WASHINGTON (ABP) — On All Saints' Day 2007, John Kerry talked publicly about his faith in a way that many of his fellow Democrats wish he had in 2004, when he lost his presidential bid to President Bush.
But, Kerry noted, such a speech immediately before the presidential election might not have been an appropriate injection of faith into the campaign.
Some political pundits have attributed the Massachusetts senator's loss, at least in part, to his difficulty in articulating his own beliefs – including his active Catholicism. As the 2008 election cycle gears up, Kerry spoke Nov. 1 on the role of faith in political campaigns to an informal gathering of journalists, sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Discussion about candidates' faith – including those of the Democratic front-runners – are “again very central to the political dialogue,” Kerry said. Still, he said, he would want candidates to talk more freely than he did about faith but avoid letting such discussion devolve into pandering.
“I think it's safe to say that this is an area where we have yet to get it right in the country,” he said.
He acknowledged that, in 2004, many of his Democratic supporters were uncomfortable with the idea of him discussing his religion freely, even though his opponent was able to connect with many religious voters precisely because of his ease in talking about his faith journey. Kerry admitted he was not exactly bred for such freewheeling discussion of one's innermost thoughts.
“The Catholicism that I grew up with is quite different from the Catholicism that we have today,” he said, noting that the church's Vatican II reforms in the 1960s created a new kind of Catholicism. “Nowadays, it's much more evangelical — and by evangelical, something is evangelical when Christ is at its center and the Bible is at its center,” Kerry said.
However, Democrats make a mistake in pretending that a candidate has no business discussing his personal faith with voters. “Religion has to inform, if you are religious, who you are — or you're not religious,” he said. “… [T]he presidency is largely about character, and your character, it has to be informed by your value system, by your beliefs. And so what you believe or don't believe about some of these issues is fair game.”
Kerry said his Catholicism has been a very important part of his life since his days as an altar boy, although it had its typical “ups and its downs.” Nonetheless, he said, during his days of combat in Vietnam, he “had a very necessary and immediate relationship with God.”
When he later decided to enter public service, he said some of his inspirations were the great liberal Christian leaders of his formative years, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and William Sloane Coffin. “In public life, ultimately, I came to a much sort of stronger, closer understanding of my own relationship and understanding of my responsibilities and my faith,” Kerry said.
But, he added: “And I've been very comfortable with [my faith] ever since, until of course 2004, when we sort of saw this exploitation, this wedge process played out, in a very open and public and difficult way.”
During the 2004 campaign, a handful of Catholic bishops said they would refuse to serve Kerry communion because of his support for keeping abortion legal. Kerry said that criticism forced him into an entirely different dilemma than the one faced by John Kennedy, the last major Catholic presidential candidate.
“President Kennedy's challenge was to prove that he was not so Catholic that he could be president. My challenge was to prove that I was Catholic enough that I could be president,” he said.
Kerry said current candidates are faced with a dilemma in how to properly use their personal faith in their campaigns. Candidates must decide “how to use religion not as a weapon,” he said, but to “use it to find common ground.”
He listed four areas where he said he believed both liberal and conservative Americans of faith could find common ground on controversial issues:
— “The value of human life and the need to alleviate suffering” around the world: “I know that Jesus didn't say just heal the sick if they can pay for it, and so we're missing something in this discussion,” he said. He noted a recent conversation he had with Southern Baptist megachurch pastor and bestselling author Rick Warren in which Warren confessed that he, for much of his ministry, had simply overlooked the gospels' strong call for Christians to do something about the world's suffering.
— The environment: “For many of us, respect for God's creation translates into a duty to protect and sustain the first creation,” Kerry said. “Before God created man, God created heaven and Earth.”
— Reducing the abortion rate: “I think we have been guilty in the [Democratic] Party at times” of being pro-choice “without honoring the deeply held beliefs” of those who believe abortion should be illegal, Kerry said. “There are 1.3 million abortions in this country, and I don't think anybody would disagree that that is too many.”
— War and peace: “Whatever your philosophical differences, all of us, I think, of different faiths have the universal sense of values and ethics and moral truths that respect the value and dignity of all human beings, and that applies to when you go to war,” he said.
But the window for beginning a proper discussion of religion in any campaign is a narrow one, Kerry added.
“The time to do it is not in the heat of the last three months of the presidential race. The time to do it is now, before you get into it,” he said. “And the bona fides of it have to be absolutely legitimate and unassailable.”
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