Category Archive

Via Sullivan, this Focus on the Family candidate guide is something to behold.  How far out do your views on the Iraq war have to be for you to believe that Mike Huckabee is somehow insufficiently supportive of it?  Responding to a statement that Huckabee made that “we broke it, we have to fix it,” one man on the candidate guide video declares in disbelief, “We didn’t break Iraq.   Saddam Hussein broke it!…To say that we broke it, we have to fix it, rings a bit hollow.”  This is crazy stuff.  No wonder Huckabee can’t gain any traction on foreign policy, even when he repeats the party line on the war, “Islamofascism” and takes a position on the Palestinians far more extreme than Likud’s.

The Romney video states, quite inaccurately, that Romney has acknowledged that Mormonism is “not a Christian faith.”  He has done no such thing, and every informed observer knows that he hasn’t.  Viewed one way, this is a transparently pro-Romney deception aimed at putting the religion question to the side.  Then again, considering the target audience, the Romney campaign could reasonably complain that Focus on the Family has injected anti-Mormonism into its campaign video in a direct attempt to undermine his candidacy.  Whatever the intent was, the effect of this video will be to remind the audience that Romney is not a Christian, which is probably exactly the opposite of what his campaign wants to see from such organisations.  Huckabee’s people are trying to spin this as an endorsement of Romney, but if it is it is one of the most poorly-worded endorsements ever.

Romney is in denial about anti-Mormonism.  He has Article VI memorised!  He gets into the Europe-bashing act again.  Will he mention France before it’s all over?

That’s part of the reason why you don’t have as rich a set of religious institutions and faith life in Europe. Part of that has to do with the fact that, traditionally, it was an extension of the state. ~Barack Obama

As I said last month, most European churches had been disestablished by the 1920s, and many had been disestablished long before then, and there are numerous other, far more significant factors that explain the secularisation of Europe.  These were my main points then:

Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of some of what were significant causes of the process of secularisation in Europe: scientific advances, materialist philosophies, the uprooting and deracinating effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, the introduction of ideological politics and mass political mobilisation, the material and moral ravages of the two wars, followed by the effects of two essentially materialist worldviews that claimed to “deliver the goods” more effectively or justly than the other.  Where the experience of Europe clearly differs from our own, and one of the reasons why Europe has gone further in its secularisation, is in their experience of the wars.  I have to wonder whether Americans would have been church-going and believing in the numbers that we are today if we had experienced the full horror of these conflicts and had endured the same losses.  There is a basic problem with the thesis that “faith thrives in a free market,” which is that there are now “free markets” all across Europe where there are no established churches or, where there are technically established churches they have no real authority over all citizens of that country who are not members, and yet faith isn’t exactly thriving and has been largely going into decline in the free, western European part since the war.  There has been some religious revival since the Cold War, but it is sporadic.  If “faith thrives in a free market,” Spain should not have undergone the rapid secularisation that it has experienced since the end of the Franco regime.  Italy disestablished the Catholic Church in 1984, which must be why religions of all kinds have been flourishing in Italy.  The Republic of Ireland hasn’t ever had an established church, yet it is experiencing the same secularisation that overtook Spain before it.  It has been the last twenty years of economic and social changes that have sapped the strength of religion in Ireland.  Clearly there is something much more complicated going on that cannot be explained with easy reference to establishment/disestablishment of religion.   

What strikes me about Obama’s comments is that they are perfectly conventional and could have come from the most anti-European neoconservative.  If Obama casts this in terms of the separation of church and state rather than describing religious pluralism in terms of “market forces,” he is nonetheless coming to the same liberal consensus answer that most Americans maddeningly endorse without thinking about whether there is any truth to it.  If our civilisation were devastated in two gigantic conflagrations and much of our territory subjected to the depredations of totalitarian governments for decades on end, we might find our religious life rather less “rich” as well. 

Everything in the exit polling breaks down much as you might expect, but one thing that continues to puzzle me is Romney’s strong performance among Catholic voters, which is not limited to South Carolina.  As  I mentioned earlier today, 38% of Catholics in the Nevada caucus supported him, and the same pattern has emerged in the earlier contests and in Florida polling.  Among all Catholics in South Carolina’s primary, he got 24%, and 28% of weekly church-going Catholics backed him.  Despite finishing a distant fourth overall, he placed second among weekly church-going Catholics.  If there are numbers breaking down Romney’s Catholic support before his religion speech and after I would be very interested to see what they are, because I would wager a nice steak dinner that his support among Catholics increased significantly after that speech and remained strong ever since.  My guess is that the themes he outlined in that speech did nothing to assuage the doubts and concerns of evangelicals, but it may very well have won over a substantial bloc of Catholic voters.  In a strange way, the anti-Mormon problem for his candidacy may have started to boomerang and work to his advantage.  Perhaps it benefits him by providing a kind of sympathy specifically from Catholics.  

It’s not hard for us irreligious types to see the point of something like fundamentalist Islam (or fundamentalist anything, I guess) — a faith that insists it is the only true faith, and regards doubters with hatred, scorn, or pity. It’s much harder to see the point of this mushy it’s-all-the-same-thing-really ecumenism. Why bother to master a lot of complicated rituals, and affirm a lot of complicated doctrines, if some other set of rituals and doctrines is just as good? ~John Derbyshire

I tend to have the same problem understanding this sort of ecumenism, but then I assume that it really matters what theological doctrines you hold, which I have to remind myself repeatedly is not how a great many people approach religious life at all.  Indeed, I would guess that religions that are focused most heavily on ritual are religions that do not seem to put, at least from the perspective of the everyday experience of the average believer, great emphasis on doctrine.  Converts to Orthodoxy, in my experience, tend be rather fixated on doctrine (as some might say that I am) and have a much harder time with all the details of orthopraxy.  You should understand that the distinction between the doctrine and praxis is essentially theoretical, in the same way that theology properly understood is first and foremost prayer.   Of course, these religions may have teaching authorities or scriptures that are held to be authoritative and doctrinal definitions that are binding, but it is through the rites and customary practices that most believers would experience their religion.  The question of superiority of one cultic practice to another would be almost beside the point: these are the rites of your family or your village or your people, and these are the rites you are obliged to keep.  This logic can work one of two ways, depending on the circumstances: it can cause extreme hostility to conversion and proselytes (the anti-Christian violence in Orissa recently stems partly from opposition to Christian missionary work among Dalits) because it is upsetting the existing order, or it can mean that there is no particular rationale or argument for doing things a certain way or believing a certain doctrine.  Which response you get will probably depend heavily on the surrounding society.  In the case in question, Bobby Jindal’s conversion to Catholicism was less likely to cause tremendous problems with his community in Catholic Louisiana and would not be a cause for many problems in some parts of India, while it might very well have been a cause of tension where Christians are in the minority or are perceived, as they are in Orissa, of challenging or interfering in the caste system.  

In Hinduism, from what I do understand, it is not usually a question of finding the optimal teaching or the best rite, but of fulfilling your duty.  Hinduism, which is outsider’s shorthand for a bewildering array of religious groups and practices, has everything from the philosophical discourses of Vedanta to the ban on harming monkeys because they are sacred to Hanuman (which has combined with deforestation to create a massive influx of monkeys into major metropolitan areas, much to the frustration of the inhabitants).  Some Vaishnavites have gone to far as to recognise Gautama Buddha and Christ as other incarnations of Vishnu, which at first seems like an ecumenical move and then you see that it is an appropriating and competitive one.  It is because of the great variety of cults and sects within what we call Hinduism that henotheism and panentheism become very attractive explanations, which can then be extended to other world religions.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t fierce sectarians and fanatics within this mix, as there are obviously are (Hindutva doesn’t come from nowhere), but even with a phenomenon such as Hindutva you see ”Hinduness” being defined in opposition to non-Hindus, which tends to minimise or efface the differences among Hindus to a certain extent. 

I’m a little late to this, but I wanted to add a few remarks to what Rod said about Huckabee’s allegedly horrifying remarks about God and the Constitution.  But first, Lisa “Go Pack To Dogpatch” Schiffren:

What do you think God’s standard is on anchor babies and birthright citizenship? (Manger!) Does Huckabee’s God believe in borders? What is God’s monetary policy? Is Jesus a capitalist? How much economic disparity will he tolerate? Wouldn’t God want us all to have health care? Nice shoes?

What about rendering unto Ceaser that which is Ceaser’s [sic], and unto God that which is God’s? Mike Huckabee is going to force those of us who have wanted more religion in the town square to reexamine the merits of strict separation of church and state. He is the best advertisement ever for the ACLU. Even if you share his ultimate views on the definition of marriage, or the desirability of abortion on demand.

Is this “Ceaser” the one who ceases and desists from something?  Tell us more about “Ceaser,” please. 

These comments, and others like them in recent days, are revealing about what some movement conservatives really think about religion in the public square, “values,” and eternal verities.  Religion in the public square is all very nice so long as we’re talking about nothing more than prayers at high school football games and maybe a creche here and there, but just watch these people who allegedly “have wanted more religion in the town square” run screaming the moment a religious conservative proposes to do something and to do it for religious reasons.  Suddenly the great friends of religiosity cannot get away fast enough, which suggests that their earlier interest in more religion was very weak or it was simply a pose for the benefit of their audience. 

What is most remarkable about all of this is that these reactions are coming from people who mostly support the exact same constitutional amendments on marriage and life that Huckabee does.  Most of them, I assume, have supported the life amendment plank in the GOP platform, and I assume virtually all of them have voted for candidates running on that platform in the past.  If they don’t agree with these amendments, it is also probably not because they think that these amendments represent some horrible intrusion of religion into the public square, but because they think they are politically misguided.  There is a good federalist, decentralist argument against both of these amendments, and that is the real issue with what Huckabee is proposing.  He is trying to set up candidates who still have some nominal respect for federalism as relativists, as he has done before.  The reaction against what Huckabee said seems to be driven entirely by the way that he said it and the fact that he dared to suggest that the laws of men should be in line with the law of God.  In this, he is making a standard Christian conservative argument.  By their reaction, they have shown how much contempt they have for that kind of argument and the people who make it.  That isn’t news to some of us, but it is a little surprising that they would express it with so much vehemence.

Instead, what we are seeing is yet more evidence that the Republican Party is not in the grip of the Religious Right. That has been a myth organized political evangelicals have been eager to promote and Democratic and Republican elites have, in gullibility, accepted. ~Daniel Casse

True enough, the GOP is not in the grip of the Religious Right, but the rest of this has things entirely backwards.  Yes, certain evangelical leaders have wanted to boast of their great influence (overcompensating for their lack of actual power) and some have enjoyed holding court and having presidential candidates seek their blessing, and some social conservatives took satisfaction in the apparently significant role of the famous “values voters” in swinging the election to Bush in 2004, but by and large the myth of the Religious Right’s stranglehold on the GOP has been promoted most of all by two groups of people in recent years: hysterical secularists on the left who would probably see ”floating crosses” in every Republican political advertisement and…secular conservatives on the right looking for scapegoats for the GOP’s recent electoral woes.  It couldn’t be Iraq, dithering on immigration for six years or massive incompetence in government that has hurt Republicans–no, it must have been that Terri Schiavo business!  Or so say the Ryan Sagers of the world.

Liberals have mistaken the importance of “values voters” to the GOP coalition for evidence of religious conservative clout in policymaking; some secular conservatives disturbed by the politics of the “values voters” and the GOP’s exploitation of wedge issues for GOTV efforts have developed elaborate theories about the religious radicalisation of the GOP, mistaking the deep cynicism of the GOP establishment for zealotry.  The one group that hasn’t been pushing the narrative of a Religious Right-dominated GOP in recent years has been…religious conservatives, who know full well that they don’t really dominate much of anything in the party.  Support for Huckabee’s candidacy is partly an outburst of frustration and dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and he has lately started making that sense of frustration an explicit part of his campaign.  However, while a major part of the voting coalition, evangelicals specifically and religious conservatives generally wield much less clout at elite movement and party levels than you would expect given the outsized electoral importance of their issues to the coalition.  The current election has highlighted the lack of unity and organisation of religious conservatives.  It was significant that Giuliani’s campaign weakened on its own–it was not stopped by religious conservative leaders, some of whom even entertained or made accommodations with the mayor.  It was also significant that religious conservative leaders adopted an “every man for himself” approach to candidate endorsements, rather than uniting around any one consensus figure, and still more significant that many, though by no means all, evangelical and social conservative voters rushed to rally around the candidate many of the leaders distrusted or opposed outright.

Do these people actually want me to start rooting for Huckabee against all better judgement?  Because that’s what this ad makes me want to do.

Via Steve Clemons

Huckabee’s Catholic problem has just become much worse (via Ambinder):

Michigan Catholic Voter Alert:
What Michigan Catholics MUST Know About Mike Huckabee

 

FACT: Mike Huckabee has exhibited a willful blindness in associating with anti-Catholicism when it has benefited him politically.

FACT: Instead of supporting a healthy expression of religion in the public square, Mike Huckabee has used his evangelical protestant faith as a wedge to divide the Republican Party and gain support from fellow evangelicals.

FACT: While claiming to believe Catholics are fellow Christians, Mike Huckabee has kept close acquitance with evangelical leaders who have:

o Compared Catholicism to a disease requiring ‘recovery’ and rehabilitation;

o Said the Catholic Church collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate Jews;

o Accused the Catholic Church of pulling mankind into the ‘dark ages’.

FACT: Mike Huckabee has been endorsed by anti-Catholic author Tim Lahaye , who called Catholicism a “false religion” Lahaye’s Church also funded “Mission to Catholics”, a virulently anti-Catholic ministry.

And on it goes.  As near as I can tell, there is nothing in the email in question that is untrue.  The item also draws attention to Huckabee’s half-hearted response to an apparent anti-Catholic campaign aimed at undermining Brownback in Iowa, which soured relations between the two campaigns and marked the real kickoff of the religious dimension of the GOP nomination contest.  Frankly, besides Hagee’s anti-Catholicism, what worries me almost as much as about Hagee is the man’s role in founding CUFI and his insane cheerleading for the bombardment of Lebanon (which he called a “miracle from God”).  Unfortunately, that’s just the sort of association that should stand him in good stead with “national security” conservatives.

Query: why aren’t Catholic voters similarly put out by Romney’s acceptance of an endorsement from Bob Jones III?

Contrary to what you read here yesterday, Romney is apparently not in such bad shape in Michigan.  Rasmussen has him leading 26-25 over McCain with Huckabee in third at 17%.  The breakdown of evangelical and Catholic votes is exactly what you would expect.  Huckabee gets a healthy 32% of evangelicals, but just 4% of Catholics, which is low even for him.  Among Catholics, he is in sixth place behind Fred Thompson and Ron Paul.  Romney leads among every non-evangelical religious group.  The good news for Huckabee is that he was never expected to be able to win a state like Michigan, at least not at this stage, so a respectable third behind Romney, the “native son,” and McCain would not be such a bad outcome.  The only one who must win is Romney, and he seems to be in a good position to do it.  However, Romney’s position is once again deceptively strong: 58% of his supporters say they might change their mind or are unsure about supporting him, which is higher than for any other candidate.  McCain and Huckabee have pretty well locked down over half of their current supporters, which still leaves many impossible to pin down for certain.  Things could shift pretty quickly in the next couple of days. 

Curiously, Romney wins among both conservatives and liberals, but loses big to McCain among “moderates.”  As you would also expect, Huckabee also does best among the <$20K earners.  He also does well among the $65-75K earners, but he is actually leading among the lowest income group.  In every other income group, he trails Romney and McCain, each of whom gets about a quarter to a third of each income group except for the lowest one.  To give you a sense of how strange a mix Ron Paul supporters are, his best support (12%) comes from $20-40K earners and the $100K earners.  McCain’s support generally increases as you go into the higher income groups, while Romney’s fluctuates back and forth.

Some marginally good news for Paul supporters: Paul shows some added strength in Michigan, now at 8%, ahead of Giuliani and almost tied with Thompson.  It is a dubious distinction to be ahead of someone who has abandoned the state and almost tied with the guy who isn’t trying very hard up north, but it is better than previous polls I have seen.  The problem is that most of his support comes from non-GOP voters (he is second only to McCain in non-GOP support), which obviously doesn’t help in later closed primaries. 

Noted by several others, the results in Iowa show that Huckabee does not do very well with Catholic voters.  Crosstabs from this old Rasmussen Florida poll from last month suggest that there may be something to this.  In a poll where Huckabee registered 27% support, 17% of Catholics backed him, while receiving a whopping 46% from evangelicals.  Meanwhile, Giuliani received the second-largest share of Catholic support (26%), while Romney was backed by the same percentage of Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants (29%).  This has been the pattern in other states as well.

Rod, who endorsed Huckabee yesterday, said something in an earlier post that came to mind as I was thinking about this question:

For me, the Huck-as-change-agent theme comes down to this: an America led by a President Huckabee, and a conservative movement whose leader he is, might be an America and a conservatism where more people will read Wendell Berry — and for that matter, Catholic social thought.

If this pattern of limited Catholic support for Huckabee keeps up, barring the unlikely elevation of Michael Gerson in a future Huckabee Administration (there’s a scary thought), there may not be many who are supporting Huckabee who will be promoting Catholic social thought in any form.  More to the point, if this pattern continues, Huckabee probably cannot win a general election.

