November 2025 Church & State Magazine
November 3, 2025
Americans United welcomed the introduction of a resolution in Congress honoring the separation of church and state.
Rep. Yassamin Ansari
U.S. Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) introduced the resolution — H. Res. 773 — on Sept. 30. It references two important speeches in church-state history: President John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, and President Ulysses S. Grant’s Sept. 29, 1875, speech to Army veterans in Des Moines.
Both presidents strongly endorsed church-state separation in their speeches. Kennedy famously said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”
Kennedy continued, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source, where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”
U.S. Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) introduced the resolution — H. Res. 773 — on Sept. 30. It references two important speeches in church-state history: President John F. Kennedy’s speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, and President Ulysses S. Grant’s Sept. 29, 1875, speech to Army veterans in Des Moines.
Both presidents strongly endorsed church-state separation in their speeches. Kennedy famously said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute — where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.”
Kennedy continued, “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source, where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”
