From my latest article at RNS:
Ben Carson doesn’t think a Muslim should be president and despite widespread criticism he hasn’t backed down.
The controversy over Carson’s comments encapsulates the ambiguity of our country’s relationship to religion — a relationship that goes back to the Founding Fathers and the writing of the Constitution. It’s clear that by not having an established national church, the earliest Americans did not want to impose a religious test for public office. No one would be automatically disqualified due to religious reasons.
As a Baptist, I’m glad we don’t have that kind of test. The earliest Baptists were the outsiders in American life, often threatened, suppressed, and jailed for their beliefs.
Other religious groups, like Roman Catholics, were also culturally disenfranchised, which is why the ascent of John F. Kennedy to the presidency was such a monumental moment in our history. So, even though the earliest Americans did not impose a religious test for office, they would have had a difficult time imagining a Catholic like Kennedy or a Baptist like Truman occupying the White House.
But here’s the catch. The fact that our country has never had religious test for public office, and that no one is automatically disqualified due to religious beliefs does not mean that religion doesn’t matter.
The reason why Kennedy’s Catholicism was controversial in 1960 was because many feared that Kennedy’s view of the papacy would give the pope an outsized, inappropriate influence in American governance. Some of the opposition to Kennedy was based in ignorance and prejudice against Catholics, but for many, it was because they took Kennedy’s religion seriously that they chose not to vote for him.
Today, the people who were most astonished at Ben Carson’s comments seem to think that a person’s religious beliefs should be totally irrelevant to how they govern or to how one votes. But that kind of religious reductionism is silly to most religious people. We know that religion really does matter in our daily life and how we think and how we live.
