I secretly engage in time travel. When my classes are finished for the day and the students have gone home, I use a certain DVD to escape the present and visit a world long since vanished. Grainy images flicker across the screen, and it is no longer 2007 in upstate New York, it is 1960 in Houston, Texas, and I’m at the Rice Hotel to hear Senator John Kennedy defend his presidential candidacy against those who claimed his Roman Catholicism would blur any separation between church and state. Many worried that a Catholic president would take his marching orders from Rome.

Now this same issue has arisen again, only this time it’s candidate Mitt Romney’s Mormonism that has center stage. Commentators are staking their claims on whether Romney’s recent speech can measure up to Kennedy’s. To me, it’s not even close, but not for the usual reasons.

It’s hardly surprising that Kennedy focused on the so-called “separation clause” of the First Amendment. Ted Sorensen, JFK’s speechwriter for the occasion, thought the speech would either make the campaign or break it, and put all his considerable intellectual tools to work, prompting Kennedy’s “I believe the separation between church and state to be absolute…I am not the Catholic candidate for President, I am the Democratic candidate for president who happens to be a Catholic.”

Romney, on the other hand, had other goals. As CNN’s Bill Schneider put it, Romney was out to mend the fences between his own Mormonism and the Christian evangelicals, a voting bloc with its own concerns about Mormon theology and polity. As such, it is hardly surprising that Romney spent nearly all his time on the “free exercise” clause of the First Amendment, wanting a more expansive role for religion in the public square, sounding very much like the opposite of what Kennedy had been trying to achieve: a religious person who happens to be a politician. 

But the differences between the two speeches are far more profound than matters of emphasis, and they show just how far the level of public discourse has plummeted in less than 50 years. Kennedy demonstrated a fluency in his own religious tradition that was markedly absent in Romney’s words. Kennedy also clearly engaged the body politic with his knowledge of the American Catholic bishops and American Catholic beliefs—making the case that he was squarely in the mainstream of how the American Catholic tradition was attempting to be a legitimate player within the American experiment.

Romney, on the other hand, spoke mostly in the vapid and vague generalities so coveted by the 20-second sound-bite. After listening to Kennedy’s speech, Romney’s sounds more like the talk given by the winner of a high school civics award.  In the words of forensics colleagues, it is more pathos than logos, more pabulum than red meat. 

But the gulf is wider yet. Unlike Romney’s speech, carefully staged at the George Bush Presidential Library, Kennedy eschewed such a home field advantage and went straight to the Lion’s Den—giving his speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, and then taking on all comers in a vigorous but civil question and answer session.

No staging, no handlers, just sharp, pointed questions and the frank exchange of views on both sides. I have no idea whether Romney possesses the intellect to even do such a thing. It has been so long since candidates have spoken at that level and with even the barest speck of forthrightness, it’s probably a skill lost to a time that valued substance over form. 

And it gets worse. Kennedy’s questioners represented the last gasp of the heyday of American mainstream churches: a time when religious discourse had yet to be marginalized and ministers were still expected to possess a thorough understanding of how theological doctrine could interact with American politics. 

Unrehearsed, members of the clergy came to the microphone one after the other, asking Kennedy very pointed and sophisticated questions, often quoting from obscure theological texts from both their and the candidate’s traditions.  And Kennedy’s answers matched his questioners’ acumen, idea for idea.  Such an exchange is unimaginable today. 

Thus, this time travel is a dangerous thing. As I listen to Kennedy and his questioners, I’m reminded of some great work of art—a piece of beautiful nobility existing in rarified air—only to be rudely awakened by the latest McCandidate, speaking in trite snippets of fluff. How the mighty have fallen. 

-- Mike McKenzie, associate professor of philosophy and religion