On one level, it makes perfect sense that Catholic voters would not respond well to Huckabee.  As a conservative Southern Baptist, he might appear to be no different from the Baptists who insist that Catholics are not Christians.  Catholic voters might conclude that the people who are voting against Romney and for Huckabee on account of religion may very well also view their church as a “cult,”  so they are withholding their support from Huckabee for that reason?  To the extent that the media have explained his political success, for the most part correctly, in terms of evangelical support, and to the extent that the media have, less accurately, talked up the anti-Mormon factor in discussing his campaign, it would not be hard for voters who know relatively little  about Huckabee to assume that he is simply the evangelical candidate with all of the possible anti-Catholic baggage that might entail.  On the other hand, why Catholic voters should respond so much more strongly to Romney is a puzzle.  He cannot claim any nominal or cultural connection to Catholicism, as Giuliani can, and his pro-life views are such a recent development that I find it hard to believe that he is winning over Catholic voters on this alone.  Is there some boomerang pro-Romney sympathy vote that has emerged in reaction against anti-Mormonism?  Perhaps Catholic voters are drawn to support the candidate who appears to be facing a “religious issue,” who currently hails from Massachusetts and who has invoked JFK’s speech on religion ad nauseam?

P.S.  The latest SurveyUSA Florida poll, while not giving any figures according to religious affiliation, confirms the pattern from the earlier poll.  Just look at the geographic distribution of Huckabee’s support: 40% in the northwest (the heavily evangelical Panhandle, including Pensacola) and 8% in the southeast (Miami-Dade and its surroundings).  Huckabee receives decent, but hardly overwhelming, support in the other regions of Florida (17-18%). Conversely, Giuliani fares best in the southeast (25%) and does horribly in the northwest (2%).  Romney runs strongest in northeast Florida (23%), receives 15% in SE Florida and receives only 8% in the northwest. Since Florida has something like 2.25 million Catholics living there, this could be a major hurdle for Huckabee (assuming that he does well enough in the rest of January that Florida still matters to his chances).  Huckabee’s other, unrelated Florida problem?  The elderly.  Voters 65+ are the core of McCain’s strength down there, while Huckabee leads among the youngest cohort and runs competitively in every other group.  Among the 65+ he is getting slaughtered by McCain 38-11, and he runs fourth overall among the eldest voters.  Somebody doesn’t like all that talk about the greatest generation being the one yet to be born.

Ross commented on Noah Feldman’s article on Mormonism recently, which reminded me that I had also wanted to respond to one part of it and arguments like the following:

Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt.

Put that way, Feldman might have a point, except that the claim of new revelation is actually the least “ridiculous” part of the story.  It is, and always has been, the content of that revelation that has drawn the most criticism, and so for the most part the majority dutifully ignores or downplays how the content of this or that religion is theologically untenable.  To do otherwise would begin us down the road to taking one set of theological claims more seriously than another, which might even (gasp!) lead us to assign different significance and measures of truth to different sets of claims.  The problem with this argument is that, for the sake of promoting toleration for minority religions, it essentially grants that every religion is just as inherently plausible as any other, which not only makes discussion of doctrine pointless, but actually impedes the possibility of religious dialogue and persuasion.  Granting this equality of religions paves the way for exactly the kind of arational sectarianism that skeptics believe is unavoidable with religion in public life.    

There is this very strange attitude about religion out there, and it is held by more than a few observant Christians as well as secular skeptics, that says that no revelation is more plausible than any other, which implies that revelation is entirely outside the realm of rational discouse and demonstration.  This is essentially fideism or a kind of neo-Barlaamism, which holds that believers should hold to their traditional faiths primarily because they are ancient–there is nothing that we can actually say rationally about a doctrine of God.  One of the reasons why this bizarre idea can gain such currency is the lack of respect people have for theology and dogma.  In our culture, if you want to dismiss someone’s position, you say that he is being dogmatic, and if you want to discredit an argument you refer to his worldview as a “theology,” preferably preceded by adjectives such as arcane. 

Such is the depth of our divorce from Christian intellectual tradition that many people do not recognise the substantive difference between an elaborately reasoned theological view and the ramblings of a science-fiction author.  Simply put, we lack discernment.  Militant atheists are at least consistent in the implications of holding such a disparaging view of revelation–for them, it is all made-up and undeserving of any respect.  Out of some misplaced sense of solidarity with other religious people against the Christopher Hitchenses and Dawkinses of the world, Christians seem to feel obliged to make general defenses of generic theism or the even more amorphous category of Religion, and woe betide the bishop who attempts, as Pope Benedict did, to illustrate the implications of radically different doctrines of God.  This then forces these Christians to argue that all these things are purely a matter of faith, where faith is defined not only as something inspired and the result of God’s grace (which it is), but also as something arational, rather than understanding that it is faith rightly understood that is the highest form of rationality.  Having conceded the high ground and having bought into a functionally extreme apophaticism, the Christian finds himself at a loss to make any argument from revelation, because he has already effectively granted that speaking kataphatically is impossible.  Trying to include everyone in a big tent of ecumenical anti-secularism eventually leads to being unable to say something about God and maintain that it is actually true, when there is nothing more fundamental to preaching and evangelising than speaking the truth about God in prayer and homilies. 

This brings me, oddly enough, to the question of evolution.  Fideistic understandings of religion and materialistic philosophies that seek to exploit evolutionary biology to their advantage enjoy a symbiotic relationship, since they both thrive on promoting mutual antagonism between reason and faith.  Tell the Christian that he must either endorse evolutionary theory or accept the Bible, and he will typically take the Bible, especially if he is not grounded in an authoritative teaching tradition that tells him that this choice is a false one.  Tell the average educated secular person that revealed religion is incompatible with scientific theory, and he may very well conclude that those who continue to adhere to revealed religion must be either ignorant, insane or up to no good.  Huckabee is someone who falls into the former category, of course, and declares himself agnostic on ”how” God works in creation, which is actually a far more honest view–and one that a majority of Americans would share–than affirming evolutionary theory because you know that it is socially unacceptable in certain circles to admit that you don’t understand or accept the theory.  As Rod has said before, evolution serves as a “cultural marker,” and it is deployed as a litmus test to see whether you belong to a certain kind of educated elite.  Ironically, the cultural bias against dogmatism and theology in religion has come around and struck science by making it permissible, even admirable, to doubt statements made with certainty.  Were it not for the tendency of many religious and secular Americans to oppose reason and faith, there would be no difficulty in affirming the truth of revelation and recognising the reasonable, albeit always provisional, nature of scientific inquiry.  Obviously, approaches to faith that prize doubt and uncertainty simply reinforce the tendency towards extreme apophaticism and fideism that make it impossible for believers and non-believers  to speak intelligibly to one another (to the extent that people working in two significantly different traditions can speak to one another). 

Jim Antle and I are on the same page here:

Now I’m going to end up with the Thomas Boswell problem if Mitt Romney pulls out a win tonight, but he’s starting to look like the Mo Udall of this election cycle.

Tim Lee agrees that Huckabee is a competitive general election candidate, and he makes an excellent point about Huckabee’s religiosity:

I think a lot of members of the liberal (and libertarian) secular elite have a weird blind spot when it comes to religion and religious rhetoric in politics. They tend to find sincere religious sentiments so alien that anyone who is conversant with the language of faith sounds nutty to them. But like it or not, this is still a predominantly religious country, and lots of voters respond well to religious rhetoric of the non-angry variety. I personally find it every bit as off-putting as Matt does, but we’re in the minority.

It’s not such a weird blind spot when you think about it.  When religion seems to you to have little or no relevant or meaningful application to public life, you almost have to assume that anyone employing such rhetoric or actually pursuing policies on account of religious teachings is either totally cynical or a crazed theocrat (or perhaps, in the view of some secular observers, both at the same time).  The idea that religious politics need not be either utterly vacuous or profoundly threatening to society contradicts a raft of assumptions that secular people have about the intersection of religion and politics.  These people have also become so accustomed to the anodyne generic theism of our Presidents that it is jarring to them to hear someone cite Scripture with fluency and some modicum of understanding.

The false meme lives on:

No one thought to raise objections to Mormonism when Mo Udall ran for president, nor even when Mitt’s father, George, made a bid.

In fact, some raised objections in both cases, and opposition to a Mormon candidate was approximately as strong then as it is now.  If it was never as central to the campaign as it has been this year, it is partly because Romney’s father and Mo Udall did not run as a religious conservative and as the spokesmen for religious and social conservatives.  Romney is appealing to a constituency that was always going to be less receptive to him.  It is also the case that the media have pushed this angle since before Romney announced his candidacy.

As I said when I reviewed his book, I think Sullivan’s entire theory about the GOP as a “religious party” dominated by “fundamentalists” gets things badly wrong.  The “theocon consensus” to which Sullivan refers is one against which the party and movement establishment has been violently protesting for the last year, and one that prominent figures in the movement consigned effectively to the margins over ten years ago when the actual “theocons” were perceived to be questioning the legitimacy of “the regime” over the issue of abortion.  Party and movement elites really don’t want religion to have much of a meaningful role, and not just in the selection of candidates.  They prefer to use it largely for symbolic appeals and GOTV efforts, and things have reached a point where Christian conservative voters may have had enough of empty gestures and manipulation.  The drive to marginalise social conservatives and blame them for the party’s defeat last year and the Giuliani candidacy both showed that a significant part of the Republican Party’s leadership was trying to become even less focused on religious and social issues than it had been.  These attempts are failing, but that they were made at all shows the priorities of the leadership of what is still a very secular party.  What exacerbates the cultural hostility to Huckabee is the association of his evangelical Christianity with a politics of what Reihan has sometimes called the “lower-middle”–this makes Huckabee both culturally different and potentially somewhat opposed to the interests of corporations and leads him to favour trying to secure the economic interests of these voters.

Sullivan perceived galloping fundamentalism when religion was used mainly a stage prop by the GOP.  Now other secular conservatives are freaking out at the prospect of voters backing a religious conservative who seems to take religious conservatism seriously.  The general conservative rejection of Sullivan’s thesis was partly an acknowledgement that the GOP was very far from being anything like a “religious party.”  The current backlash against Huckabee is part of the effort to make sure that religious voters don’t upset the current arrangement, in which religious conservatives receive lip service and are supposed to accept gratefully whatever they are given.    

While the attacks are on valid issues, at heart, the attacks appear to be because he is a former preacher from the South — a country bumpkin and a Jesus Freak. ~Erick Erickson

Via Ponnuru

Well, yes, that is a very large part of the reason for the GOP and conservative movement establishment’s reaction against Huckabee.  Additionally, their problem is that he is primarily a social conservative candidate in a party and in an election cycle where the social conservatives were supposed to sit down, be quiet and support the appropriate “national security” candidate.  People in the heartland were, as usual, supposed to accept whatever the coastal elites–in this case, conservative coastal elites–threw at them. 

There are two ways to express this frustration with Huckabee: to focus on his poor tax policy record and basically non-existent foreign policy credentials, or to belittle the college he attended and deplore his religiosity.  The latter approach has started to become more popular.  This is why many conservative pundits have focused their criticism on the “Christian leader” reference, his views on evolution and his alleged “insults” towards Mormonism.  Religion is all very well and good for some of these elites, provided that it doesn’t get taken too seriously and doesn’t become too central.  There are some in the conservative movement and the GOP who could in one breath defend evangelicals against the old insult that they are “easily led,” and who in the next will complain that those same evangelicals are not keeping in their place.   

Some of this reaction is tied together with some pundits’ support for a Huckabee rival, and some of it is tied to legitimate criticisms of Huckabee’s record, but I think a lot of it is cultural hostility of some Republican and conservative elites to the broad mass of evangelical Christians who make up a significant bloc of the GOP.  The latter are useful allies, but are otherwise treated as the unwanted stepchild that the elite would prefer to banish to the basement whenever possible.  Thompson was an acceptable Southerner, because he was a Southerner who had adapted to Washington and was a lobbyist and actor, and he was someone who rarely attended church, while Huckabee represents, for good and ill, a lot of Southern Republican voters.  Thompson was the sort of candidate who could, for some reason, get the base excited and appease the elite at the same time, except that he was, in practice, an awful candidate.  Huckabee has captured Thompson’s supporters, but cannot satisfy the elite. 

Combine some inherited distaste or unfamiliarity with the South among some pundits with the fear that the GOP is already too defined by its Southern wing and that it risks becoming a regional party (an overblown fear that once again tries to blame the GOP’s woes on cultural and social conservative politics of the Southerners), and you have a recipe for tremendous opposition to a Southern evangelical candidate.  It is absolutely true that the reaction against him by the establishment has been disproportionate, considering how ready so many conservative pundits have been to give Giuliani free passes and the benefit of the doubt in every case: “He has indicted friends with mob connections?  Why worry?  He’s pro-choice?  So what?  Don’t you know there’s a war on?!”  Huckabee’s rise was tolerable to these people so long as they could persuade themselves that it might help Giuliani capture the nomination, but now that he has become a more credible threat to Giuliani it has become open season.  Support for Giuliani’s rise had already shown social conservatives that they and their agenda were not very important to the party leadership, and the withering contempt for Huckabee simply confirmed that understanding. 

Erickson continues:

The New York-Washington Corridor of Conservative Intelligentsia^TM bristles at the idea that a back water social conservative from Arkansas has excited the base in a way the others haven’t. We were, after all, suppose to go for Romney or Rudy. They told us so.      

Huckabee’s creationism is one of the things that I suspect irritates conservative elites the most.  After all, how can they really accept someone who doesn’t accept evolution?  Acknowledging the theory of evolution here really serves, as Rod mentioned in a recent bloggingheads in a slightly different discussion about Huckabee’s views, as a “cultural marker” that shows that you are sufficiently urbane and sophisticated.  It is a mark of belonging to a certain set of the educated elite and a way of showing that you are not really one of those people who literally believe the Genesis account of creation.  (Now there are perfectly good and correct exegetical and theological arguments against reading Genesis this way, but that is not what we’re talking about.)  It is fine to humour those people with preposterous notions such as teaching Intelligent Design in science class (a position that has quasi-intellectual respectability), but letting them take prominent national leadership roles is really going too far.  If voters perceive supporting Huckabee’s candidacy as a way to stick a finger in the eye of the party leaders, I think they may be just angry and disaffected enough to do it.  As I said earlier today, the hostility of East Coast pundits may translate into an advantage for Huckabee’s popularity.

Update: John McIntyre has the elite anti-Huckabee roundup.

Public political discussion of Governor Romney’s faith in recent weeks, however, has been marked by so many flagrant misstatements about that faith, and the repeitition of so many long-conventional bigotries about it, that it seemed to me to far beyond the limits of fair discussion. ~Michael Novak

So many flagrant misstatements?  Which misstatements are these?  Even if this is were tue, Novak’s point here seems to be that a little-understood religion is not well understood and open to mischaracterisation, so it is high time that we stop talking about it.  I confess that I don’t understand the complaints about unfairness at all.  Is it unfair to state publicly what a religion teaches?  If it is indeed the case that someone in this debate has erred and misrepresented LDS teachings, it seems to me that it is all the more important for those who see these statements as misrepresentations to step in and correct the record.  In the course of any other discussion, that is what would happen.  The natural response is not, “Everyone is being unfair to this presidential candidate, so I will endorse him.”  By the same token, I should endorse Obama if I think that it is unfair that people spread the falsehood that he is a Muslim.  This is, to put it mildly, a strange approach to political endorsement. 

It’s two centuries since the passage of the First Amendment and our presidential candidates still cannot distinguish establishment from free exercise. ~Charles Krauthammer

It seems clear to me from the article that it is exactly these things that Krauthammer seems unable to distinguish, or rather he seems unable to understand that they do not even apply to the role of religion in this campaign.  The establishment clause concerns a prohibition against any law establishing a religion at the federal level in the United States.  That is what it meant and what it still means.  It is elementary, which is why it is tiresome that so few people seem to grasp that this has nothing to do with expressions of public opinion or political preferences.  The hollowness of the objection Krauthammer and others are raising is evident once you notice that the only kind of political judgements about someone’s religion that they really find unacceptable is a negative one.  They may find positive judgements in favour of a candidate on account of his religion undesirable, but they do not usually make an issue out of it. 

If voting is an exercise of political speech (it is), and freedom of speech is guaranteed under the same First Amendment, there is nothing illicit or impropr in exercising that freedom, so long as it does not endanger public safety under very specific circumstances and conditions (e.g., inciting to riot, etc.).  The implicit complaint in this debate is that somehow disapproval of a candidate’s religious beliefs is a curtailment of that candidate’s religious liberty, which is not true.  The argument seems to be that free speech should, as a matter of practice and custom, end where there are strong disagreements and that this applies only to questions of religious difference, which I think is an appalling idea.  Mind you, this is not a violation of anyone’s First Amendment rights, because it is not the government that is trying to impose this rule.  Nonetheless, it is a very deliberate attempt to stifle one particular kind of political expression through the deployment of social pressures and the implied or explicit accusations of prejudice.  Conservatives who rebel against the principle of thought-policing rules on campuses and elsewhere should reject this argument, which is based on the same principle.  All thhose who constantly tell us how interested they are in intellectual diversity and open debate should have no problem with a debate that also includes religious beliefs.  If voters believe these things are irrelevant, they are perfectly capable of selecting candidates who do not engage in this kind of politics. 

