Doing Politics Without God

Eleven days before making it official, John Fitzgerald Kennedy gave his first speech as president-elect, speaking in Boston where he had spent the first 43 years of his life. It was early January of 1961; and, striking a nostalgic note, he reminded his audience beneath the great Bulfinch building of the State House that “It was here my grandparents were born—it is here I hope my grandchildren will be born.”  

Alas, it was not to be. Less than three years later—on November 22, 1963—he would be gunned down in Dallas, a day Americans of a certain generation will never forget.

But it was not just nostalgia that Kennedy had gone to Boston to express. A sense of hope was in the air that day as well, so that when “the high court of history” convened to make its judgment upon his presidency, it would conclude that he had been surrounded by men of “courage, judgment, integrity, and dedication.” Let these be, he added, “the qualities which, with God’s help, this son of Massachusetts hopes will characterize our government’s conduct in the four stormy years that lie ahead.”

It was the only mention God got in the entire speech. Or in nearly any speech JFK would deliver over the many years he spent in politics. Which was no accident, by the way, owing to the instruction he’d given Richard Goodwin, who both researched and wrote the thing. “I was always fond of Lincoln’s goodbye to his fellow townsmen in Springfield, Illinois,” Kennedy told him. “It’s from his heart, and it’s short. That’s important.” “But Dick,” he then added, “less God.”

So, God pretty much ends up on the cutting room floor. Unlike Lincoln, for whom leaving God out of the equation would have been simply unthinkable. And why is that? Because for Abraham Lincoln, along with practically everyone else in 19th-century America, God was not a parenthetical aside, not a fifth wheel, the turning of which only took place on Sundays in church. He was everywhere. Indeed, not the least of the places He inhabited was the Holy Book itself, where His self-revealing Word spoke to everyone in authoritative and unmistakable accent.  

So, what did president-elect Lincoln actually say about God that set him so sharply apart from Kennedy, who, for all that his religious pedigree remained Roman Catholic, was really only a secularist after all? And what is secularism if not the dismantling of the ladder that leads men from this world to the next, leaving them bereft in the face of a cosmos lacking any connection to the hereafter?  

Here, then, are the actual words Lincoln spoke from the platform of the train that would deliver him twelve days later to Washington where a bloody Civil War was about to begin. And who, like Kennedy himself, would never return, an assassin’s bullet having struck him down on April 15, 1865, six days after the war’s end:

No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing, when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.

Do presidents speak like that anymore? Does anyone? Certainly, John Kennedy did not. 

We have come a long way since Lincoln. Who, by the way, wrote his own speeches, not needing to outsource his muse to this or that highly-paid verbalist. He knew his own mind and it was steeped in the truths that matter, truths about which he felt deeply and could hone his expression of to suit the circumstance. Like the metaphysical equality of the black man, whom we may not enslave because, like all of us, he comes from God, in whose image he was most fearfully made. And that, as Lincoln pointedly reminded the people of Springfield whom he was about to take leave of, a politics grounded in God will ultimately succeed even as the neglect of God will cause it no less ultimately to fail. 

What are the criteria that God has laid down which we ignore at our peril? They are not to be found in “the high court of history,” whose judgments, even if just and true, can provide no solace for the living since none of us will be alive to receive them when history finally gets around to issuing them. In fact, history itself must render an account—not to itself, as if it were a self-justifying mechanism, but to God, who sits in judgment upon all things under the sun. 

“Everything will come before His truth and be revealed,” Romano Guardini reminds us in The Virtues, a profound study written in the aftermath of the destruction of Nazi Germany, whose very rejection of divine and transcendent truth had left it in ruins. “Everything will come under His justice and receive His final verdict.” Justice is not determined by the powerful, nor by the passions, but by truth itself, which is but another name for God. And by so many acts of submission to the truth, we grow in virtue—the habit of which extends, says Guardini, “through the whole of existence, as a harmony which gathers it into a unity.” Thus does it rise to God, even as it radiates out from God.

“Plato already knew this,” he adds, “when he invented for God the name of Agathon, the ‘good.’ It is from the eternal goodness of God that moral enlightenment comes into the soul of the receptive man.” And in what does the perfection toward which the practice of the good consist? Nothing less than the life of faith itself. “We may recall,” he says, “the mysterious vision in the Apocalypse where the embodiment of order, the Holy City, comes down from God to man” (Revelation 21:10ff), whose emanations diffuse out into the whole of the public life. 

We are thus enjoined to give shape to the world, to the temporal order, according to a blueprint not of our design but of God’s. For it is He alone who is God, the real and living Lord and Creator of the universe, to whom all are obliged to obey.

This is the basic order of all earthly conditions and of all earthly activity. Against it, the first man rebelled when he let himself be persuaded that he might “be as God,” and this rebellion continues to the present day, on the part of great and small, genius and gabbler. But if this order is disturbed, then no matter how much power is gained, how much welfare secured, or how much culture developed, all things remain in chaos.

Not exactly a perspective which secularist politicians are likely to canvass when instructing their speechwriters to give them “less God” when addressing the voters who elected them.