In
the competition for the White House religion has always been very
important especially in a country like the U.S. where the religion’s
appurtenance is really important for American electors: if you want
to be voted topics like religion, faith are essential.
In
many presidential elections the religion has played a key role, here
some episodes from the past:
in
2004, the Methodist George W. Bush won the confirmation thanks to a
campaign focused on the ethical and religious values: in that
situation Bush was voted by a good part of the Catholic electorate,
traditionally democratic.
In
the presidential elections of 1960 the Democrat candidate John
Fitzgerald Kennedy defeated the Quaker Richard Nixon, becoming the
first Catholic president in American history. During the election
campaign, Kennedy was under attack because of his catholic faith and
already
during the primaries for the Democratic leadership, the Massachusetts
senator was forced to redouble his efforts because of religious.
After
the party's nomination, Kennedy thought the problem of religion was
solved but it wasn’t.
For
that reason in September 1960, two months before the vote, he had to
return to the subject.
On
day 12, the candidate of the Democratic Party went to Houston ,Texas,
to participate in a debate organized by the Association of ministers
of religion, which is a group part of the American Protestantism. The
main theme was the religion of the future President.
At
the beginning of his speech Kennedy affirmed that in 1960 the
problem could not be the religion of the President because America
had more important problems than this: the spread of communist
influence, the hungry children in West Virginia, the old people who
couldn't pay their doctor bills and the families forced to give up
their farms.
According
to JFK these topics were the real problems of the election campaign.
Anyway JFK knew the importance of the subject and he said it was
necessary to declare once again what kind of America he believed in.
JFK
said that he believed in an America where the separation of church
and state was absolute: in this kind of America a catholic priest
could not tell the president how to act, and a protestant minister
could not tell him for whom to vote.
He
believed in an America without religious intolerance, where all men
and all churches were equal, where every man had the same right to
attend or not attend the church of his choice.
According
to Kennedy the religion of the president should be his private
affair, and he declared the appurtenance of the Catholicism at the
history of the United States.
It’s
remarkable what JFK declared, a very sensitive phrase: “But if
this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost
their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then
it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of
Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history,
and in the eyes of our own people.”
We
can consider the election of JFK as a turning point in the history of
U.S; in fact for the first time the WASP paradigm (White Anglo-Saxon
and Protestant) was not respected.
Sources:
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