What is so frustrating about this debate is that neither establishment nor the free exercise of religion is at stake here.  Religious liberty is not endangered, and no one is proposing an established religion.  We do indeed live in an increasingly religiously diverse society.  It seems bizarre that this would be the one aspect of our society that we would refuse to talk about in our political discourse.

In the same way that civil rights laws established not just the legal but also the moral norm that one simply does not discriminate on the basis of race — changing the practice of one generation and the consciousness of the next — so the constitutional injunction against religious tests is meant to make citizens understand that such tests are profoundly un-American. ~Charles Krauthammer

No, the injunction was meant and is still meant to prevent federal offices from being dependent on whether or not you confess a particular creed or religion.  When it was written, there were many state religious tests (because there were still a few state established churches), and there were likely members of the Constitutional Convention who had no problem in principle with religious tests in their own states.  What they would not accept is the religious test that someone from another church in another state might try to impose on them through the federal government.  Krauthammer does at least admit that the prohibition of religious tests is a prohibition against what the government does, not a statement about what citizens may or may not do in selecting their representatives.  It’s a funny word, representative.  Taken at face value, you might even think that it is supposed to mean that citizens select those whom they believe best represents them.  All this complaining about prohibitions against religious tests is a concerted effort to make people feel guilty for wanting what they regard as their best representation. 

But there is some hope for common ground: both Krauthammer and Huckabee seem to be of the mistaken view that laws establish moral norms.  This is particularly bizarre in the American context, since such laws would likely have never been enacted by elected representatives unless there was already some considerable moral consensus behind them that enacting the law, and enforcing existing moral norms, was the appropriate and right thing to do.   

Scott Richert has some additional thoughts on Mormon theology at Taki’s Top Drawer. 

He shows a Wikipedia-level appreciation of other religions, admiring “the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims” and “the ancient traditions of the Jews.” These vapid nostrums suggest his innermost conviction of America’s true faith. A devout Christian vision emerges of a U.S. society that is in fact increasingly diverse. ~Roger Cohen

I don’t think the speech presented a “devout Christian vision,” and indeed he was at pains to present anything but that.  The entire speech was premised on arguing for pluralism and against religious homogeneity or the cultural hegemony of any particular religion, boiling down the many religions to our “great moral inheritance” and a vague and minimally demanding theism.  It was a typical expression of the sort of superficial, smorgasbord approach to diversity that we have all grown up with in America.  For some reason, paeans to diversity seem to require “vapid nostrums,” because we must find something about every group that is distinctive yet not the cause of some offense among another group, which usually ends up leaving us with not much to say about them.  Had a non-Mormon given the speech, you could imagine him saying, “I admire the impeccable politeness of the Mormons.”  After all, to say anything in greater detail would be, by the standards of the speech, to establish a “religious test”!  

Romney could hardly have said, “I admire the spiritual journey of the Muslim who struggles in the path of God,” since this would mean that he is also admiring the mujahideen, so he was reduced to saying something meaningless.  Even Wikipedia-level appreciation would have offered more depth of understanding of other religions.  What was most disingenuous about this part of the speech was that Romney claimed to admire these elements so much that he wished they were part of his religion!  When he hears this speech, Cohen encounters the drippy multiculturalism of a religious studies seminar and mistakes it for religious militancy.

Thus the scandal of Jesus and Satan being brothers is one based entirely on extrapolation and syllogism. Yes, because both Jesus and Satan were created as part of the offspring of God, you could say they’re related, or even brothers. ~Ryan Bell

In other words, because Mormonism holds a doctrine similar to Arianism (i.e., that the Son is created), what Huckabee said is obviously horribly wrong, except that it’s actually correct.  I don’t think anyone will be hiring this guy to do spin control.  You do have to admire the gall of bringing Hitler into the debate.  That is always a good way to persuade and win new friends.

But I think attacking someone’s religion is really going too far. It’s just not the American way, and I think people will reject that. ~Mitt Romney

Romney said that on The Today Show in response to Huckabee’s question in the Chafets profile.  David Kuo made the right point about this:

I’m sorry but I am really confused about all of this. Since when is asking a question about someone’s religion attacking it?? This is bizarre.

Kuo referred to Romney’s appearance as “pathetic.” 

I am obviously just about as strongly opposed to Romney as you can be, but no one can possibly confuse me for a fan of Huckabee, either.  I think Romney’s Mormonism is something that is legitimate for voters to take into account, but I also know that Huckabee has stated publicly time and again that he thinks it should be irrelevant.  (Here he makes the statement as clearly as anyone could possibly want.)  As a matter of fairness and accuracy, it seems wrong to impute to Huckabee the views and motives of those who are going to vote against Romney on account of his religion unless there is evidence that he actually holds such views and has such motives.  Huckabee has plenty of flaws, all of which are amply detailed in the same Chafets profile.  Ironically, by focusing on this one sentence, the media and Romney are giving Huckabee an easy out  on his genuinely worrisome record and policy views.  By protesting about one sentence, which they must regard in itself as an irrelevancy, and ignoring the serious flaws in Huckabee’s ideas (or lack thereof in certain cases), the media are actually empowering the candidate who stands to benefit from the anti-Mormon reaction among Republican voters.  Whatever Romney may or may not have accomplished with his speech last week, he stands to lose by embracing the rhetoric of the oppressed minority (which, if you haven’t noticed, does not exactly win over conservative voters).     

The small but growing effort to tar Huckabee as some sort of sectarian campaigner or incipient theocrat strikes me as wrong on the merits and seriously counterproductive for those making the argument.  If I am a caucus-goer or a primary voter who has not firmly committed to another candidate, I could very easily see Mitt Romney as someone working with the mainstream media to accuse a social conservative candidate of bigotry.  Think about how that appears to a conservative audience.  It does not make Romney look better to them, let me tell you.  

It seems to me that you give people the benefit of the doubt in these cases.  Huckabee was probably innocently asking the question he asked, and he has since gone out of his way to make it clear that he thinks that the issue shouldn’t be part of the campaign.  He has had opportunities to say publicly whether he thought Mormonism was Christian or not, and he demurred.  He could have very easily said something else, but chose not to do so.  If you find all the talk about Mormonism disconcerting, you really don’t want to get things to the point where Huckabee feels compelled to start answering those questions by labeling Huckabee, pretty much baselessly, as a “sectarian” who is playing “the Mormon card.” 

More bizarre yet is Romney’s reaction.  The question that Huckabee asked actually reflects Mormon teaching with a reasonable degree of accuracy.  (You can say that it takes this view out of context and implies something that the LDS church does not teach, but I think this is a reach.)  If, in fact, Huckabee doesn’t know much about Mormonism, his question might reflect something that he has heard over the years and was asking in the natural give and take of conversation.  Now you can argue that he shouldn’t have said it, or you can argue that Chafets shouldn’t have included it, but Romney’s reaction doesn’t really make sense unless he finds the tenets of his own religion so embarrassing and strange that the mere mention of them constitutes an “attack” or unless you are a candidate, as Romney is, in need of something, anything, you can use to tear down your opponent.  Of course these beliefs are a political liability, as we all know, but if Romney believed what he said last Thursday that those who think these things matter “underestimate the American people” he cannot possibly see a mere question as an attack worthy of condemnation. 

Pluralism doesn’t mean that we all become silent about matters of great importance.  You do not really have a free society if asking questions is considered an assault.  More basically, you need something more substantial than this if you’re going to charge someone with attacking your religion.      

But without digging into the theological nitty gritty here, the bottom line is that however different the theology may be, Mormon morality is very much the same manichean [bold mine-DL], good vs. evil outlook as traditional Christianity. ~Mark Hemingway

In fairness, Hemingway clarifies in an update that he doesn’t use manichean here in a way that actually refers to, well, Manichean beliefs, and he certainly isn’t the only person who uses manichean in a very loose and inaccurate way, but it is notable that he uses this word in a post that is trying to explain and contextualise a heterodox idea in Mormonism.  In the Mormons’ defense, they do not have a Manichean understanding of the universe, and neither do Christians.  Manichees believe the created order is a prison for human souls that was created by an evil principle, and understand morality as a war of spirit and matter that is significantly different from the moral theology of both Mormons and Christians.  Since Manichee is one of the most overused heresiological tropes in history, it was an unusually unfortunate choice for someone who wanted to deflect criticisms of Mormonism.

P.S.  Hemingway’s update is itself unfortunate when he refers to the “dualistic notion of good vs. evil” in Christianity.  Christianity doesn’t have a dualistic notion of good vs. evil.  In the classic patristic formulations, whether of Augustine or the Greek Fathers, evil is the negation and absence of good.  A dualistic notion of good vs. evil would be…the Manichean understanding.

As America demonstrates, faith thrives in a free market. In Europe, the established church, whether formal (the Church of England) or informal (as in Catholic Italy and Spain), killed religion as surely as state ownership killed the British car industry. When the Episcopal Church degenerates into wimpsville relativist milquetoast mush, Americans go elsewhere. When the Church of England undergoes similar institutional decline, Britons give up on religion entirely. ~Mark Steyn

There’s something rather odd about this line of argument.  It’s a pretty obvious flaw that an acquaintance with the first 1,900 years of Christianity would reveal: established, state-backed religion flourished in Europe for most of European history.  Across Europe, institutional churches have lost the mass membership they once had, whether they are preaching “milquetoast mush” or very traditional orthodoxy (the latter undoubtedly fare somewhat better, but only relatively so).  Leave aside for now that the options in England aren’t just “Anglicanism or Bust!” and that Britons can (and sometimes do) choose to attend one of the other churches. 

This explanation of Europe’s greater secularisation is amazingly unsatisfying, designed as it is to vindicate “market forces” in every area of life.  I suppose that I expect it from a venture capitalist, but I also expect conservatives to question it.  I don’t deny that alliances between states and institutional churches (or, in many countries, the subordination of the church as effectively a department of government) over the last two centuries politicised the position of the church and radicalised opponents of the regime in an increasingly anticlerical and sometimes anti-Christian direction.  But that was not the “cause” of secularisation as such.  Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of some of what were significant causes of the process of secularisation in Europe: scientific advances, materialist philosophies, the uprooting and deracinating effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, the introduction of ideological politics and mass political mobilisation, the material and moral ravages of the two wars, followed by the effects of two essentially materialist worldviews that claimed to “deliver the goods” more effectively or justly than the other.  Where the experience of Europe clearly differs from our own, and one of the reasons why Europe has gone further in its secularisation, is in their experience of the wars.  I have to wonder whether Americans would have been church-going and believing in the numbers that we are today if we had experienced the full horror of these conflicts and had endured the same losses.  There is a basic problem with the thesis that “faith thrives in a free market,” which is that there are now “free markets” all across Europe where there are no established churches or, where there are technically established churches they have no real authority over all citizens of that country who are not members, and yet faith isn’t exactly thriving and has been largely going into decline in the free, western European part since the war.  There has been some religious revival since the Cold War, but it is sporadic.  If “faith thrives in a free market,” Spain should not have undergone the rapid secularisation that it has experienced since the end of the Franco regime.  Italy disestablished the Catholic Church in 1984, which must be why religions of all kinds have been flourishing in Italy.  The Republic of Ireland hasn’t ever had an established church, yet it is experiencing the same secularisation that overtook Spain before it.  It has been the last twenty years of economic and social changes that have sapped the strength of religion in Ireland.  Clearly there is something much more complicated going on that cannot be explained with easy reference to establishment/disestablishment of religion. 

 I believe, of course, that there are thousands of people who are not of faith who are moral. ~Mitt Romney

As for the rest of the atheists and agnostics, well, he isn’t going to say more.

Bob Wright and Ramesh Ponnuru were talking about Mormon-related matters on bloggingheads recently, and something Ponnuru said stood out (since I had just been looking at the Pew polling he referred to).  He mentioned a word association result and claimed that the poll showed that 75% of the public used the word polygamy to describe Mormonism.  This is not what the poll said.  The figure was 75, but it was the number of times the word polygamy was mentioned in free association out of a total of 1,461 responses.  I think there is still fairly widespread, residual association of Mormonism with polygamy, but I don’t think it’s anything like 75%.  In any case, whatever it is, the Pew results show something else.

P.S.  While I’m in fact-checking mode, Ponnuru said that Robertson won the 1988 Iowa caucuses (at 7:14), when it was Bob Dole who won and Robertson placed second.  

As far back as 1967, only three-quarters of Americans said they would vote for an otherwise well qualified person who was a Mormon.  This year – some 40 years later — the results to this question are almost exactly the same.  ~USA Today/Gallup Blog

This reminds me of the remark you hear all the time in commentary on this question: in the 1968 election, George Romney didn’t face this problem.  This is not true.  He did face this problem, but failed to gain any ground as a presidential candidate before there was that much time for the issue to become a prominent one.  We may forget, as we now enter the eleventh month of this election campaign (11 down, 11 to go!), that Romney started his campaign for the Republican nomination in November 1967 and by the end of February he was out.  He was a declared candidate for a little over four months.  He had made his famous “brainwashed” remark earlier in 1967 before becoming an avowedly antiwar candidate (an example his son has definitely not followed).  His son started organising the preliminary elements  of his presidential campaign in 2005, and there has been active speculation about his presidential run since mid-2006 at least.  There has been much more time to ponder the implications of this factor, much more time to do a lot of polling on it, and much more time for pundits and bloggers to write endless commentaries on the topic. 

The issue has taken on added significance in the nominating contest because evangelicals, many of whom would have been Democratic voters in 1967-68, have since started voting Republican much more frequently.  As a Republican candidate before the 1968 realignment, Romney would have been more insulated from the early pressures his son is now experiencing.  Had he been a Democrat, the issue might have become more significant in the nominating contest.  Others cite the famed presidential runs of Mo Udall and Orrin Hatch, both of which went precisely nowhere in the end.  Udall’s attempt was somewhat more successful, and even though Udall was also not an actively practicing Mormon his membership in the LDS church was used against him during the primaries.  Udall lost to Jimmy Carter, so the Carter-Huckabee comparisons have something else going for them.  Indeed, Udall’s defeat can provide some clue of what might have happened had Romney been running in the other party. 

The idea that modern anti-Mormonism has somehow come out of nowhere in recent years is a myth.

“The Golden Compass” is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the “Harry Potter” franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects. ~Peter Rainer

So, I take it that that’s a thumbs down.  I have been interested to read some reviews of The Golden Compass after commenting on this Atlantic article about it.  While it has received some good press, many reviewers are saying that it is confusing and mediocre.  (The title has also provided easy fodder for mocking the film’s direction, or lack thereof.)  I wonder if the movie has so softened and dulled the ideas in the book (even if they are ideas that would have made the movie much less popular and lucrative), as the article suggested it did, that it lost whatever coherence it may have had as a novel.  The Chronicle’s reviewer certainly thought this was the case:

It’s a story without a soul.

Perhaps materialists will take that as a compliment?

Largely unrelated to the theme of his speech, the main part of which I am refraining from discussing any further for a couple of weeks, Romney threw in some added Europe-bashing and Fred Thompsonesque disrespect for Allied war dead.  He said:

No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America’s sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world.

The last sentence is true, and the first sentence is not.  The last sentence passes over in silence all the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from other countries who were sacrificing every bit as much and were fighting “for liberty” as much as our soldiers were.  Once again, I would repeat that there is something unhealthy in ranking nations by tallying up body counts or pints of blood shed, but even if it were a contest our country would not “win” first place.  That doesn’t make one nation more admirable than another, since it was an allied effort.  

I don’t exactly know what the point of any of these direct and indirect shots at Europe was, except perhaps to advance the dubious and easily disproven thesis that religion and freedom need one another to survive.  Both can be desirable, but they are not necessarily or obviously complementary in all times and in all places.  Also, while we all presumably understand that England’s established church lost still more authority at the end of the seventeenth century with the Act of Toleration, it has never been all together clear how the post-1688/9 established religion of England was fundamentally at odds with constitutional liberties and parliamentary government.  Several American states continued to have established churches after independence (Romney’s Massachusetts gave up on an established church only in 1833).  It was the relative religious diversity among the states that was one of the reasons for anxiety about a federal government establishment of religion; the prohibition of a federal religious establishment was intended as much to protect state and local religious establishments as it was to protect dissenters.   

Alex Massie has more.

Romney’s campaign has released some excerpts of the speech he will be giving in about an hour.  It says pretty much what many thought he would say (it is much more Millman than Fox), which is simply a more elaborate version of his standard rhetoric.  He has said that he is not a spokesman for his religion before, and he is going to tell us that again.  Here is a reason why this stance is particularly unsatisfying.  As far as the balancing act goes, the speech is better than I expected.  The reference to religious tests will probably not go down well, since the religious tests to which the Constitution refers were tests imposed through law to screen for dissenters from a formally established, official doctrine.  You cannot have a religious test without a legally established church or religion to serve as the standard for that test.  It is one thing to say that he thinks it is not a relevant or appropriate topic for political discussion.  For what it’s worth, Ron Paul takes that view.  However, whether it is relevant or not, there is no question of a religious test here.  To call this a religious test or a prelude to a religious test is to conflate a formal and legal impediment to office with the attitudes and beliefs of citizens.  It would mean that trying to elect someone you believe best represents you is a kind of persecution of the candidates you do not select, which seems like a very strange way to view things.

