What’s so striking today about the remarks from the 1960 campaign is the essentially secular convictions that lay behind them. Kennedy didn’t deny his faith, but said bluntly it just wasn’t that important. “We have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election,” he declared right at the outset. “War and hunger and ignorance and despair know no religious barriers.” In those days the bigots attacking Kennedy for being Catholic could be portrayed as uneducated, retrograde – indeed, primitive – demagogues. It was they who would impose dogma on democracy, not Kennedy. The debate could be framed as one between rational leadership and irrational religiosity.

Unfettered by a need to appear pious, Kennedy struck a tone more of sorrow than anger: “So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again--not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me--but what kind of America I believe in.” The issues he addressed then had more to do with ethnic and social prejudice than theological distinctions: “If this election is decided on the basis that 40 million [Catholic] Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser,” said Kennedy. He leaves no question of divided allegiance, precisely, because in his view “the separation of church and state is absolute.”

I’d like to hear all the presidential candidates use that word "absolute." I’d like to hear one say, as Kennedy did, that what kind of church he or she believes in is important only to him or her. I’d like to hear them declare in the late president’s exact words, “I want a Chief Executive whose public acts are responsible to all groups and obligated to none--who can attend any ceremony, service or dinner his office may appropriately require of him--and whose fulfillment of his Presidential oath is not limited or conditioned by any religious oath, ritual or obligation.”

But Romney would never suggest for a second that there are more critical issues than his religion. That’s not the tenor of these Bible-toting times. So the attitude that Romney struck was, if not holier, then as-holy-as-thou in a field where his key rival coming up in Iowa is a former Baptist preacher.

The result in Romney’s speech is an uncomfortable relativism, ranking oaths in order of importance while invoking Founding Fathers as if they were church elders. “As a young man, Lincoln described what he called America's 'political religion' - the commitment to defend the rule of law and the Constitution,” said Romney. “When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God.” So, he’ll have two religions, the Mormon one and the political one? But only if he gets elected? Such are the contortions imposed by today’s politics of piety.