960s, could articulate this, or if the general sense was mere over-active xenophobia. It is likely that, particularly given his playboy reputation, J.F.K. was very much a contemporary man in the sense that it has been a long time since the culture of our politicians has been one of devout, practicing religious belief. And yet politicians still have to (or perceive the need to) pretend they are in fact devoutly religious church-goers. This potentially placed J.F.K. between a rock and a hard place: either we was a devout religious Catholic (and therefore beholden to a foreign Pope), or he would need to admit to being a fair-whether Christian, opening himself up to moral attacks on his character. Clearly J.F.K. weathered the storm to the point of winning the election, but something about him seems to have been too radical, as we still don't fully know why he was the only modern American President to have been assassinated.

        There does exist some empirical evidence to speak on this topic. Dave Roos argues that the first Catholic Presidential candidate (Al Smith in 1928) faced more (and more overt) anti-Catholic bigotry than Kennedy would, later. If it were true that the anti-Catholic sentiment directed at Catholic candidates was rooted more in the country's particular libertarian history (rather than in bigotry), one might expect this push-back to be more articulate in the past, as less time had elapsed since the Protestant-as-free-thinker meme was written and read. At the same time, it is well-known that bigotry has tended to plummet over time—a sign of true progress—and so it can be difficult to tease these opposing trends apart.

        If one simply looks at historical sources, an interesting saga emerges. While it is unclear if Roos accuses then-Presidential-candidate Richard Nixon of bigotry in his own heart (the man's statements about other minority groups would not make it surprising), he does claim that Nixon intentionally ran an anti-Catholicism strategy against his opponent, J.F.K. But he admits he did so behind the scenes; Nixon's public-facing statement was that he would not campaign against Kennedy's religious beliefs. This suggests that Nixon believed that attitudes in the voting public had changed, that they would not appreciate someone campaigning against a minority group in this way. In fact, Nancy Gibbs claims that Nixon warned his Republican allies to avoid the topic of religion, believing it would actually help J.F.K., overall (in his view, only atheism would scare away the American voter).

        As for J.F.K. himself, Gibbs cites his own sister's testimony that he was not a devout believer; yet, she also notes that when in a pre-Presidential Congressional campaign for a majority-Catholic constituency, Kennedy capitalized on his somewhat-nominal religion. In his Presidential-run, while advisers disagreed on the issue of how to handle Kennedy's Catholicism, it was ultimately decided that he would use the example to emphasize the religious freedom and tolerance enshrined in The First Amendment to The Bill Of Rights in The Constitution. Ultimately, Kennedy won after essentially emphasizing that he was politically “Protestant” (in the sense that Adams and Paine meant), even if he was religiously Catholic. If people were generally bigoted towards the idea of Catholicism, could such a candidate win by making an appeal to liberal politics, religion aside?

        The answer lies in part on who voted for Kennedy's victory. Gibbs points out that J.F.K. received 78% of the sizable Catholic minority, but only 38% of the Protestant vote (“... the first candidate in history to win with a minority of the Protestant votes.”). It seems quite likely that Catholics voted for J.F.K. in religious solidarity, but fully 38% of Protestants is nothing to sneeze at; after all, J.F.K. did previously win his Primary in the same allegedly anti-Catholic country. In fact, if anything, these numbers suggest that Catholics were far more positively-motivated to vote on religious grounds than Protestants were negatively motivated: based on the same Gallup poll, Protestant Nixon won nearly half as many Catholic votes as Kennedy won Protestant votes. And while ol' Herbert Hoover had beaten Al Smith (the first Catholic candidate) handedly in terms of The Electoral College (84% v. 16%), Catholic Smith actually got 41% of the popular vote (leaving room for an interpretation of anti-Catholicism among the delegates or otherwise embedded in the process, but far less so in the people as a whole). American Presidential elections tend to be close matches (overall, Kennedy won with a slim 50.1% of the vote), and these general elections are fought between candidates who have already won their party-primaries: it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the attitudes of the population at large based on who wins a close race between two candidates in which voters' primary concerns can be expected to be policy-based (or at least political in nature). The most divisive cut in the Gallup poll was indeed politics: Kennedy got a paltry 5% of the Republican vote (not to mention two-thirds of the vote from labor-union members) whereas Nixon got three times that out of Democrats. Independents were split 43% v. 57% in favor of Nixon, which doesn't obviously suggest any serious weight given to any single non-political variable, such as religion. Further, when you look at the different regions of the country, the support only deviates from 50/50 by at most three points—and that was the East's favoring Kennedy. On top of that, Kennedy won only 39% of the college-educated vote, but 52% and 55% of the high-school-educated and grade-school-educated votes, respectively; at the risk of projecting contemporary campus politics into the past, this is the inverse relation as would be expected if one assumes the less-educated are more likely to be bigoted (and perhaps further supporting economic incentives as a stronger driving force among voters).