There is also one line (”diversity of our cultural expression”), which is effectively a nod to the ”diversity is our strength” idea (an article of faith more irrational than anything taught by even the most far-out religions), that will have conservatives of various stripes smacking their foreheads.    

James Poniewozik asks the right question:

Speaking of which, why, exactly, does it constitute “bigotry” to vote against someone on the basis of their religion? Religious beliefs are relevant, strong and foundational–as political candidates never tire of reminding us. No one calls it bigotry when someone votes for a candidate explicitly because, say, he cites Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher. Yet it seems that, as a society, we’ve decided that you’re allowed to make judgments based on a candidate’s religion–but only positive ones.

This speech is an opportunity to dispel misconceptions and inform the public.  If Romney wanted this question to go away or, since it isn’t going to go away, at least to go into the background, this doesn’t seem to be the speech he ought to be giving.

While qualifying his remarks, saying that he isn’t trying to be facetious or trite (I mean, why would anyone ever say that Mike Huckabee is trite?), Huckabee seems to attribute his rise in the polls to divine intervention.  Now I understand that one should glorify God rather than oneself, but there is something a bit strange in giving this answer as the entire explanation, as if it was beside the point that he is thriving in states where there are a lot of evangelicals and struggling in states where there are few. 

I think I would find this casual invocation of God’s assistance more appropriate if Huckabee hadn’t done this in the past.  It seems to me that you can acknowledge and revere God’s sovereignty over all things and recognise that all things are ordered by His Providence, or you can choose to use Him as a prop in a comedy routine.  You don’t really get to do both.

Prof. Fox, long-time friend of Eunomia, has offered up what he would say in Romney’s place tomorrow, which I think will noticeably outshine Romney’s own address in thoughtfulness and intelligence.  Here is a smart, interesting excerpt:

“Secularism” is much broader and much more complicated than the reductive, simplistic antisectarianism that some atheists preach, an antisectarianism that assumes everything religious is ultimately sectarian, part of a program to move the world in the direction of some very specific God or dogma. This is not the case. The secularism that properly adheres to the American character–a secularism which involves civility, toleration, human decency and human rights–is not a secularism that ever did or ever should launch crusades against sects, whether they be Catholic or Presbyterian or Southern Baptist, assuming those organizations break no democratically-determined laws; it is a secularism that rather emerged alongside a broadly Christian understanding of what the plurality of sects means for a society.

I don’t see a former venture capitalist using such words as metaphysics and antisectarianism, but if Romney were to give Prof. Fox’s speech he would come out of this episode with a reputation for serious thought.  Politically, it could go well, when he says:

I want to emphasize that I think it is perfectly possible to legitimately vote against a candidate on the basis of their religion; I know that, even in the simple and straightforward ways in which my daily beliefs have shaped my life, there is ground for criticism and doubt.

By not denying legitimacy to such opposition, the candidate could appear at once gracious and thoughtful.  Then again, it could suddenly take a bad turn, especially when he says:

But I take the American people seriously enough to believe that they will recognize and respond to an expression of faith which is Christian first and foremost, and sectarian second. 

This is one of the major claims on which the entire controversy, such as it is, turns, this emphasis on “faith which is Christian first and foremost.”  Would Romney want to give the impression that supporting him implied an endorsement of Mormonism as Christianity?  If one of the principal reasons for evangelicals and other Christians’ anxiety about and hostility to a Mormon candidate is the fear that his nomination or election would promote Mormonism as “just another denomination,” or something of the kind, this line is almost guaranteed to confirm these voters in their opposition. 

My initial response is that a speech given in this register would satisfy only those history and divinity professors and the philosophy and religious studies majors who would really, fully grasp what he was saying.  (This is partly because I think an average voter who hears the word  “sectarian” thinks about “sectarian violence” in Iraq and elsewhere and will be made more anxious about talk of sectarians in America; I don’t assume the vast majority to be in possession of a deep and abiding understanding of post-Reformation European history, whether they are religious or secular.)  I think there are problems with Prof. Fox’s description of secularism above (a practical one being that it is embraced by a fairly small and, I would guess, shrinking constituency of humane secularists and scholarly believers), but these are problems that I don’t think a majority of the country would necessarily see or consider to be problems.

This predicament really is a trap for Romney, as I and others have observed before: if he stresses what he has in common with Christian voters, he will be criticised for not being forthright and honest enough about his own religion, and if he acknowledges difference he is probably dooming himself to electoral oblivion by alienating Christian voters.  Yet recent polling shows that he is damaged even more by his evasiveness and reluctance to speak on the matter, which fits into the narrative that he is inauthentic (some might even say fraudulent).  Perhaps if Romney himself were not such an obviously protean, shape-shifting sort of candidate on his policy views, his unwillingness to speak about his religion would have appeared as wisdom and discretion, instead of coming across as yet another example of his inability to give a straight answer to a question.  (The good news for him is that he has not yet said that he would consult ”the lawyers” about whether he believes in God.)  

Update: Pew has new polling on public attitudes about Mormonism.  Pew’s polling shows a significantly higher percentage overall who would be less likely to vote for a candidate on account of Mormonism than the L.A. Times poll does.  The response is strongest, as we have seen previously, among white evangelicals (36% are less likely vs. the overall 25%) and weekly church-going evangelicals in particular (41%). 

Second Update: My Scene colleague Noah Millman offers a different kind of speech for Romney that is more likely to succeed politically, but which pretty carefully avoids saying anything definite about his religion.  I have to say that Noah actually captures Romney’s love of patriotic gushing quite well.  If you wanted to make it really sound like Romney (which I know Noah wasn’t trying to do), you would need to insert at least three or four “goshes” into the speech, as in, “Gosh, this country is the greatest.”  Or, as Romney actually said during one of the debates:

Gosh, I love America…. America for me is not just our rolling mountains and hills and streams and great cities. It’s the American people. And the American people are the greatest people in the world. What makes America the greatest nation in the world is the heart of the American people….It is that optimism about this great people that makes this the greatest nation on earth. 

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Monday that he would not focus on his Mormon beliefs in a major speech on religion this week and instead would discuss his concern that “faith has disappeared from the public square.” ~The Los Angeles Times

So, after all of our fevered speculation about why Romney was going to address questions about his religion at this politically sensitive time, “The Speech” is going to be “some speech on religion.”     

Maybe some voters who are inclined to hold Romney’s Mormonism against him will feel guilty when Romney cites the principle of religious tolerance. ~Marc Ambinder

Perhaps, but for them to feel guilty they would have to have done something they actually thought was wrong.  Not voting for Romney because of his Mormonism is not intolerance, and it is a measure of how distorted, or rather inflated, the concept of tolerance has become that strong disagreement over religion can be equated with religious intolerance.

But I think it’s bogus to assert that the reason for Governor Romney’s upcoming speech is a rival’s poll numbers. Rather, it’s the fact that a rival appears to be running an overtly sectarian campaign — something that is just not good for America. ~Charles Mitchell

I'’m holding off commenting more about the speech for a while, but I did want to address this claim of sectarianism, which I think is excessive and a sign of how increasingly panicked Romney supporters are becoming.  I will say also that I think Huckabee’s rise is not a major factor behind the decision to give the speech.  It is not just Romneyites who have been accusing Huckabee of making a religious appeal, but they are virtually alone in claiming that Huckabee is running a “sectarian campaign.”  His recent advertisement, entitled “Believe,” has received criticism from almost all quarters for its graphic that reads, “Christian Leader.”  According to Huckabee on ABC’s This Week, where he appeared yesterday, the purpose of the ad was simply introductory.  Huckabee is an ordained minister, and he has been in the forefront of various Christian conservative endeavours, such as the promotion of so-called “covenant marriage,” both of which give him some legitimate claim to the description “Christian leader.”  Observers are assuming a sectarian and anti-Mormon motive behind to this part of Huckabee’s ad, when this is both unproven and seems directly contradictory to everything Huckabee says publicly and the general tenor of his campaign.  Might his ad have the effect of directing voters who do not want to support a Mormon towards Huckabee?  Yes, it might, but if you wanted to run a “sectarian campaign” you would make the appeal much more straightforward.  Huckabee isn’t running such a campaign, because I suspect he knows that this would grate on the sensibilities of a lot of voters.  He probably also believes that strongly affirming his beliefs isn’t the same, or at least doesn’t have to be the same, as ridiculing someone else’s. 

At most, the ad very vaguely alludes to his past work as a minister (which you would only recognise if you already knew this about him), but never mentions any of that explicitly, and it seeks to identify the candidate with his target constituency, Christian conservatives.  Unless it is now supposed to be illegitimate for a Christian to describe himself as such, I fail to see what Huckabee has done wrong.  Some Christian conservatives are rubbed the wrong way by such overt appeals to Christian identity, but then I suspect Ross was not won over by George Bush’s claim that his ”favourite philosopher is Jesus Christ” or by the story of his religious awakening.  The voters won over by these appeals see nothing the matter with a candidate stating and embracing his religious identity, and they think it is entirely appropriate to judge candidates based on this, because they do not think religion is something to be kept out of the public eye, nor do they think it is somehow shameful to speak about it in public.  If a person’s religion informs his “values” and shapes his judgement about matters of public policy, it should be something that voters take into consideration. 

The basic argument against this, and it is the one that Chait has made, is that this is unfair to candidates who are unrepresentative of the body politic in their religious affiliation, which is essentially a complaint that there is a majority religion and that candidates in a mass democracy are likely to come to from that majority religion in nationwide elections.  Short of completey removing religion from public discourse or awaiting the day when there are no majority religions, it seems inevitable in a mass democracy that religious identity will have an impact on elections, just as other kinds of identity have and must have in a political system that is, for good or ill, inherently identitarian.  Secular voters respond to secular candidates and react against publicly religious candidates in the same way, because they are interested in being represented by someone like them who shares their worldview.  Secular Americans treat an entirely non-religious politics as the norm and the neutral ground upon which publicly religious candidates intrude, but having that kind of politics is a preference that can and will be contested.     

In any case, it seems to me that the intended message of Huckabee’s ad seems to be not simply, or even necessarily, “You should vote for me because I am a Christian,” but rather, “Because my faith defines me, I have principles that will not change or waver.”  This ad does implicitly criticise Romney, not because he is a Mormon, but because Romney is an opportunistic fraud.  If you want to damage Romney with the voting public, you would never need to say a thing about his religion–just remind them of the man’s utter lack of scruples when it comes to public policy positions.  In the end, that will be more than enough.

P.S.  Incidentally, I agree with the argument that identity is a terrible basis for selecting candidates if you are actually interested in selecting the person best qualified for the office, because it will often cause voters to choose inferior candidates, but then democracy and selecting the most meritorious candidates have never gone together.  If you aren’t a fan of democracy (and I’m definitely not), this is probably one of the reasons why, but it is an unavoidable part of the process.

On the surface of it, Romney shouldn’t have to give a Mormon speech any more than Obama should have to give a Muslim speech. ~Patrick Ruffini

Except for the small matter that Obama isn’t a Muslim.  The remarkable thing is that Obama has spoken more openly and directly about his experience living among Muslims and about his Muslim ancestors, while Romney has avoided discussing his religion whenever possible.  The perceived connection between Obama and Islam is probably far more damaging to him than Romney’s Mormonism is (because public opposition to a Muslim presidential candidate is even greater), but he and his supporters keep talking up his time in Indonesia, apparently oblivious that every time someone mentions Indonesia and his great understanding of the “Islamic world” many voters hear, “Obama is a Muslim.”  One tries in vain to explain to these people that he lived there, but did not actually convert.  I attempted to explain the facts at a recent Thanksgiving gathering, but the Obama-is-a-Muslim meme is already becoming engrained.  They know that he lived in some Muslim country “over there” and that is enough to confirm their worst suspicions. 

Besides, wo we really think, given the state of affairs and the public mood, that if a presidential candidate were a Muslim that he wouldn’t have to address it publicly in some way?  Of course he would.  The perception that both candidates belong to non-Christian religions are clearly political liabilities, as poll after poll on Muslim and Mormon presidential candidates shows, but the difference is that the Obama-is-a-Muslim meme is a lie, while Romney is something like a fifth-generation Mormon and proud of it.  Obama shouldn’t have to give a major speech to debunk unfounded rumours.  If Romney wants to be competitive, not just in the primaries but also for the general election, he needs to confront the reality, troubling as he and others may find it, that at least a quarter of the electorate is currently opposed to considering voting for him for no other reason than his religion.  As polling on this reveals, this sentiment is more or less evenly spread across the political spectrum. 

Ruffini adds in an update:

The anti-Mormon bigots and the anti-Muslim rumormongers seem to exist on about the same level — and neither candidate should let these fringe elements define their campaign.

Well, if you want to define somewhere between 25-43% of the electorate as “fringe elements,” I guess you can do so, but I’m not sure how someone wins an election by ignoring such huge levels of built-in opposition.

As you may have noticed, I have had a few things to say about Romney and the “Mormon factor” in this election, so I suppose I should comment on the news (via Noam Scheiber) that Romney will be giving the long-awaited speech that is aimed at allaying fears and doubts about his religion.  I have noted before that Romney has an impossible balancing act to maintain when he addresses this question, which may be why he has carefully evaded it for months, but it is also the case that Romney cannot keep evading the issue so long as he wishes to define his campaign and his “values” in terms of being a “person of faith.”  The impossible balancing act is stressing the political irrelevance of the theological differences Mormonism really does have with Christianity while simultaneously claiming that this very same religion, whose distinctive substance is supposed to be irrelevant, informs and shapes his “values” that he will rely on to make judgements about policy.  Another part of the balancing act (which is where it becomes really dangerous politically) is to declare that it is “un-American” to judge a candidate based on his religion without insulting the millions of voters who consider a candidate’s religion an important part of selecting their preferred candidate, while also paying homage to the “separation of church and state” without actually endorsing the idea that the separation of church and state has any constitutional basis (which a fairly large number of religious conservatives doesn’t accept).  His speech will have to go something like this: “My faith, which is very important to me and has made me who I am, should not be important to you, but it is important that we have a person of faith leading this country, and that person happens to be me.”

I agree that the timing of this couldn’t be worse, but I wonder whether the timing makes that much difference.  The extensive opposition to a Mormon candidate wouldn’t have disappeared had he given the speech earlier.  However, by giving the speech now he may be exacerbating what is already a bad situation for himself.  Had he done it three or four months ago and laid the issue to rest, at least as much as he could, he could have reduced the publicity surrounding the speech and tried to contain the damage.  Now that there is just a month left until the caucuses, he is using valuable time and exposing himself to the backlash that we knew was coming at a time when he cannot afford to shed any more support.  In the end, Romney has always been in an impossible position: a sizeable percentage of his own party will never vote for someone of his religion, and these are the same people he needed to win over to become the unchallenged social conservative consensus candidate, which is why Romney’s campaign has always been a fool’s errand as I’ve said from the beginning.  My guess is that Romney gives the speech on Thursday and his campaign in Iowa begins to implode, as his shallow support there evaporates.

Ross has covered most of Chait’s article pretty thoroughly with a biting tone and plenty of vim, but he seems to have overlooked the most glaring problem with Chait’s argument–the concluding line.  Chait wrote:

If it makes sense to support public figures because they share our religious beliefs, then it also makes sense to oppose public figures who don’t.

Not that!  This is supposed to be the killing blow, the conclusion that shows us why “faith-based politics” is ultimately so pernicious: it leads voters to judge candidates according to their beliefs!  Religious beliefs, yes, but beliefs all the same.  Unless we think that religious teachings have no effect on the education and cultivation of the minds of religious people, it seems entirely arbitrary to declare one set of beliefs off limits to public scrutiny and out of bounds for public discourse.  The secularist declares quite confidently that voters should not take this into consideration, which is to say that voters are supposed to ignore what is generally granted to be an important element in the lives of most Americans.  Yes, this does mean that voters will oppose public figures who do not share their beliefs, or at the very least this difference of beliefs will create an obstacle that the candidate will need to overcome and address.  How is this ultimately any different from any other aspect of democratic politicking?  Candidates, if they are to be successful, must reach voters “where they live,” so to speak, and so long as Americans are at least nominally religious we can expect public expressions of this and we should also expect the influence of these views on the government.  

Separated from a coercive state apparatus mandating this or that doctrine, religious arguments or policy arguments that draw on religious language must rely on their persuasive power.  If this kind of language has real persuasive power and my political opponents were using it, I could see the temptation to keep it out of public discourse as much as possible.  Yet the core of the secularists’ own view of the world is that religious language is not persuasive (not to them anyway) and that appeals to Scripture, tradition and ethical arguments derived from these sources are spurious.  In short, secularists want to bar the door to a styule of politics that they themselves find entirely unpersuasive on the grounds that it is…too dangerously powerful.     

