JFK’s Faith & Death

The fiftieth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination has predictably sparked lots of remembrance but little particularly about his religious faith. He was of course the first and only U.S. Catholic president. Thirty four years before JFK’s election Democrat Al Smith had lost the presidency perhaps in part because of his Catholicism.

In 1959, JFK as senator appeared privately before the Methodist Council of Bishops (photo above), clearly testing his appeal as a Catholic to skeptical Protestants. The impression of him was favorable, although fellow Methodist Hubert Humphrey, another senator and presidential aspirant who also appeared, was more of a favorite. (See my book Methodism & Politics in the 20th Century.)

During the presidential primaries in 1960, especially in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia, running against Humphrey, JFK assured voters his Catholicism would not affect his governance. More famously, during the general election campaign against Richard Nixon, a Quaker who attended a Methodist church, JFK rebutted concerns about his Catholicism by addressing the Houston Ministerial Association. Photos show an auditorium of hundreds of dark suited, all male, white clergy. Clearly the association was racially segregated.

JFK assured the Houston Protestant clergy:

“Whatever issue may come before me as president – on birth control, divorce,…or any other subject, I will make my decision…in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest…If the time should ever come…when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office.”

JFK’s mother was ardently devout while his father was church attending but spiritually more aloof, himself aggressively adulterous and described as “amoral.” Two of JFK’s sisters married Protestants, and JFK once considered marrying a Protestant, which his parents forbade. He attended an Episcopal prep school, and most of his closest associates were Episcopalians or other well heeled WASPs.

As historian David Holmes writes in The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents, “Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose worldly protagonists often had Irish names but attended Episcopal churches, Kennedy seem to fit the fashionable Episcopal mold better than the Roman Catholic type.”

Protestant historian Martin Marty once described JFK as “spiritually rootless and politically almost disturbingly secular.” Close confidante Ted Sorenson once told JFK: “I think some of my Unitarianism is rubbing off on you.” Sorenson recalled him as a “faithful adherent but he did not talk about it.”

JFK routinely quoted from the King James Bible in speeches, not the Catholic Bible. Although he had a “tribal loyalty to the church,” Holmes describes JFK’s overall spiritual ethos as more akin to the deistic Episcopalianism of some 18th Century Founding Fathers. Somewhat similar to some of the Catholic monarchs of continental Europe, JFK divorced his personal life, which included countless adulteries, from his church’s teachings. Holmes cites JFK’s friend, reporter Ben Bradlee, as claiming that JFK favored abortion rights. If true, JFK was again showing his proclivity for WASP attitudes of the era.

In 1959 JFK met an aged Winston Churchill on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht, telling the former prime minister that his Catholicism could be an electoral obstacle to the presidency. JFK laughed when Churchill responded: “If that’s the only difficulty, you can always change your religion and still remain a good Christian.”

The details of JFK’s exact theology are unclear, but he seems to have believed in God and in a Providential role for himself. Echoing Lincoln at the start of the Civil War, JFK wrote himself a note after his tense meeting with Soviet chief Nikita Khrushchev: “I know that there is a God and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I am ready.” JFK sometimes sought solitude in a church during times of crisis.

Whatever his private beliefs, JFK’s election as the first Catholic President solidified American Catholics’ role in the architecture of American civil religion, whose priestly rites JFK managed masterfully. He effortlessly spoke in the idiom of nearly all his predecessors in placing American democracy at the services of a benevolent God. His funeral, modeled somewhat after Lincoln’s, and which included heads of state and other dignitaries walking up Connecticut Avenue from the White House to St. Matthews Cathedral, where JFK had worshiped, was itself a magnificent harmony of Christian hope and American religious pageantry.

Interestingly, a Dallas Methodist minister played a key role in establishing some mythology surrounding JFK’s assassination in Dallas. The Rev. William Holmes, who later would pastor prominent Metropolitan Methodist Church in Washington, DC where the Nixons had attended in the 1950s, urged his city of Dallas to atone for the role its “extremism” played in facilitating the presidential murder. Holmes preached:

“I am well aware this morning that the man charged with the assassination of our
President is an admitted, left-wing Marxist. But any extremism – whether it wears the hat of left-wing or right-wing – issues in the same by-products. It announces death and condemnation to all who hold a different point of view. And here is the hardest thing to say: There is no city in the United States which in recent months and years has been more acquiescent toward its extremists than Dallas, Texas. We, the majority of citizens, have gone quietly about our work and leisure, forfeiting the city’s image to the hate mongers and reactionaries in our midst. The spirit of assassination has been with us for some time – not manifest in bullets, but in spitting mouths and political invectives.”

Rev. Holmes shared the stories of 4th grade children cheering the president’s death (a story he learned from a friend), a conservative crowd’s earlier heckling Adlai Stevenson and right wing demonstrators manhandling Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in a hotel lobby. LBJ biographer Robert Caro, in his latest volume, describes how LBJ shrewdly exploited the kerfuffle by cheerfully walking with his wife as slowly as possible through the angry crowd, to facilitate maximum sympathetic media coverage.

Holmes preached:

“The vocal, organized and unorganized extremists have captured us – while we were sleeping in the night. And there is no way in all creation to avoid our mutual guilt. By our timidity, we have encouraged the aggressor; by our paralysis we have given safe conduct to reactionaries; by our confusion we have promoted the clarity of evil; by our small prejudices and little hates we have prepared the way for monstrous and demonic acts that have betrayed us all. We have become a garbled people, mistaking patriotic cries for patriotism, boisterous boasts for courage, and superficial piety for faith. In this week of blood-stained history and death, we are under an imperative to cry: “Oh Lord, have mercy on us all.”

Although Holmes cited Lee Harvey Oswald as a Marxist, his sermon targeted right wing extremism in Dallas as complicit in JFK’s death. That sermon was reported on CBS News with Walter Cronkite, reportedly earning him threats, and forcing him and his family to live under police protection for some days. As United Methodist News Service notes, Holmes went on to a ministerial career of addressing “controversial subjects, including the CIA, homosexuality, abortion, gun control and affirmative action.”

Holmes’ nationally publicized sermon was only one small example of the enormous influence of JFK’s life and death, which abruptly closed one era and presaged a more tumultuous one.