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Can He Do That?
He can if they let him!
In 1961, sociologist Robert Bellah watched John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, give his inaugural address. At the time, Kennedy’s religion was controversial — many Americans mistrusted the Catholic Church and suspected Kennedy of being secretly in cahoots with the Pope.
But in his speech, Kennedy treated religion the same way as the presidents who had come before him, making vague references to the United States as an instrument of God’s will but steering away from any specific religious claims. Bellah wondered how the American political formulas around religion had come to be. Why not be more explicitly Christian in an overwhelmingly Christian nation? Why mention God at all in a country that prized the separation of church and state?
He concluded that Americans had developed a “civil religion” over the years, describing it this way
What we have, then, from the earliest years of the republic is a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity. This religion-there seems no other word for it-while not antithetical to and indeed sharing much in common with Christianity, was neither sectarian nor in any specific sense Christian.