Then there was this section that jumped out at me:

The depth of American religiosity is precisely why secularism is so important. Since religion is premised on faith, theological disputes cannot be settled through public reason [bold mine-DL]. Even the most vicious public policy disputes get settled over time. (Americans now agree on slavery and greenback currency.)  But we’re no closer to consensus on the divinity of Jesus than we were 200 years ago.

What would constitute a consensus on this?  Who is “we”?  All Americans?  Christians have enjoyed a general consensus on this for a lot longer than 200 years.   How wide and broad is the neo-Arian movement these days?  There was a good deal more consensus about this among all Americans at a number of points in the last 200 years than there is now, if only because we used to be a much more religiously homogenous country to the extent that even larger majorities identified themselves with one part of the “Great Tradition” of Christianity or another.  In a strange way, what Chait seems to be saying is that a lack of consensus about the final conclusions of a debate means that we should not have an ongoing debate.  He takes for granted that there cannot be a consensus on such matters, since they are theological, but this is to misunderstand how theological claims are made and judged.  

At the root of Chait’s claim is a conceit about theology that bears no relationship to what theology actually is.  For the secularist and, I’m sorry to say, for more than a few believers, theology is something abstract and divorced from “real” religious experience.  As the Fathers teach us, theology is best understood as prayer and spiritual experience and only subsequently as formal doctrine that expresses the realities encountered in that experience in technical and philosophical language.  In the Church, those most expert at marrying these two, the life of prayer and spiritual experience and precise exposition of the Faith, are given the epithet Theologian (Sts. John, Gregory of Nazianzos and Symeon bear this title in the Orthodox Church).  The danger of the conceit that “theological disputes cannot be settled through public reason” is that it encourages the view that religious life is purely experiential and subjective and has no rationality to it at all.  This is what we all know as fideism, and it is not Christian theology (nor would other religious traditions recognise this arational form of their teachings).  There are axioms at the heart of any theological system, just as there in any philosophical argument, but the demonstration of theological truths has been since the early centuries of the Church a decidedly intellectual and rational enterprise. 

Obviously, divorced from praxis and a living faith this theology will not be sufficient, but there is a basic misconception here that theology exists outside the realm of the rational and is therefore unfit for public discourse.  It is a matter of record, however, that public discourse in pre-modern Europe was frequently entirely theology, and the rhetorical and intellectual traditions we and modern Europeans inherited from that history remain suffused with a theological dimension and the practice of deliberating on doctrinal matters in public.  Chait deploys the phrase “public reason,” which is a way of saying “a kind of reason that makes an a priori exclusion of anything related to metaphysics or revelation.”  In other words, a deficient kind of reason.  I agree that this sort of reason cannot settle anything, since it barely begins to grasp the fullness of reality.

Ross’ reply to Chait referred to this poll that shows that Democrats are more likely to say they would not vote for a Mormon than Republicans, which made me try to remember what that famous Rasmussen poll on that question had to say.  I went digging through the archives and found it again.  Sure enough, 51% of Democratic likely voters say that they would not even “consider” voting for a Mormon, compared with 40% of Republicans and 33% of “other.”  The overall “no” figure was 43%, which is higher than what most polls of the general public say (are likely voters really more likely to be anti-Mormon?).  For some reason, the 30-39 year olds are the most opposed to a Mormon presidential candidate, women are more likely to be opposed than men, blacks are more likely to be opposed than whites and political moderates and conservatives are virtual ties at 44% and 43% opposed respectively (liberals are at 41%).  Religion can intensify the general anti-Mormonism of the public, but this is not something limited just to those who engage in “faith-based politics.”  It is, as Ross suggested, as much the result of secularists wary of “faith-based politics” and wary of a specific religion as it is of voters who judge candidates by their religion. 

The point is, as I have said before, is that anti-Mormonism is widespread and every demographic participates in it to some significant extent.  It is unmistakable that the strongest concentrations of opposition are found among evangelicals (53% opposed) and, of course, those who think that a candidate’s faith is “very important” (59% opposed), but the concentrations in every other group are also very high. 

Chait obviously doesn’t want “faith-based politics” under any circumstances, but its capacity to generate opposition to candidates from this particular minority religion shouldn’t be one of the reasons he gives when some large part of every group in America doesn’t want a Mormon as President.

Ross is right when he says this in response to Chait:

Romney hasn’t been giving speeches about how Mormon theology is consonant with Trinitarian Christianity. Instead, he’s been dodging those kind of questions, while giving speeches arguing that his religious beliefs lead him to the same policy conclusions about abortion, same-sex marriage, and so forth, that conservative Catholics and evangelicals tend to reach. He’s arguing that his positions on the issues are more important than their theological underpinnings, in other words, not the other way around.

As the Byron York piece on Romney related, the rare exception to this strategy of evasion took place when Romney thought he wasn’t being recorded and was being challenged very directly to embrace and display his religion.  One of the things that has irritated some Mormons is Romney’s reluctance to speak about his religion, combined with his rare attempts to smooth over the differences (as he did when he was interviewed by Stephanopoulos), since it has given them (and others) the impression that he is somehow embarrassed or ashamed to speak publicly about it.  He says that this is entirely untrue and is proud of his religion–just not so proud that he wants to tell you about it.  When Romney evades these questions or his supporters make lame arguments about how we’re not choosing a “theologian-in-chief,” it declares to religious conservatives that he thinks that his religion is actually irrelevant to his “values.”  In Romney’s case, this is not hard to believe, since he has been a lifelong Mormon and has only very recently discerned that his faith, into which others should not pry, authorises or inspires policy views that it had never inspired before.  At that point, being a “person of faith” becomes rather more like a box that must be checked rather than being the core of the man.

As I have said more than once, one of Romney’s difficulties with religious conservatives is that he appeals to them thanks to the logic Ross mentioned (values, not theology) when I assume that many religious conservatives think that it matters how you obtain and arrive at those “values” and how you ground them in your religious teachings.  This may not take precedence over everything, but the assumption Romney is making is that it doesn’t matter how he has arrived at sharing the same “values,” so long as he shares them.  Yet what made George Bush such a favourite of evangelicals is that they could identify with how he had arrived at his beliefs and his conclusions.  Perhaps this is an idiosyncratic objection on my part, but few things annoy me more than when people try to reduce witnessing a living faith and acting as leaven in the world to an adherence to a set of “values” and when they then give precedence to those “values” over actual doctrinal truths.  That is fundamentally what Romney’s candidacy represents, it seems antithetical to what religious conservatives claim to believe, and it is why I expect that his currently broad but shallow support will collapse. 

“You know, the term ‘Christian’ means different things to different people,” Romney told me. “Jews aren’t Christian. That doesn’t preclude a Jew from being able to run for office and become president. I believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world and is the son of God. Now, some people say, well, that doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian because Christian refers to a certain group of evangelical Christian faiths. That’s fine. That’s their view. Others say, no, anyone who believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the Savior should be called Christian. That’s fine, too. I’ll just describe what I believe and not try to distinguish my faith from others. That’s really something for my faith to do and for the churches amongst themselves to consider.” ~Byron York

You would think that Christian conservatives would have a hard time swallowing this “I’m OK, You’re OK” approach to defining basic terms.  I suppose this is the sort of relativistic babble you end up having when you start out from a position of espousing shared “values,” but Romney is making a mistake here.  He will not say directly that he believes Mormons are Christians, which he seems to believe, but he doesn’t want to say that those who think otherwise are mistaken.  This attempt to have it both ways is going to dissatisfy a lot of Christian and Mormon voters alike.  

While I’m thinking about the topic of atheism and “hard secularism,” I thought I would make a few remarks about this Atlantic piece on the making of the movie version of The Golden Compass.  I haven’t read the Dark Materials trilogy, nor am I exactly rushing out to pick up a copy of the first book, so I am relying pretty much entirely on the article for the background, but something did strike me about an idea contained in one version of the script.  From the article:

The earlier scripts made passing reference to the Fall. In the Stoppard script, Asriel, in a rage about the Authority, mocks the “apple of desire” and the “fig-leaf of shame”; a few scenes later Coulter, the evil Nicole Kidman character, yells at Asriel, “You can’t conquer God!” Weitz told me he’d originally written an opening scene showing Lyra in a college chapel listening to a sermon about the alternative Genesis, “but that movie was not going to get made.” A Weitz script dated December 2004 makes no explicit reference to Genesis. Instead, the theology is mediated entirely through a discussion of Dust, which, according to your taste, is either more highbrow or just more muddled. Asriel tells Lyra that people believe Dust is sin and that it brings on misery. He says he will set out to destroy Dust and essentially reverse the consequences of original sin: “When I do—pain, sin, suffering—death itself will die.”

What this reminds me of more than anything else, aside from gnostic utopian insanity, is the Alliance assassin from Serenity, who seeks the annihilation of sin from what I think is supposed to be the other side of things.  For the assassin, eliminating sin was the ultimate goal of the totalitarian Alliance’s desire for control (against which our anarchic, vaguely neo-Confederate Browncoat heroes are resisting), which is the role that “the Magisterium” theoretically ought to be filling in a story that vilifies religious authority, but apparently it is not. 

In any case, there does seem to be something to the charge that The Golden Compass is “Hitchens taken to the kids,” though this may do a disservice to the movie, which might at least be entertaining.  Even the finished product’s somewhat more muted digs at Christianity are not going to be well-received, at least not by anyone who isn’t already a fan of the anti-clerical jabs of V for Vendetta and the dedicated blasphemy of something like Preacher. 

One of the surest ways that you can tell that it’s going to be badly lacking is the frequency with which people defending it in this article keep saying that it’s “highly spiritual.”  Talking about something being “spiritual” as a substitute for religion, or as a way of proving that something isn’t anti-religious, is a classic response, since it doesn’t actually have to mean anything and yet seems to provide some cover for the person saying it.  We’ve all heard the line: “Oh, I’m not interested in religion, but I consider myself a very spiritual person.”  How nice.  Even Sam Harris meditates, so I understand, and obviously entire sci-fi franchises are built on or involve hokey mysticism (Star Wars, Stargate) that might well have been derived from The Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism, so why can’t an adaptation of an explicitly anti-theist work of fiction also be “spiritual” in some entirely non-commital and thoroughly meaningless way?   

James, Ross, Michael, Will Wilkinson and Keith Pavlischek of the Ethics and Public Policy Center recently discussed the “New Atheism” or “hard secularism” (as Ross calls it) on an AFF panel called “Is atheism the new religious right?”  I had heard that the panel was happening, but today is the first time I’ve heard the audio from it.  Give it a listen if you have the time. 

We should not call ourselves secularists. We should not call ourselves humanists, or secular humanists, or naturalists, or skeptics, or anti-theists, or rationalists, or freethinkers, or brights.  We should not call ourselves anything. ~Sam Harris

Wouldn’t that just open them up to charges of being a very literal sort of anti-nominalist?  After all, if nomen est omen, and Harris doesn’t want to be superstitious, he would really have to abandon all names and resort to communicating through a series of hand gestures (and one suspects that he would be more persuasive than he currently is).  Regardless, I guess this means that Harris is against really goofy-looking atheist symbols, too, since both names and images are signifiers of something that Harris doesn’t think should be formally represented.

Read the whole of Michael’s article.  As usual, he has captured the memorable details from the conference very well.

Rod and Amy Sullivan appear on bloggingheads, discussing evangelicals and politics (and Kirkpatrick’s recent Times magazine article) and the intersection of religion and politics generally.

The Hebrew prophets have a political vision and it is not neoconservative.  ~David Klinghoffer

You have to laugh at Klinghoffer’s description of a prospective attack on Iran as “aggressive defense.”  What’s next?  Peaceful violence?  Charitable hate?  Lawful crime?  (Klinghoffer must be an expert in stating absurdities, since he is a fellow at the Discovery Institute.)

You do have to admire Klinghoffer’s intellectual contortions to justify the moral abomination of the “new fusionism.”  Aggression and moral reform marching side by side is a hard thing to defend, but he gives it his best shot. 

Then again, Klinghoffer never wrote (probably unwittingly) truer words than these:

Idolatry manifests itself in every age.  Its essence lies in setting up moral authorities in competition with, or to the negation of, God.

Quite.  That might be a powerful lesson on which the various warfare state-lovers could reflect and meditate.  Of course, it is precisely the neocons surrounding Rudy Giuliani who embrace the idolatry of nationalism, and it is those religious conservatives who ignore their own convictions in the name of fighting “Islamofascism” who are complicit in the same error.   

There was also this:

Yet the prophets had little to say against Assyrofascism or Babylofascism.

I wonder why.  Maybe because they weren’t morons.

I’ve been shocked, really, at the fact that it seems to — there seems to be a place in our culture for, gosh, saying that Mormonism is not a real religion. ~Lynne Cheney

Relatively few people are claiming that it’s “not a real religion.”  For its critics, it is only too real, and the thing some of them might find most shocking is that it does, in fact, exist and people believe it.  The real argument, however, is not incredulity at the Mormon creed, so to speak, as it is anxiety about the relationship between Mormonism and Christianity.  There may be the occasional secular person, a Damon Linker, say, who sees dire threats emanating from Salt Lake City, but the real problem is not so much that Romney’s religion isn’t “real” (it may be one of the very few things about him that isn’t fake!) as it is that his religion seems alien and bizarre to many of the people whose votes he needs to win the nomination. 

If Christian conservatives respond favourably to “one of their own” (as the recent Huckamania suggests they do), they are similarly unenthusiastic about those with whom they cannot relate and identify in terms of shared religious experience.  Even acknowledging Brownback’s less-than-charismatic persona and keeping in mind his ties to evangelicals as qualifications, the fate of Brownback may be telling for how this kind of identity politics works.  It probably did not help him with many of these voters that he had become Catholic.  He could still speak in their idiom and understand their perspective, but there were limits to his ability to claim to be “one of them.” 

Romney hardly helps himself by treating discussion of the subject as a source of embarrassment or lame humour, encouraging critics to regard his religion as something of which he is ashamed.  As a voter’s stupid question about “how many First Ladies can we expect” shows, modern Mormonism is not well understood or very familiar.  Anyone from a relatively poorly understood minority religion is going to carry the political burden of trying to relate his religious experience to that of the voters he’s addressing, especially if he wants to talk up his faith and his life as a “person of faith” in his campaign.

The “cult” charge is patently unfair and seems to reflect bigotry, but the perspective that Mormonism is more of an offshoot of Christianity than a variety of it seems fairly well-supported to me. Generally, when you add a new holy book, you have a new religion. ~Matt Yglesias

Perhaps the pejorative use of the term “cult” is a bit much, if by “cult” you mean a group of people who are mindlessly controlled by a cynical, villainous leader who exploits their gullibility.  Even if you think that is true of Joseph Smith’s career, it is hard to claim the same thing for his modern successors, who are, if anything, all together in earnest and sincere.  In another sense, “cult” refers to any religious group and could be fairly applied to the LDS church.  It is a bit intriguing how some cultural conservatives will make a point of noting how culture derives form cultus, referring a religious cult, but how others will use “cult” as an insult. 

In any case, the thing that intrigues me most is the idea that, for some people, “values” trump theology, even though it is allegedly from theology and church teaching that these same people derive their “values.”  One might suppose that how one reached these conclusions would matter quite a lot, but this “values” talk reminds us that there are some who don’t care how you reach the right conclusion so long as you get there.  At bottom, it really is a question of identity politics: can Christian conservative voters knowingly endorse someone who is not really Christian?  For some, “values” are enough.  But I imagine they are not sufficient for most.

But while I agree with his goal of working towards a rational, secular world, a triumph of enlightenment values, I disagree entirely with his proposed strategy, which seems to involve putting a bullet through every god-haunted brain. ~Pharyngula

It might be worth noting that the two are frequently paired in the last two centuries, and that the triumph of “enlightenment values” has often enough been associated with just such mass killing of believers.    Those who would like to insist that such mass killing-for-enlightenment has nothing to do with the “enlightenment values” cannot very well make the same connection between religion and violence committed in the name of religion.  It would require instead a non-ideological and intelligent appraisal of history, which secularists and atheists, at least of the militant variety, have never been interested in making.  Of course, a crucial difference, certainly in Western history, is that secular revolutionaries have no difficulty believing that the ends of advancing the cause justify the means, while for Christians in particular to make similar arguments they must betray Christianity’s moral and spiritual teachings.      

This gets to the heart of the absurdity of Hitchens’ view of religion.  If it “ruins everything,” as the subtitle of his book claims, how can a decent atheist stand by and let it go on ruining things so terribly?  Hitchens was simply showing the fanaticism that tends to accompany a view in which all believers are either dupes or power-hungry villains who have made the world a much worse place.  Once you have cast theism itself as a species of totalitarian groupthink, as Hitchens and his ilk do, it’s rather hard to say that you shouldn’t be willing to fight the totalitarians you have just so labeled, and to fight them tooth and nail.  Hitchens really is just taking his position to its logical extreme, which reveals the basic moral bankruptcy and evil at the heart of his ideas.  He has never been squeamish about endorsing revolutionary violence before, and his so-called “move to the right” over the last few years was simply his joining together with people who shared his faith in the redemptive and liberating power of violence.   

Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has joined the ranks of militant secularism and has lately advocated “defeating Islam” in much the same way as Hitchens, Hitchens possesses the intense certainty that a supposed devotion to rationality and enlightenment require large-scale irrational slaughter and barbarism.  That is nothing new.  It is the inevitable venom of the disenchanted ex-believer or the bitter non-believer, who cannot simply cease believing and leave it at that, but must try to “free” everyone else from ”chains” that the latter do not see.  If they will not free themselves, they must be forced to be free–such is the bloody logic of “enlightenment values” and “freethinking” in action.  To get from the Freisinnigen to the death camps it takes only a few steps.

Romney is asked about Mormonism wherever he goes. In my travels, I find his religious preference cited everywhere as the source of opposition to his candidacy. His response to the former CEOs that only reporters care about this issue sounded like a politician’s tired evasion. Romney was indicating that either he was too obtuse to appreciate his problem or was stalling because he had not determined how to deal with it. Contact with his advisers indicates the latter is the case. ~Robert Novak

When will Christopher Hitchens berate those lousy Buddhist monks for sowing “discord” and “hate” in Burma?  After all, he knows how religion poisons everything*, so I anticipate his denunciation of those troublemaking fanatics any day now.

*I hadn’t thought of it before, but this is just an adaptation of a phrase attributed to Mao: “religion is poison.”  Keep the faith, Hitch.

A few pokes have made the structure wobble and sway, and if enough of us get together, we could push it all right over. ~Pharyngula

Via Sullivan

Yes, it’s not because atheist diatribes are feebly argued and pitiful that we ridicule and deride them, but because they are so powerful and threatening to the claims of faith.  That must be why atheism is taking the world by storm…oh, wait, it isn’t.  Of course these insults provoke religious people to indignant response, and especially because the arguments used are tendentious or inaccurate or intellectually sloppy (or all three together).  But this really is one of the weakest argument of them all.  It’s as if a man called your mother filthy names and then used your outraged response as proof that the accusations are true.

Then there is the old chestnut that any and all religion is a prop of tyrants and a license to abuse power.  I should have thought that this would have been revealed as absurd by the end of the twentieth century, but why would anything as trivial as empirically verifiable historical record disturb the comfortable and lazy habits of the atheist mind?  The Church at its best was historically the bane of arbitrary rulers and abuses of secular power, and even the most autocratic of Christian rulers would have never contemplated the mass slaughter of innocents that enlightened revolutionaries carried out.  Even in the worst persecutions of heretics (and I would note that one of the most ancient and most thoroughly Christianised polities, namely Byzantium, generally avoided any executions of heretics), it was typical that only recalcitrant heresiarchs would be punished.  Enlightened terror tries to wipe out entire communities, entire nations, for the “greater good” or “utopia” or some damned pseudo-scientific lie.  And, of course, plenty of enlightened atheists have accepted the political rationalisations of mass murder while they scoff at the punishment of heretics.  If the “New Atheists” want to play the game of “whose mentality is more likely to lead to tyranny and state-sanctioned killing?” they shall lose, and lose badly.

He goes on:

We can admire the scattered bits of rational architecture that have arisen from the flawed bases of religion … but what if all of humanity were building on the bedrock of naturalism and reason, instead of that quaking vapor of god-belief? We could reach so much higher!

Yes, as high as the tower of Babel…but then that didn’t go very well, did it?

Via James comes this claim:

Contemporary Japan and India, among other non-Christian countries, have also embraced the Great Separation.

This is pretty demonstrably untrue in the case of India, since Indian politics has been nothing if not suffused with religiosity of all kinds since independence.  It is technically true to the extent that the religious communities in question do not have institutional “churches” as such, but pretty clearly nonsense to the extent that religious activist associations wield enormous clout in Indian politics.  There is an idea that this has been bad for “Indian secularism,” but Indian secularism has not meant the separation of religion and politics but the incorporation of all communities into the political process.  Where Hindutva seems to some to threaten the system is in its majoritarianism and exclusivism.  But the Great Separation has nothing to do with it one way or the other.  Japan is more straightforward in that the divinity of the emperor was officially repudiated, but large numbers of people still respect the emperor intensely and the symbolic value of the emperor is incalculable.  The clearest example of actual separation is in Turkey, which is where the separation is being actively undermined by the democratic process, because the “separation of church and state” or the separation of religion from politics is fundamentally hostile to democratic principles in a religious country. 

Then there is this even more extraordinary claim:

Separating church and state works; mixing them tends toward disaster.

This is where the messy details and historical contingencies come in handy.  First of all, it depends on which church or religion and what kind of state, which this formula ignores.  I can also say, with just as much confidence, that mixing church and state works, while separating them tends towards disaster.  I can say this because I can think of cases that support both claims, just as Ms. Goldstein can think of cases that support hers.  To my mind, Rome (renowned as the most punctilious of religious societies) and Byzantium “worked” and the Soviet Union failed–consider their respective lifespans as political systems and “experiments” in having different answers on the church/state relationship question.  Byzantium wins, hands down.  Does that mean that we should all prostrate ourselves before an emperor?  Perhaps not.  What it does mean is that taking the particular experience of certain nations as a universal rule is probably unwise.  The details of church-state relations are extremely important in distinguishing between excessive subordination of church to state or subordination of the state to the church.  Separation works, except for all the times that it doesn’t and symphoneia works better. 

I will have to second Josh Patashnik’s post, in which he replies to Mr. Krikorian:

I’m going to offer the rival prediction that if and when the Iranian government falls, there will be no mass conversion to Zoroastrianism [bold mine-DL], no widespread beheading of Christians, and Iran will…remain Muslim.

The point about Zoroastrianism is basically guaranteed, since Zoroastrianism today is unique among the ancient world religions that originated in the Near East in that its adherents actively discourage conversion.  Also, it has not had any noticeable or significant presence in the land of its birth for many centuries.  Quixotic attempts by the Pahlavis to consciously revive pre-Islamic Iranian traditions and names were, shall we say, not wildly popular, associated as they were with a rather brutal dictatorial regime.  (For that matter, rampant Baha’i revivals are also unlikely, since the Baha’i faith hardly seized the imaginations of Iranians during the rule of the Pahlavis.)    

This reminds me of two things that would be widely considered major drawbacks to the separationist plan.  The first would be that an embargoed, isolated Islamic world (were such a thing possible) would almost certainly have a massive backlash against the native Christian populations, and the refugees we have seen fleeing Iraq for Syria would soon be fleeing the entire Levant for Cyprus and points west.  The second would be that it would make Israel’s position totally untenable in the long term.  No one would confuse me with an enthusiastic booster of the U.S.-Israel connection, to be sure, but the likely extinction of Judaism and Christianity in their native lands following the implementation of such a plan would be an unacceptable price for whatever “strategic goals” such an arrangement might serve. 

Fundamentally, the hope of this plan is that Muslims will judge the merits of Islam based on earthly successes and failures.  Though I cannot claim to know the minds of so many different kinds of Muslims throughout the world, my guess is that people raised up in a tradition that teaches them a theodicy in which trials and rewards are God’s will are not going to conclude that political tyranny or disastrous misrule are evidence that Islam needs to be fundamentally changed or abandoned all together.  It didn’t happen for the entirety of Ottoman rule, and it isn’t likely to happen in the future.  On the contrary, the woes of this world will make traditional Muslims all the more likely to turn to their deity for justice and mercy in direct proportion to the extent of the misery experienced.    

Presenting Mormon tritheism:

Just to clarify, Mormons in fact do believe that Christ is God. It’s really quite simple. There is one God, which is the Godhead, consisting of three separate beings [bold mine-DL] in the way that the Bush Administration is one administration consisting of many people. God the Father, Jesus Christ who is also God, and the Holy Ghost, who is also God. They are one in purpose. It’s not more complicated than that. Mormons do not believe in the Nicean [sic] Creed, but Christ’s role is not undermined.

In other words, Mormons do not share the fundamental doctrine of God that all Christians share and quite explicitly accept something that undermines monotheism.

The radio host interviewing Romney in this video, Jan Mickelson, raises some of the same objections to Romney’s “wall of separation” logic that I assumed conservative Christians would be making all along.  Here you have someone who wants to run as a religious conservative, but who won’t talk about his religion, and who explicitly denies that his religion is connected to his candidacy (except insofar as it allows him to portray himself as a “person of faith”).  When Romney endorses Kennedy’s handling of his Catholicism, Mickelson responds: ”the pro-life community here in Iowa call him [Kennedy] a cafeteria Catholic.”  In other words, you aren’t likely to win over religious conservatives by running away from or ignoring your religion (even if it is a religion that said conservatives may not care for).  Romney then goes on to say that he isn’t there to talk about “a religion or the principles of a religion,” but at the same time he wants to trade on the points of agreement that he has with religious, particularly Christian, conservatives, who hold the views on life that they do, at least in part, because of their religious teachings.  Romney wants to make distinctions that make it possible for him to maintain this balance, while the religious conservatives whose votes he needs and whose votes he is presumably trying to win don’t accept the validity of these distinctions.  Indeed, to the extent that they think they are real distinctions and not merely rhetorical dodges, they believe them to be misguided or perfidious.

During one of the ad breaks (while the camera kept rolling), Mickelson says: “I think you’re make a big mistake when you distance yourself from your faith.”  (As it happens, I agree with Mickelson’s point here.)  Part of Romney’s response: “There are Mormons in the leadership of my church who are pro-choice.”  I’m not sure why he feels compelled to mention this, since it clouds the issue for his potential supporters.  If Mormon church teaching permits the possibility of Mormons being pro-choice (and I’d grant that it does), Romney’s fidelity to his Mormonism will hardly reassure pro-life conservatives, since it is no way guarantees that he would remain pro-life as a matter of policy, but his awkward handling of questions pertaining to his religion gives the impression that he doesn’t think it should even be part of the debate.  He could turn this to his advantage by saying, “My church’s teachings do not require me to be politically pro-life, but I have taken this position anyway (or at least made a mildly convincing pander to that effect), so you should look at the political position I have taken and not dwell on what my church does or does not permit.”  That would be the smart way to handle it, but this is not how he handled it.  Instead, he seems offended that people keep talking about his religion.  He continues to give the impression that he finds it embarrassing or unsuitable for public conversation, as if to say, “The public square has nothing religious in it, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it, thanks very much.”

Mickelson catches him on this and, it seems to me, nails him to the wall as far as many religious conservatives are concerned: “When you bifurcate politics from religion, and you have this hermetically-sealed….you make a political category over here and a spiritual one over here.”  Shortly after this, Romney said, “My religion is for me and how I live my life.”  Perhaps that is a view of religion that most Americans share, but it is not a popular one among religious conservatives.

This is great.  In this one rather long YouTube video (via Eric Kleefeld) lie the seeds of doom for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

Update: To clarify, I don’t necessarily think that this one video will wreck his campaign, but watching Romney attempt to square the circle of running as a “person of faith” who doesn’t want to talk about his religion because he isn’t running ”as a Mormon” while saying that his opposition to abortion is a secular position is devastating to the rationale for his candidacy.  Brownback, Huckabee et al. have just had their prayers answered. 

Second Update: This exchange may help to convince people that he is, in fact, a human being who gets frustrated and angry because of criticism rather than a robot or mannequin.  This could help him win more voters who are not strongly opposed to Romney’s Mormonism, but who might find his normal plastic demeanour off-putting.  It is also fascinating to see Romney run up against hard-line strict constructionists and have no idea how to handle their views.  It’s as if he’s never even heard of the idea that judicial review is a usurpation (in fairness to him, he probably never has).

Separately, Rasmussen shows that only 35% of Republican voters think Romney is conservative, and only 54% of Republicans have a favourable view of the man.  Only McCain among the big four has worse fav/unfav numbers.  If Romney were to somehow win the nomination, GOP voters would probably be pretty unenthusiastic about his candidacy.

Update: Kleefeld receives word from Romney’s campaign manager on why the Romney campaign put this video on YouTube:

Because it shows Governor Romney standing his ground and making his case to an interviewer that took him head-on over the issues. He is confident and engaging during a tough inquiry. Folks who have seen the video says it is Governor Romney at his best, so we felt others should have the chance to see it.

This is Romney at his best?  I can’t say that I am surprised to hear that, but I find it curious that his campaign manager would be claiming it.  This episode is potentially very bad for Romney, so it is bizarre that his people would be spreading it around the Web deliberately.

I have to apologise for the delay in getting this up, since it has been available for several days.  Tom Piatak, who also often writes for Chronicles, has a superb, devastating review of Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.  If you haven’t already done so, you should read it. 

In “Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion,” David Gelernter, a Yale computer-science professor and a versatile and prolific public intellectual, makes a provocative claim: Such professions of faith express “belief in . . . a religious idea of enormous, transporting power.” Indeed, he contends that America “is a biblical republic and Americanism a biblical religion.”

This does not in any way detract, Gelernter is quick to clarify, from America’s commitment to religious freedom: Liberty, democracy and equality constitute the American Creed [bold mine-DL]. And Americanism entails a duty to not only realize these universal ideas at home, but to spread them around the world. ~Peter Berkowitz

It’s simply appalling in so many ways that I am at first overwhelmed.  In the first place, the title is a little baffling (why the fourth?), until you realise that he must mean to include Islam as the third great “Western” religion, at which point we can already take it as a given that words mean nothing to the author.  Then there is this bit from his book’s description: 

Gelernter argues that what we have come to call “Americanism” is in fact a secular version of Zionism. Not the Zionism of the ancient Hebrews, but that of the Puritan founders who saw themselves as the new children of Israel, creating a new Jerusalem in a new world. Their faith-based ideals of liberty, equality, and democratic governance had a greater influence on the nation’s founders than the Enlightenment.
 

It is hard to say which is the worse part.  You have this business about “secular Zionism” that is at once religious and not religious  side by side with misrepresentations about ” faith-based ideals of…democratic governance” when referring to 17th century Calvinists along with a New England-centric spin on the whole of American identity, as if the Randolphs, Jeffersons, Morrises, Washingtons, Madisons and Pinckneys of the early republican era were guided by the zeal of New England Puritanism.  Whether or not I dislike many things in the Enlightenment heritage of many of the Whig ideas at the core of the political philosophy of many of the Founders (and I do), I cannot pretend that it played second fiddle to some mythical Zionism.  To the extent that this did exist at all and influenced American political life, the phenomenon he describes has very little to do with the establishment of the Republic and much more to do with the “refounding” or rather destruction of the same in the War.  If this Americanism has as three of its patrons Lincoln, TR and Wilson, the question is not whether it is dangerous (since it clearly is), but whether it has so entered into the mainstream of American politics that it cannot now be expelled. 

If “liberty, democracy and equality” constitute “the American Creed,” I am glad to say that many of the more esteemed Americans in our early history were only two-thirds or even one-third believers in it. 

Then there is another item from the book description:

If America is a religion, it is a religion without a god, and it is a global religion. People who believe in America live all over the world. Its adherents have included oppressed and freedom-loving peoples everywhere—from the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions to the martyred Chinese dissidents of Tiananmen Square.

I don’t know what to call this except insane.  There was another global godless political religion that sought to spread all over creation.  Perhaps Gelernter has heard of it.  As its fate reminds us, the Lord does not suffer such blasphemies to long endure.  You cannot serve both God and Americanism. 

This claim about the other peoples of the world is also shockingly presumptuous, even for someone of Gelernter’s policy views.  It is as close to someone saying publicly that “inside everyone there is an American trying to get you” as I have ever seen in real life.  This idea is often implied in what many democratists say, and it can be inferred from many of Mr. Bush’s major speeches, but most have the good sense not to say such things quite so bluntly.  Quite obviously, the patriots of the Greek and Hungarian revolutions “believed” in Greece and Hungary, if we must use this language of “believing in” countries.  (The physical places exist whether or not anyone believes in them, and the cultural distinctiveness of Greek and Hungarian would exist whether or not any political revolutionary ever “believed” in a national cause.)  The latter made the mistake of trusting the shaky promises of foolish American ”rollback” advocates, but the heroes of 1956 did not “believe in America” or in Americanism.  If they believed in an -ism, it might have been Hungarianism or something like it.  Give Gelernter credit for a certain bizarre consistency: if all it takes to be an American is to buy into a few tired political slogans, anyone who embraces those slogans really must effectively be an American or at least an Americanist.

Then there is this last bit, which is just too funny:

Gelernter also shows that anti-Americanism, particularly the virulent kind that is found today in Europe, is a reaction against this religious conception of America on the part of those who adhere to a rival religion of pacifism and appeasement.

Or it might have something to do with prudential objections to policies that are perceived as dangerous and misguided.  However, as we can all see, that’s obviously far too outlandish of an interpretation, so the “religion of appeasement” explanation will have to do.  Does that mean that anti-Americans in Latin America and the Near East also belong to the broad church of appeasement?  Hugo Chavez, pacifist–you heard it from Gelernter first!  No wonder the description calls the argument “startlingly original.”  I am startled that it even got published. 

