My mother took her right to vote very seriously. After all, she was a proud American citizen; a thankful American immigrant who read the news religiously, listened to the radio, and watched television back when there were only three stations on the big box in the living room.
She stood in line at our polling place; entering that voting booth confident in the knowledge that it was a secret ballot; allowing her to vote her mind and her conscience. Mom took me along when I was very little, and I still remember the feeling of the black cloth and the swish sound of the metal track as we were surrounded by the privacy curtain. There was a hushed quiet in the room; not a library quiet, but rather the quiet of a chapel. To her, voting was a sacred act; a rite as well as a right. Although it wasn’t her birth right, upon becoming an American citizen, it was her entitlement. It was also her right as a woman. You see my mother was born in 1917. In 1917 an American woman did NOT have the right to vote. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing women the right to vote was only passed by Congress on June 4, 1919 and ratified on August 18, 1920.
That swish of the sacred curtain of the voting booth has been replaced by a sonic boom capable of shaking the very foundations our faith in the Democratic process. That sonic boom is the noise of protest revolving around the separation of Church and State.
This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Americans find themselves struggling with the voting booth, or the separation of Church and State. Our Founding Fathers wrestled with it. [In England and America a Religious Test was administered in order to promote certain religious beliefs and exclude others.] On September 17, 1787, Article VI, the “No Religious Test Clause” was signed into the American Constitution and ratified on June 21, 1788. “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
At the time the United States Constitution was adopted, religious qualifications for holding state and local office were pervasive. Delaware’s constitution, for example, required government officials to “profess faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost.” North Carolina barred anyone “who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion” from serving in the government. Religious Tests effectively barred Catholics, non-believers, and non-Christians from holding office. And until struck down by the Supreme Court in 1978, many states had laws prohibiting clergy from holding office!
In the late 1950s, Catholic politicians were viewed with open suspicion by many mainline Protestants and Evangelicals, not exactly a great climate for the presidential campaign of the first Catholic elected President of the United States. Catholic candidates were accused of having “dual loyalties” to both the Vatican and the United States, prompting John Fitzgerald Kennedy to say, “I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.
On September 12, 1960, Candidate Kennedy addressed the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a group of Protestant ministers, in an attempt to mitigate the reluctance of Protestant faith leaders to support a Catholic Candidate. I leave you today with his words that ring just as true today as then, and which may give today’s voters a lens into how America has changed and perhaps give them the courage to “vote their convictions” when the time comes.
“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew-- or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril.”
Wishing you a thoughtful week of wrestling with your convictions; it is good exercise.
Rabbi Rose
