Faith of their Fathers

On Monday I finished reading Thomas Maier’s The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings, a fascinating and sympathetic journey through five generations of that family’s life in America. Maier’s thesis is that biographers and historians have tended to underestimate the influence of the Kennedys’ Roman Catholicism and Irish ethnicity on their politics, mainly because none of the Kennedys set up the theocracy feared by (among others) the Houston ministers during the 1960 presidential campaign. But Maier argues that Jack and Robert Kennedy staunchly opposed communism primarily because they had been shaped by a conservative Catholicism that saw communism as its primary enemy. Moreover, Robert Kennedy fought hard for civil rights both because Catholic theologians had been teaching that integration was the morally correct choice and because he saw the treatment of African-Americans through the lens of his own Irish experience.


Maier’s thesis is essentially correct. One cannot totally divorce someone’s political ideas from the experiences (whether sacred or secular) that shaped him or her. Maier has an easier time drawing a line from the Kennedys’ Irish immigrant experience to their politics since for a Kennedy being an Irish-American meant knowing oppression first by the English and then by the Boston Brahmins. The Irish in the Kennedys compelled them to beat the Brahmins whether in finance (as Joe Kennedy did) or in building a new political base (as Joe’s father PJ and father-in-law John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald did). But what did it mean to a Kennedy to be a Roman Catholic?

It helps to understand that Roman Catholicism is not a monolithic religion—something that Protestants too often fail to grasp. There are people like the late Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman, fighting Vatican II tooth and nail and supporting an almost reactionary political mindset, as well as those like the late Richard Cardinal Cushing and the Jesuit Fr. Richard McSorley, who welcomed the church’s aggiornamento and thought that the church’s creeds pushed for a progressive answer to the social and political questions of the day. (All three clerics were well known to the Kennedy family.) Thus, it is not surprising to see a wide variety of responses, even from equally pious members of the family. Indeed, as Maier points out, there were shifts in the way that Robert Kennedy (one of the most devout of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s children) dealt with clergy and with his attitudes towards certain political questions.

At the same time, though, Maier points out that there were certain constants amid the changes. For example, Robert Kennedy firmly believed in original sin, unlike most of his more secular liberal allies. Though Maier does not say so, I would argue that it added gravitas to Robert’s agenda and kept him from the utopianism so prevalent among the political left. And thus, though I am not a Roman Catholic, I appreciate the way that his faith added depth to what could have been a very flat way of looking at politics.

Most commentators on faith and politics assume that a politician of faith must either be a diehard secularist in political life or an outright theocrat. Maier shows us another possibility: people’s faith shapes their values, which will determine to some degree the political questions they find most interesting and the approaches they will use to answer those questions, even if their faith does not explicitly determine their politics and they use secular arguments in the political realm and find themselves often allied on political matters with those of a completely different faith.