I have already done most of the commenting on Mormonism that I am going to do, but since the topic has come up again in Ross’ latest bloggingheads and prompted a reply to Ross’ request for a clarification from Prof. Fox, a longtime friend of Eunomia, I thought I might add a few comments.  Prof. Fox writes:

For example: Matt Yglesias claims in the Bloggingheads video that the Mormon church teaches that “the New World, in pre-Columbian times, was dominated by two vast rival empires.” (Those would be “the Nephites,” the people who carried on the family name and traditions of an early prophet named Nephi, and “the Lamanites,” a group named after his brother and enemy, Laman.) While the history of Book of Mormon interpretation over the past 180 years is actually pretty complicated, the basic facts are that Matt here is correctly describing what most Mormons who read the book believed…up until about 20-30 years ago, that is. The Book of Mormon itself never suggests the existence of massive, continent-wide, roaming empires; rather, serious readers have come to recognize that in fact the book talks about a couple (or actually more than a couple) pretty densely populated yet nonetheless localized tribes, and nearly everything presented in the book as fact takes place, according to its own narrative, within an area that a person on foot could cross within week, if not less. This is what we Mormons called the “limited geography” thesis: specifically, that the book isn’t telling us the whole history of the Native Americans (which many Mormons admittedly thought the primary purpose of the book was for decades), but rather telling the story of some relatively restricted groups, whose story God thought important enough to make certain it would be preserved and brought forth in our day.

However, the official LDS version of the Book of Mormon has this passage (Helaman 3:8):

And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea ^awest to the sea east.

And again, Helaman 11:20:

And thus it did come to pass that the people of Nephi began to prosper again in the land, and began to build up their waste places, and began to multiply and spread, even until they did ^acover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east.

There may be ways to reconcile this language with the “limited geography” thesis (perhaps the land between the two seas is exceedingly small?), and I won’t pretend that I am anything close to being thoroughly versed in these matters, but it appears at first glance that the earlier prevailing view of vast territories is one that seems to have some direct support in a central LDS scriptural text. 

Incidentally, there are other things that will leap out at the reader of the online version of the Book of Mormon (especially since they are hyperlinked).  For instance, there are several references to weapons made of steel.  Leaving aside the technological question, this creates another problem.  The official site does the cross-referencing work for you, pointing you to citations from the Bible that (in the traditional King James language) also refer to steel.  This seems a strange thing to draw attention to, since these passages about steel weapons from the Bible are English mistranslations of the adjective for a bow made of bronze (toxon chalkoun in the Septuagint versions of 2 Sam. 22:35 and Ps. 18:34/LXX 17:34), which tends to confirm that the language was taken directly from the King James mistranslation rather than echoing the content of the Old Testament books to which it is being compared. 

These are probably familiar arguments to Prof. Fox and others, and they may therefore be as tiresome to them as shocked secularist discoveries of contradictions between the Gospel accounts are to me.  Nonetheless, if a Mormon defense of the historicity of their scriptures’ claims is to persuade anyone, it will need to sort out these contradictions.

It’s even making a difference at the ballot box. Liberals have spent much of the past six years straining to cut into the GOP’s advantage among religious voters. But when the Democrats finally shattered the Republican majority in the 2006 midterms, it was their consolidation of the secular vote that helped put them over the top. Despite all their efforts to close the God gap, the Democrats managed barely any gains among frequent churchgoers last November—but their share of the vote among Americans who never attend church at all leaped to 67 percent, from 55 percent in 2002. ~Ross Douthat

This would suggest that, for all of Obama’s “righteous wind” and John Edwards’ “faith-belief,” the Democratic Party is geared to become more aggressively secularist in the coming years than it has been.

Ross points to Prof. Coyne’s response to Brownback’s evolution op-ed:

What happens if scientific truth conflicts with a politician’s “spiritual truth”? This is not a theoretical problem, but a real one, as we see in debates about stem-cell research, abortion, genetic engineering, and global warming.

Like Ross, I am unimpressed by this dilemma.  This is the sort of dilemma that one is supposed to solve by chucking out “spiritual truths” all together, if at all possible, or at least by reducing them to wan insignificance.  To take a different tack, what exactly is the “spiritual truth” about global warming?  Brownback himself, like Huckabee, actually takes an interest in climate change and conservation, so this laundry list of science-related policy questions on which conservatives are supposed to be buffoons seems particularly inappropriate in a response to Brownback.  There are evangelicals who believe climate change alarmists, and there are evangelicals, non-evangelicals and secular people who don’t buy into the alarmism at all and a whole range of people spread in between.  I missed the passage in the Book of Genesis where it said:

And, lo, God said unto Abraham, “Thy children shall cause a great emission of chloroflourocarbons and shall cause the atmosphere to trap heat and gradually warm the entire planet.  And I, the Lord thy God, shall be angry with the children of Abraham for their refusal to pass a meaningful carbon tax.”

The point is that religious beliefs will usually have little to do with attitudes towards the truths discovered through scientific inquiry.  No religious teaching is offended or violated by the existence of climate change, regardless of its causes or severity.  Where religious convictions and ethics derived from religious tradition may well come into the debate concern the applications of scientific knowledge and medical research.  The “scientific truth” about an embryo is, at least in part, that it is a human being in the very early stages of development.  The ethical and moral arguments against killing humans in very early stages of development do not reject any “scientific truths.”  The opponents of abortion have come to significantly different conclusions about the significance and value of humans in very early stages of development.  Science does not necessarily settle the matter one way or the other.  The same might be said of stem-cell research or genetic engineering.  Science describes and studies empirical reality, but it does not normally provide prescriptions for how men use that understanding of reality.

There are strict literalists who will insist that evolutionary biology and Scripture cannot both be right.  This is, happily, not the view endorsed by the teaching authorities of most Christians.  Christianity affirms the unity of truth.  Indeed, belief in a Creator demands that we acknowledge that the study of the natural world cannot disclose anything that contradicts revelation.  If people believe they have discovered obvious contradictions, they have either not worked on the problem long enough or they have been interpreting either the scientific evidence or revealed truths or both in a mistaken way.  Most non-literalist Christians, which would be most Christians in this country, have whatever problems with evolution that they do because of the impression they receive, whether through relatively poor scientific education, the preaching of dogmatic evolutionists or popular culture, that if a theory of evolution describes how life on earth probably developed and changed everything their religion teaches eventually falls apart.  This isn’t true, but it is repeated often enough by polemicists on both sides that those with relatively poor scientific education are either going to fall back on their prior beliefs and reject evolution or accept evolution and reject their religious upbringing.  It does not help matters when you have prominent religious conservatives, such as Brownback, construct unsatisfying fideistic halfway houses that are not really faithful to either science or faith. 

To make matters worse, Intelligent Design just makes a mess of things by pretending that you can solve scientific problems by saying, effectively, “And here we can see that God is working.”  Indeed, ID-as-science seems to owe much of its momentum to visceral opposition to randomness: things can’t simply be randomly evolved, but must have a certain structure.  Even if, as Christians believe, the structure and orderliness in the natural world points towards a Creator, acknowledging this will not add any new insights to the research.  Even if everyone granted the ID activists’ point, our scientific understanding of the world would not have actually gone forward.  This acknowledgement may very well lend new meaning to the study of the natural world, but it does not change anything in the understanding of the natural world.  In its pretense to be science-plus-religion, rather than religious philosophy attempting to lecture natural science on its deficiencies, ID convinces no one who is not already a believer and manages to get itself lumped in, bizarrely, with creation science with which it has virtually nothing in common.

Ross is right to locate conservative anxiety about these questions in the “political and moral implications” of them.  However, this may be where conservatives have been going wrong for a very long time.  If I accept, say, Hitchens’ or Dawkins’ explanation of what the political and moral implications of evolutionary theory (or cosmology or whatever) are, I have already conceded that these implications, which I don’t like at all, must follow from this or that scientific theory.  This leads me to want to question the reliability of that theory and to propose quasi-theories that seem to subvert the authority of that theory, but in the end I have still yielded the crucial ground, which is to accept the hostile materialist’s most tendentious interpretation of the meaning of an empirical observation.  Obviously, by playing their game their way, you are bound to lose.  The simplest way around this, and the one with the most intellectual coherence and integrity, would be to accept the truths of evolutionary biology as the most reasonable understanding thus far of how life changes and develops on this planet, but to categorically refuse to grant that evolutionary biology must somehow jeopardise the truth that man is created or that Scripture is true and the revealed Word of God.  There is actually no good reason why it should, and a proper appreciation for science would teach us the humility about what we can and cannot know. 

Do you think any cool Trade Fair girl would give you the time of day if she knew the pathetic Bible-dancing goody-goody that you are? ~Fred (Chris Eigemann), Barcelona

Quasi-religious people attend services, but they’re bored much of the time. They read the Bible, but find large parts of it odd and irrelevant. They find themselves inextricably bound to their faith, but think some of the people who define it are nuts. ~David Brooks

While reading this, I was reminded of Barcelona and Ted’s “Bible-dancing” (in which he dances to the tune of Pennsylvania 6-5000 while reading the Bible) because late in the film one of the Trade Fair girls (Ted’s future wife) describes herself as quasi-religious.  For his part, Ted has something of a quasi-religious respect for the cult of management.  Cosa de gringos.

Peggy Noonan wrote in her column (which was actually all about Fred Thompson):

While the other candidates bang away earnestly in a frozen format, Thompson continues to sneak up from the creek and steal their underwear–boxers, briefs and temple garments.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best joke ever told, but it wasn’t terrible.  Hugh Hewitt, pretending that he cares about religious prejudice because he has a pro-Romney book to sell, retorts in faux outrage:

If an orthodox Jew was in the running, would Peggy have added “yarmulke?” Or if a devout Catholic, a mention of a rosary or a scapula? I doubt it.  There are acceptable bigotries and unacceptable bigotries.  Anti-Mormon drive-bys that are good for a laugh play well in some circles –the same circles that used to indulge Catholic and Irish jokes.

Where on the body exactly does Hewitt think yarmulkes are worn?  And it plays well in those sinister Irish joke circles!  Not that!  Yes, I understand that Mormons take these garments very seriously and invest them with real religious significance, which is their business, but if Mormons or their would-be defenders (who are typically much more sensitive about these things than actual Mormons, because they are working overtime to show how enlightened and inclusive they are) want Mormonism to become better known and more widely accepted in American society they could all really do without the humourless whining of Hugh Hewitt.  The main problem that Romney has with his Mormonism, outside of the dedicated anti-Mormons who will never vote for a Mormon, is that he simply refuses to talk about it in any detail.  By trying to overcome prejudice or aversion to what some people see as a ”cult,” he treats it as a very secretive, almost embarrassing subject–in other words, he acts as if he belongs to a cult, and not in a good way.  Instead of seeing Noonan’s column as part of a process of normalising and “mainstreaming” Mormonism as an everyday part of American life, making it into something that pundits can poke fun at the same as any other American religion, Hewitt naturally assumes the worst.  Perhaps this is because he knows that among many conservative voters Romney’s Mormonism is a deal-breaker, so he overreacts to any instance of potential anti-Mormon sentiment in the conservative press because he already knows how dire the situation is for his chosen candidate.   

How could Christ have died for our sins, when supposedly he also did not die at all? Did the Jews not know that murder and adultery were wrong before they received the Ten Commandments, and if they did know, why was this such a wonderful gift? On a more somber note, how can the “argument from design” (that only some kind of “intelligence” could have designed anything as perfect as a human being) be reconciled with the religious practice of female genital mutilation, which posits that women, at least, as nature creates them, are not so perfect after all? Whether sallies like these give pause to the believer is a question I can’t answer. ~Michael Kinsley

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;     
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,     
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will                                    And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Michael Kinsley can often be interesting (or is that “interesting!”?), but here his credulity undoes him.  No, these points give believers no pause, because they are not serious points.  They are the sorts of points one expects to hear from Jodie Foster’s character in Contact or a fifth grader who thinks he has discovered–for the first time ever–that there are differences between the different Gospels.  It’s a good thing we have folks like Hitchens to pick up on the loose threads, since no Christian has ever thought about any of this, but has gone about in mindless “god-worship.”  Personally, I prefer the phrase “god-worship” to religion, since it makes it very clear what cannot be included as religion.

Are these questions from Hitchens’ book, as related by Kinsley, actually at all interesting?  Are they even accurate statements about the beliefs he purports to destroy in a solvent of Hitchensian ridicule?  Well, no and no.  Leave it to an atheist to not understand the purpose of the covenant, which was not primarily ethical lesson-giving (rather obviously, murder was considered a grave sin from the time of Cain, but why worry yourself over details after having thrown back a few too many drinks?).  The covenant, represented in the giving of the Law, was the establishment of what was to be an eternal bond between God and His People.  The Law was the limit or the boundary set for those who would distinguish themselves as the chosen of God.  That is one point of the Law and the giving of the Law.  The keeping of the Law involves not murdering and not committing adultery, but the far more significant and prioritised Commandments concern the worship of the One God, reverence for His Holy Name and the rejection of idols.  Obviously, the Israelites did need to be told about these things, because they had either never known them or had forgotten them during the sojourn in Egypt.  Try to keep up, Hitchens.

Christ, of course, did die in His humanity, and the reality of His death is a point that the Gospels go to some lengths to insist upon.  Again, it is the paradox of the God-become-man dying that formed one of the great difficulties of Christian theology, but it was not some blind spot that Christians have never noticed.  Christians have come to account for it by stressing that it was in the flesh that Christ suffered and died, but it was nonetheless the Word’s own flesh that suffered and died.  Paradoxically, it can be said by traditional Christians that God died upon the Cross, but it will be said at the same time that God qua God is impassible and immortal.  It’s a complicated idea, and no doubt it causes trouble for Hitchens, but one thing it isn’t is some unaccounted for contradiction.  Hitchens’ objection isn’t new or clever or interesting; it is a sort of inverted Docetism, where he denies the reality of the Incarnation by attacking the divinity of Christ rather than the reality of the flesh.  Are African and Muslim practitioners of female gential mutilation paid-up members of the Discovery Institute?  That would be interesting if it were true, but we all know it isn’t.  When female-genital mutilators begin citing the “argument from design,” then we can start heeding something that Hitchens says.  

Why not argue against real adversaries rather than strawmen?  Why not take on the main challenge, rather than kick around the easy targets of Mormonism and Islam, as he does in the other excerpts available at Slate?  Could it be that the bold and flamboyant Hitchens cannot hack it against real opposition?

I’m curious: have I just not noticed books like this before? Or is it really true that there’s a sudden avalanche of popular books extolling the virtues of atheism? ~Kevin Drum

Drum cites Dawkins, Harris, Stenger and Hitchens as evidence of the “avalanche.”  Do four books constitute an avalanche?  It seems to me that some similar four or five-year period during the 19th century, which Kuehnelt-Leddihn mocked in Moscow 1979 as the true age of atheism, or the height of the Cold War must have produced as much atheistic printed material as the last five years have.  Did the era of rising political communism somehow manage to produce fewer tracts on behalf of atheism in a similar span of time?  In fact, these four books seem to be remarkable for how few of them there are.  If ever there were a time during the last 17 years when religion and belief in God should be enduring great scrutiny and opposition, it would seem that the last six years would be it.  Yet most people in the West, whether secular or religious, have come to one or more of the following three conclusions: 1) violence in the name of any religion has nothing to do with Religion; 2) crimes committed by religious extremists tell us nothing about the truth of any religion (obviously closely related to #1); 3) their religion may be violent and dangerous, but that doesn’t apply to all religions, especially ours; 4) faith is perfectly reasonable, provided that it doesn’t become all-consuming; 5) faith should be all-consuming, but should stand in opposition to violence; 6) every religion would be fine, provided that it was balanced with a little “enlightenment”; 7) this simply proves that our religion is true and theirs isn’t.  Virtually nobody anywhere has come to the conclusion that says, “There, you see, this just affirms my conviction that God is made-up nonsense.”  No doubt the atheist will say, “This is just another example of the foolishness of crowds and the persistent delusions of the ignorant.”  This is what he would have to say, because it can hardly encourage an atheist that the last few years have not seemed to produce a new generation of fellow non-believers.    

It is also remarkable how generally unrepresentative of the contemporary discourse on faith and God they are.  Of course, being representative of the Zeitgeist is not any measure of truth, but it is worth noting that even the skeptics have become much more skeptical of pure skepticism when it comes to matters divine.  Atheists always exude this aura of the poor, few truth-seekers oppressed by the masses of the deluded, because they are not part of any “avalance,” but normally appear on the scene as isolated little flurries that come quickly to an end. 

Are books dedicated to running down religion and theism as irrational the same as books “extolling the virtues of atheism”?  A book that attacks the existence of God, or rather denies the rationality of belief in God, tells you nothing positive about atheism.  It doesn’t have to, and it isn’t trying to tell you anything about atheism.  The atheist thinks, just as the theist thinks, but with less reason, that he is telling you about the ”way things really are.”  An atheist tract is, to the atheist’s mind, like a botanist telling you, “This is what a hydrangea is.”  It assumes that atheism is simply what you would have to end up with if God does not exist.  Atheism offers nothing, but promises that life is pointless.  Not surprising that all this miserable view can manage to produce is four books of any prominence in the span of several years.   

Are these books actually popular?  Yes, Hitchens’ book is currently #3 on Amazon, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising since it just came out last week and has received plenty of press, and Dawkins’ book is still at #25.  The other two are not in the top 100.  What do you want to bet that the same secularists and atheists who bought the books by Dawkins and Harris are also running out to buy Hitchens’ latest? 

Does John Edwards include Jews in his prayers? Or Muslims? Or Hindus?  Or any other non-Christians?

