The Kennedy Myth

Historic civil religion is the basic strand of American civil religion. Our puritan forbears came to this new land to establish a holy commonwealth, beholden to a sovereign God who provided them with transcendent ideals which both guided and judged them, rendering them quite aware of the arrogance of power and skeptical of charismatic claims. Our nation was founded upon republican principles, chief among which was a God-given right to liberty, accompanied by a lofty sense of the duties of citizenship and humble sense of the equality of all persons, which refused to exalt public officials ceremonially. More recently, Catholic civil religion has belatedly entered into historic American civil religion with its sense of an eternal backdrop behind the human stage, a sense of human solidarity, and a belief in a durable world with a permanent tragic dimension; it is not so much an addition to the other two sky religions leading us forward to conquer new worlds as an earth religion which could help to counter- balance their impatience and austerity. Despite some nods toward historic civil religion at the beginning and end of Kennedy's Inaugural Address and even more in his farewell to Massachusetts, historic American civil religion is illuminated in the Kennedy myth more by its absence than its presence, indeed by its often being sorely lacking. Kennedy was detached from historic civil religion--puritan, republican, and Catholic streams alike. While a "religious test" for office in terms of ecclesiastical affiliation is improper, a violation of separation of church and state rightly reversed by Kennedy's election (the so-called religious issue), the question of Kennedy's values, his operant civil religion (the real religious issue), deserves to be asked of Kennedy and of every presidential aspirant. Criticism and evaluation at this point is quite justified, and, from a puritan point of view, church and state must be separate to encourage such criticism (in contrast to Kennedy's modern point of view which saw the church as irrelevant to political life). Yet criticism is precisely what the church (and intellectuals) did not give Kennedy enough of, not when he was alive, even less in death, except for fixed allusions to his sins, like every man's, in the funeral Mass. Nor did Kennedy provide self-criticism for himself. So often, fundamental assumptions went unquestioned, bracketed out by the pragmatic process he loved so well, and those who tried to raise questions of value were either disregarded or banished (lacking total loyalty because they had principles of their own!). So often, precisely what was lacking in the Kennedy political method--which Fairlie documents over and over and about whose repetition he warns us--were political values, limited historic goods, which might be prioritized and methodically sought. Whether Kennedy had convictions is moot; he surely did not have the courage of his convictions, was unwilling to take limited historic risks for political programs though he was all too willing to take all-out risks in his cult of toughness, and lacked the patience and perseverance to carry out the long twilight struggle against tyranny, poverty, disease, and war which he had annunciated. Yet Kennedy was not without some glimmers of historic civil religion especially near the end of his life when, Sorensen tells us, values finally counted more to him than votes. When riots forced his hand Kennedy transcended his enforcement of existing civil rights laws and his middling administrative actions to propose sweeping civil rights legislation, not simply based on the pressure of black constituents and their white urban allies but also backed by historic ideals of justice and equality. In the peace area, Kennedy began moves toward arms control, coexistence, and detente symbolized by the test ban treaty, which does not constitute the full organic peace for which we hope but surely—in contrast to the Cold War ideology of confrontation in which he bad been embroiled--involves a move in an historic direction. After his death, Kennedy was idealized as a hero of historic peace and freedom, which, despite its shallow rootedness in reality, was not an ignoble ideal. It was partly that ideal which motivated Robert Kennedy as John Kennedy's extension to question the justice of the Vietnam war, as Kennedy had never done, along the lines of an historic just war theory, even repudiating his brother's policy, and also moved him to identify with the poor and blacks and other victims in a quite compassionate historic manner. Historic civil religion was largely lacking from responses to Kennedy's death, especially as the church lent itself to archaic unification and commended some of the worst sides of Kennedy to 'be followed uncritically, even putting him forward as a martyr and a Christ figure, but there was a turning to an historic providential or covenantal God, a temporary questioning of American innocence and a wallowing in slightly misdirected guilt, and at least some halting attempts to find historic meaning in the assassination in particular and in tragedy in general.