        Far better evidence for anti-Catholic sentiment in American Presidential politics would be the number of Catholic candidates which had even made it to a general election; by the 35^th President, only about 3% of candidates / Presidents had been Catholic (two and one individual, respectively), despite comprising a quarter of the population. While this naively implies that there was about 10x less Catholic participation in the Presidency than would be expected, a back-of-the-envelope correction for the differing proportion of Catholic Americans through time¹ suggests it was something more like ¼ of their expected participation (and this is without taking other variables, such as groups' differing status and wealth, into account). One could interpret this as up to a 3:1 bias in favor of Protestants over Catholics among Americans. Yet this is somewhat difficult to square with the fact that, when push came to shove, 41% of Americans voted for the Protestant candidate in 1928, and even Protestants only favored “their” candidate less than 2:1 in the nearly 50/50-split 1960 election.

        Of the plausibly-small remaining anti-Catholic bias at play during the 1960 general election, it is difficult to surmise if and how much of it might have been driven by sheer bigotry versus the memetic legacy of the founders' views of “Protestantism”-as-libertarianism (particularly given that I suspect these attitudes can be passed down to us without the articulation behind them making the trip, and because these are therefore not entirely mutually-exclusive explanations). That Kennedy enjoyed only a minority of support from the college-educated might be interpreted as circumstantial evidence in favor of an articulated philosophical reason to prefer “Protestantism” to Catholicism in an American executive, but this is by no means obvious and is not unlikely to be washed out by the economic incentives at play. Another hint is in the candidates' respective campaign strategies. Again, according to Gibbs, Nixon himself had expressed a desire to avoid the situation, believing it would help rather than hinder Kennedy. For Kennedy's part, he campaigned on the issue, using it as an example of American diversity, free expression, and to underscore the paramount importance of The Constitution (read: above even religion) to the duty of the Presidency. Gibbs argues that Kennedy's spin was that to vote for him was to vote for tolerance (there was a similar sentiment around our first black President, Barack Obama's campaigning in 2007), and evidently, tolerance won. Even when you examine the vocal minority of anti-Catholic sentiment, it is not all as obviously bigot-minded as it is presented by some historians, today. One shouldn't confuse the nominally religious with their more fundamentalist members, but is it really that absurd to worry that one's deepest cosmological beliefs could influence their decisions? Did devout Catholics in 1960 not place great weight on the opinion of The Pope? Shaun Casey of Berkely (via Roos) points out that Kennedy received hundreds of letters about how they could not vote for a Catholic; but say, 500, out of 180,000,000 Americans was 0.0003% of the population, about 0.0007% of voters, and about 0.001% of Protestants. This is about three orders of magnitude too small to have affected the election (in other words, to believe that the election turned on this kind of sentiment, you would need to believe that the actual number of voters who thought this way was three orders of magnitude larger than the number who decided to write-in about it, which it was evidently not, unless some countervailing force(s) outweighed it). Both Roos and Gibbs cite the same direct example of an anti-Kennedy voter switching to Kennedy so that their state wouldn't seem bigoted; this logic does not make much sense if the person is actually anti-Kennedy for bigoted reasons, and it is telling that to be a bigot was itself already stigmatized by 1960. On top of this, many of the direct quotes levied by Gibbs as examples of bigotry explicitly mention protecting “American culture” and a “heritage of freedom”, which are arguably as-likely to be under-girded by The Founders' libertarian values as by bigoted fear-mongering. The apparently nominal-nature of J.F.K.'s Catholicism perhaps points towards the latter, but again, Kennedy was also known to have played up his religious bona fides to help him win an election in another context, which could give the false impression that his religiosity wasn't merely nominal, after all.

        Interestingly, in our own time, RFK Jr. is running for President, and has been met with the exact opposite kind of opposition. Whereas Americans in the '60s were supposedly worried that JFK would take his orders from a foreign elite, RFK Jr. is today lambasted, censored, and all but exiled from the Democratic Party because he doesn't fall in line with the global ivory tower.

        It seems to me that anti-Catholicism was not a particularity large force in the 1960 election. It is less clear the extent to which this opposition arose as an outgrowth of America's founding philosophy of free-thought over dogmatism, versus overt bigotry or group-hatred. What isn't in doubt is that America's history is far more nuanced, and interesting, than the univariate history of bigotry and its gradual death, if only we are curious enough to think about it.

Footnotes:

1. Catholic population data was gleaned for (and linearly interpolated between) different years used the following additional sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_the_United_States#Colonial_era; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States; and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Catholic_Church_in_the_United_States#Colonial_era.