Whenever I hear somebody saying that John Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 put the religious question to rest, it raises my hackles. I remember quite well that JFK referred to his Catholicism as “an accident of birth”, for which I will take his word. This contrasts with the great French-Irish writer Hilaire Belloc’s response.
Belloc was a naturalized British citizen. When he ran for Parliament in 1906, a heckler in the crowd during a campaign speech asked if he were a papist. Belloc, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a rosary, responded “Sir, so far as possible I hear Mass each day and I go to my knees and tell these beads each night. If that offends you, then I pray God may spare me the indignity of representing you in Parliament.” He won the election.
Now that’s putting the religious question to rest.
I’d never heard this before, but I will say “Amen” to that.
We’d really have to scrape through Congress to find somebody who is the intellectual equivalent of a Hillaire Belloc. Many are on par with George Babbitt, certainly; Belloc, not so much.
Safe to say no one of that caliber is running for president either
We are truly poorly served by our political class. I suspect that it has something to do with giving them much more power over time, combined with a grueling selection process that drives out most people and a first-past-the-post election system that cartelizes politics. Can we get people to fix these systemic problems? Not likely. We just have to hope that the aberrantly good politicians come along with sufficient frequency to keep us from the edge of failure.