Related articles and links |  1 of 5

Christianity Today's profiles of this year's election candidates will continue tomorrow with an article on George W. Bush's need to retain the evangelical vote.

Whatever comment you make about John Kerry's Christianity, it will fit somewhere in the spiritual timeline of his life.

Critics say Kerry, a Roman Catholic, has all the form and ritual of religion but almost none of the doctrine. Others see a selfless public servant of iron-clad Christian conscience unafraid to stand his ground on moral issues in opposition to a cardinal or bishop.

The image-buffers in the Democratic presidential campaign don't often allow a spiritual light to shine very far into the interior of John Kerry. But on occasion, Kerry himself opens up. A few months back, as his presidential campaign plane flew over Oregon's Hood River, he stared out the window. Later at an outdoor rally, he exclaimed,

"I was flying down the Hood River and the gorges. I was thinking: God! I need to get back here!

"I was planning on doing a little windsurfing."

Kerry was on his Wheels Up for a Stronger America tour. During a three-day, five-event swing through the Pacific Northwest, during which Christianity Today trailed the Kerry campaign, this was the only time the candidate invoked God's name publicly.

For Kerry, windsurfing is one measure of his spirituality. In a 1998 interview with American Windsurfer, he said windsurfing is more spiritually fulfilling than playing hockey because windsurfing "allows nature to play with you in ways that nature doesn't involve itself with a hockey game."

In that interview, Kerry provided some of his most detailed public comments about his theological ideals:

"I'm a Catholic and I practice, but at the same time I have an open-mindedness to many other expressions of spirituality that come through different religions. … I've spent some time reading and thinking about [religion] and trying to study it, and I've arrived at not so much a sense of the differences, but a sense of the similarities in so many ways; the value-system roots and linkages between the Torah, the Qur'an, and the Bible and the fundamental story that runs through all of this, that … really connects all of us.

"I've always been fascinated by the transcendentalists and the pantheists and others who found these great connections just in nature, in trees, the ponds, the ripples of the wind on the pond, the great feast of nature itself."

This windsurfer's open-mindedness translates into some jarring stances on public policy.

For example, Kerry said in a July interview with an Iowa newspaper, "I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception." That comment apparently was the first time Kerry, who has consistent endorsements from leading pro-choice groups, reported a belief that human life begins at the moment of conception—a key pro-life tenet.

Kerry continued, "I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist." Despite Kerry's comments on human conception, NARAL Pro-Choice America declared in July, "The choice for pro-choice voters is abundantly clear—only Kerry-Edwards can be counted on to protect and defend a woman's right to choose."

Recently American Catholic bishops, however, have publicly crossed swords with pro-choice Catholic pols, such as Kerry, the first Catholic presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy in 1960. (See "Senate's Top Democrat in the Cross Hairs," p. 36.) And Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Catholic Church's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a private memo this summer advised American bishops to refuse Communion to all pro-choice Catholic officeholders.

next page... |  1 of 5

October 2004, Vol. 48, No. 10