Senator John F. Kerry defended the place of religious discussion in American political life yesterday, even as the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee decried the "unitary assertion of rectitude by certain Christian figures" and the "exploitation of religion" he said played a role in his loss to President Bush, who garnered disproportionate support from the most devout voters.The Massachusetts Democrat, whose Catholic faith at times was an issue in his presidential campaign, said it was "fair game" to expect candidates to discuss theology, and said he should have done so more prominently in 2004.
"The presidency is largely about character," he said at a discussion hosted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. "It has to be influenced by your value system and beliefs."
He called upon Democrats running for president this year to be more forward in discussing their religious backgrounds with voters, and identified domestic and global poverty, the environment, abortion, and the rules of war as issues in which scriptural language and values could be used to rally religious-minded voters to traditionally Democratic policies.
Kerry traced his religious background to John Winthrop, an ancestor who first used the term "city on a hill" as an early Puritan settler of 17th-century New England.
Kerry's father was Catholic and his mother Protestant, but she converted and guided Kerry in his faith.
As a teenage altar boy, he said, he was "unbelievably immersed in my religion" and as a soldier in Vietnam discovered a "necessary and immediate" version of it: "Protect me, and I'll be good," he joked.
But in 2004, Kerry came under fire from four Catholic bishops, who sought to deny him Holy Communion because he supported abortion rights. Other Catholic politicians have faced similar reactions from church leaders.
"Democratic candidates who are Catholic are quite wary of speaking of their own religion, because the bishops have blasted so many of them recently," said the Rev. Mark Massa, codirector of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.
Kerry challenged the bishops who contested his position on abortion, but acknowledged he could have been more forceful in asserting the complexity of his background in approaching the subject.
"For John F. Kennedy, the challenge was to prove he wasn't too Catholic to be president," Kerry said. "Mine was to prove I was Catholic enough."
Since Kennedy's election, Kerry said, the religion has changed. "The Catholicism I grew up with is quite different than the Catholicism we have today," Kerry said, citing both the changes brought by the Vatican II conference and the rise of evangelical Catholicism in the United States.
He also said people have become more comfortable talking openly about their faith - even in New England, where politicians would rarely discuss their personal experience of religion.
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