He didn’t the other day. The other day, in order to commemorate those killed at Virginia Tech, Edwards led a prayer “in Christ’s name” at Ryman Auditorium, which bills itself as “Nashville’s  Premier Performance Hall.”

Edwards has a perfect right to pray publicly or privately any way he wants to. But people who are not Christians often feel left out of prayers like his. ~Roger Simon

I have to agree with Yglesias: this Politico item reaches new depths of lameness.  In fact, it has passed far beneath the mere crust of lameness and broken down into the core of absurdity, where it will fortunately be consumed by tons of satirical magma.

John Edwards is a Christian.  It seems to me that the only way that he could pray without being tagged as a pandering, overly ecumenical buffoon would be to pray “in Christ’s name.”  It has to be embarrassing for all involved to hear politicians rattle off the new trinity of inclusiveness: “The strength of America is in our churches, our synagogues and our mosques!”  Presumably a Muslim candidate, were there ever to be such a one, would open his prayer with bismillah arrahman arrahim, or perhaps a translation of the same, because that’s part of how Muslims pray.  Give me a candidate who will not reshape his prayers to fit a focus group any day (even if his decision to give a prayer was apparently done on the advice of a consultant).  Spare me the treacly preaching of a Roger Simon when he asks:

Why not include all religions in your prayers?

Because that’s obviously fake and done for political purposes?  Because virtually no one, in his regular prayers, “includes” all religions in this way?  The reasons could go on. 

Much as I enjoyed the fellowship of the past weekend in Charlottesville, there was a persistent and palpable animosity toward politics and government generally held by many of the participants. For all the talk of community, it was a community bereft of the idea that communities require more than just good feeling, but laws and institutions as well as the willingness on the part of citizens to work publically toward the formation and enactment of the public good and the recognition that such work will result in conflict. There was something of a gauzy sentimentality and even anarchic libertarianism that pervaded the sessions. As much as I admire Wendell Berry, his work does not sufficiently attend to the needs for, and demands of, politics. Indeed, I was struck by the similarity between two camps that otherwise might be thought to be polar opposites - agrarian communitarians and libertarians. Both are wildly optimistic about human nature and the ability of humans to “do their own thing” without the “interference” of politics and government. ~Prof. Patrick Deneen

I heard Prof. Deneen’s talk in Charlottesville, and I was pretty sure there was nothing really troubling in it, but I went back through it again today and made sure.  Since I, anarchopaleo-retroneotradcon populist agrarian Bolingbrokean reactionary that I am, still haven’t found anything all that objectionable in it, and I didn’t notice the “gauzy sentimentality” in the attendees that Prof. Deneen noticed, I assume I am either missing something tremendously important or there has been an unfortunate misunderstanding somewhere.  Yes, there was much talk about Wendell Berry, such that it became the running joke of the conference, but it was not just aimless gushing about the grand old Kentuckian; the references and citations were all, for the most part, part of the defense of rooted, limited and human-scale living. 

The talk itself should have made any neo-Schumpeterian and neo-Schuhmacherian’s heart fill with joy and gladness, and the conference attendees should have reassured everyone that a room could erupt in applause at the mention of Ron Paul’s impending presidential victory and believe in and try to live rooted traditional community life at the same time and that they cheered for Ron Paul because they believed and lived in this way.  (Am I just imposing my own perspective on all the attendees?  I don’t know, but I don’t think so.)  The people who were there despise what the political class calls “politics” because I think they understand that this “politics” has nothing good or positive to do with the immediate political communities to which they belong.  They loathe “government” generally not because they think any and all government is undesirable, but because they believe this kind of government that we have today is significantly and dangerously corrupted.  Prof. Deneen may find in the enthusiasm for Ron Paul an example of precisely the sort of disengagement and lack of realism about politics that he thinks is the problem, but I would suggest that any expression of enthusiasm for a presidential candidate, even an extreme long-shot such as Rep. Paul, demonstrates a strong sense of engagement and perhaps almost undue preoccupation with politics as conventionally defined. 

There is a sense in which D.C. is less of a monstrosity as a city than Las Vegas or Phoenix, engaged in perpetual war with nature as those cities are, but there is also a very real sense in which those places could not thrive without the policies and priorities set in Washington.  Washington is not at war with nature, but it is at war with our America, and so it is not terribly surprising that people who consider themselves patriots regard it with special loathing.  For my part, in my visits to the Georgetown campus and the rest of the metro area, I have found some things to enjoy in the District and its environs, but on the whole I take Kekaumenos’ advice about going to the capital: don’t do it unless you absolutely have to, and leave as quickly as possible.  

Were there libertarians at the conference who had an unfortunately optimistic view of human nature?  Probably.  Did they make up the bulk of the speakers and attendees?  I am doubtful about that.  Are there some romantics who pine for settled communities simply because they like to have things to pine for?  Probably.  But that is not what anyone I met was talking about.  Maybe I didn’t meet enough of the people at the conference.  I would like to suggest, however, that the hostility to politics and government (which I suppose can hardly satisfy a professor of government) that Prof. Deneen encountered there was very far from a desire to live in a world beyond politics.  The ISI folks, as I understand them, view attempts to escape the inevitable realities of politics as fairly insane.  As Chantal Delsol’s book would have it, it is the attempt to eliminate the structures of power (among other things) all together that constitutes one of the grave mistakes of modern Western man.  The existence of power and the existence of disparities of power will be constants in human experience, and so there is the ultimate choice of attempting to constrain and limit the corruption that comes from concentrated power (according to the finest Anglo-American traditions of Bolingbroke, the Country party, the Anti-Federalists, who are the very same people who embody what Prof. Deneen calls the alternative tradition) or acquiescing to various degrees in the monstrosity of the Robinarchy on the grounds that there has to be a government somewhere.  To be against the Robinarchy does not mean that you reject authority or government, much less that you have an optimistic assessment of human nature, but that you would like to see government rightly ordered according to principles of legitimacy, lawfulness and justice. 

Over the past year it has been interesting to see reactions to the conservatism of virtue and place (this seems to be the most succinct name for what we are trying to describe) that has been on display at different points.  When traditional conservatism was advanced during the debates over “crunchy conservatism,” all of the talk of virtue and the criticism of megacorporations immediately aroused the suspicions of the enforcers of acceptable fusionism that some sort of lefty statist coup was in the works.  Citing John Lukacs saying negative things about paving over green fields was taken as proof that we wanted to collectivise the farms, or something like that.  Libertarian terror at the prospect of actually living your life in accordance with nature was palpable.  It was the foes of the traditionalists, paleos and “crunchy cons” who wanted to talk about a “partial philosophy of life” and who advanced the idea that politics somehow stops at the voting booth and the government office.  The anarcho-traditionalists, if we want to call them that, were the ones saying that political life is first and foremost concerned with the affairs of the institutions of your local political community and the needs of your family, and these are what ought to take priority.  They were proposing practicing politics as if the Permanent Things (i.e., virtues, among other things) really existed and actually mattered, and you could see the unmitigated horror this induced in every “mainstream conservative.”  

There was an equally harsh reaction in the other direction when the exact same people begin speaking favourably about “front-porch anarchism” and Wendell Berry and Dorothy Day in a slightly different context.  All of a sudden the same people who were a few months earlier supposedly attempting to regulate every aspect of your daily life with supposedly fascist dreams of transcendence were dangerously oblivious to the need for order and stability!  This would be the “gauzy sentimentality” objection Prof. Deneen voiced earlier.  However, I think I can explain how people keep having this mistaken impression.  

The “front-porch anarchist” folks were talking about ”anarchism” with the understanding that this means a rejection of consolidation, concentration and centralisation, a repudiation of war, the extraction of wealth by the state and the exploitation of the land and the people by corporate masters together with a rejection of the trashy culture, the degradation of the human person and the general ugliness of the age.  It is difficult to discern this at first, because the label anarchist is immediately off-putting to most conservatives (as it should be in its normal meaning of bomb-throwing assassins), but what needs to be understood is that these “front-porch anarchists” are irrevocably opposed to the kind of anarchist who believes that destruction is creative, since they are adamantly opposed to the kind of “creative destruction” that requires the destruction of all they love to create the bland, homogenous, dead world that they hate.  From everything I heard in Prof. Deneen’s talk, it seems to me that he and they are in more or less perfect agreement.  What have I missed that I think this? 

As a boy in Indonesia, Barack Obama crisscrossed the religious divide. At the local primary school, he prayed in thanks to a Catholic saint. In the neighborhood mosque, he bowed to Allah.

Having a personal background in both Christianity and Islam might seem useful for an aspiring U.S. president in an age when Islamic nations and radical groups are key national security and foreign policy issues. But a connection with Islam is untrod territory for presidential politics. ~The Los Angeles Times

As noted at The Plank, the Obama campaign hastily denied any Allah-bowing:

Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ. Accounts in the L.A. Times that suggest otherwise are simply not true.

Was the next headline, “Obama Embarrassed By Muslim Ties”?  Somehow I don’t think it was.  Note how nicely the LA Times spun the story and gave it a pro-Obama title.  It wasn’t a story that stressed that he had actually been a Muslim for a short time or grew up as a religiously confused child, both of which could in any case be attributed to his mother’s decisions, but that one that said he had “crisscrossed” a “cultural divide.”  This supposedly shows that he is capable of uniting different religions, different cultures, different anything, because he can be on both sides of the fence at the same time.  He is Mug and Wump and everything in between. 

However, the story did say:

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended.

This could be easy to spin as a case of bureaucratic formality where the step-father had to put down something for registration and picked his own religion as a matter of convenience.  Whether anyone would believe it or not is another question, but these full-throated denials don’t help Obama’s credibility more generally for people who would otherwise not necessarily care about this.  It is clear that Obama is embarrassed by this detail in his past and so eager to move away from anything that might conjure up an idea of foreignness or the phrase “black Muslim.”  As the first example of a presidential candidate’s Muslim ties being publicly revealed, it is hard to know whether this will become the equal and opposite version of the politician’s public embrace of his recently-discovered Jewish heritage.  However, from what can be found in this story Obama really has nothing to fear from his years as “Barry Soetero,” but he may well badly damage his credibility if he keeps strenuously denying that he was ever a Muslim.  To most people, if you prayed in a mosque, saying that you were never a Muslim is a bit like saying, “I smoked, but I didn’t inhale.” 

Actually, the bigger problem Obama might have with this story is the bit that draws attention to his knock on prayer:

In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and 30 brown children, muttering words.

Taken out of context, this citation makes it sound as if Obama is something of a great cynic about religion and prayer, as if anyone ever claimed that angels would be visibly descending or that anything should “happen” during class prayers.  That hardly fits with the man who likes to talk up the importance of faith and refers to a “righteous wind at our backs.”  Some people might begin to think that Obama’s religion talk is just a lot of self-righteous wind.

I wish we knew more about the theological differences between the historic American Muslim groups and Sunnis. ~Mollie

But the effort to marginalize, even demonize, Christian conservatives is unworthy of anyone who considers himself a member of the political movement that is trying to preserve the American tradition. ~Steven Warshawsky

Mr. Warshawsky makes many smart points, some of which I’ve touched upon in my numerous posts against skeptical and secular conservatives, and he represents part of what may be the beginning of a backlash against the hyperventilating of members of what Warshawsky calls the “atheist wing” of the movement.  The hyperventilating continues here.  Of course, in terms of total numbers, it is more like an “atheist feather” than a whole wing, but it is a useful designation as any (though it will be greeted with outrage by Sullivan, Vicar of Doubt and Defender of the Quite Possibly Untrue Faith).  Consider these sentences from near the beginning of Christopher Orlet’s piece in the New English Review:

But I, for one, am not so ready to concede that atheism is “against our reason.” Historically I have had the theologians on my side.

But this is absurd.  He hasn’t had “the theologians” on his side, historically or otherwise, since the entire enterprise of theology is the use of reason to make the ways of God known to man.  If believers assumed that reason was somehow naturally inclined to atheism, theology would never have come into existence in any religion.  It is precisely because Christian believers consider our Faith to be the most rational thing and in perfect agreement with the workings of reason that Christians took over and adapted Greek ontology, metaphysics and logic for the purposes of discoursing about the nature and works of God.  Mr. Orlet cherry-picks from Luther at his most anti-intellectual and somehow thinks he has proven his blatantly false claim, while ignoring the other two thousand years of Christian theology and philosophy.  Can the “skeptical” conservatives begin to see why their religious friends do not take their complaints very seriously?

What is one going to do with an article that begins so poorly?  I suppose we must soldier on, if only to get to the more ridiculous bits that come later.  Posing the question to Edmund Burke, whose quote about the innate quality of man’s religiosity opens the article, Mr. Orlet asks:

What then would Burke have made of his spiritual and intellectual heirs who have recently and publicly emerged from the closet of skepticism, and thereby suffered the enmity of the so-called fundies and theocons?

It is hard to say what Burke would have said, since the situation would probably have seemed very strange to him, but he might have said that it is not surprising that people so egregiously ungrateful to their ancestors and disdainful of the religious inheritance these ancestors received, added to and then passed on have been met with less than warm enthusiasm among those who believe that we have obligations to the dead and those not yet born.  This is where the Burkean conservative looks at the atheist and sees an impious fool–impious not really because he rejects God, but rather because he rejects the established customs and centuries-long traditions of his ancestors and thus cuts himself off from the contract binding past, present and future.  He separates himself from the great continuity and wisdom of the tradition, even though, as Kirk said, conservatives believe that the individual is foolish and the species wise. 

From Burke’s mildly religious perspective, he would probably marvel at these people, who are neither oppressed nor actually marginalised by anyone, complaining as if they have all suffered the fate of Giordano Bruno or Mennochio, the hero of Carlo Ginsburg’s cheese book.  Let’s be specific.  Who has “suffered the enmity of the so-called fundies and theocons”?  Mr. Orlet tells us:

We’re talking about a Who’s Who of conservative writers and pundits: Stephen Chapman, Theodore Dalrymple, John Derbyshire, Heather MacDonald, Andrew Stuttaford and James Taranto.

With the exception of James Taranto, who is obnoxious for any number of other reasons, I generally like the writing and work of all of these people.  Several of them have had articles appear in a magazine, The American Conservative, to which I have also contributed, and I am proud that TAC welcomes smart commentary from so many widely varying perspectives.  Thus Ms. Mac Donald and I have both ridiculed Mr. Bush’s vacuous “freedom is God’s gift to humanity” propaganda, but from entirely different perspectives and with somewhat different arguments.  The irony is that she does not seem to care that Mr. Bush may be simply using and exploiting Christians’ beliefs when he drags God into his awful foreign policy decisions.  Nor does she seem concerned that his conception of God is so far removed from that of traditional Christianity as to make the indictment against Mr. Bush irrelevant to her criticism of religious conservatives generally. 

When these writers make smart, well-formed arguments and present copious amounts of evidence to back up their claims, as they often will, they are among the better pundits in mainstream conservatism.  Mac Donald’s work on immigration, Chapman’s columns on civil liberties and Derbyshire’s blasts against Intelligent Design are breaths of fresh air after choking on the miasma of “nation of immigrants” pablum, panegyrics for the unitary executive and muddle-headed enthusiasm for pseudo-science that fill so much conservative commentary today.  Obviously, almost all of them are at prominent conservative or at least vaguely right-leaning journals and newspapers, where they have bigger and more prominent platforms than many a religious conservative, most of whom must be satisfied to eke out a living in the “provinces” of the movement.  It is like people living at the courts in Rome and Constantinople complaining that they lack the tremendous access to power and prestige afforded the monks at St. Sava’s in Palestine.  It is ludicrous, and I am frankly tired of hearing some of them whine about how the mean theocons have made their lives unpleasant.  I should emphasise that it has only been some of these people, as far as I know, who have complained at any great length about the perverse influence of religion on modern conservatism.  What have been the consequences?  Has anyone been fired from his or her position?  Has anyone even attempted to force them into the political or professional wilderness?  The answer to both of these questions is plainly “no.”   

But it should come as no surprise that at least some of these people have earned the enmity of “so-called fundies and theocons”!  For starters, they call their religious allies things like “fundie” and “theocon,” both of which are obviously disparaging terms intended to reduce intelligent positions with which they disagree into easily dismissed caricatures.  (Mr. Orlet has already shown that he prefers to keep his argument superficial and light as well by stating right away that he thinks theism and reason have historically always been at odds.)  Next, some will attack religious conservatives, often with great vehemence, as people who have somehow done terrible violence to the content of conservatism (as if it was religion, and not galloping ideological commitments to militaristic foreign policy and expansion of government, that had distorted or changed conservatism in recent years).  This is always a charged statement to make about any other conservatives, and it had better have something behind more than the fact that the critic is an atheist and doesn’t believe all this God-talk nonsense anyway.  It is unseemly that these skeptics and atheists have suddenly discovered their voice at the very moment when everyone and his brother seems to have a book out blaming Republican political woes and conservative disarray on the role of religious conservatives in the most dishonest campaign of scapegoating I have seen in many years.  It certainly doesn’t help when there seems to be an assumption among at least a few of the “skeptical” conservatives that their position is the natural and obvious one that conservatives ought to take, and that the connection with religion, or more specifically Christianity, is bad for conservatism.  This is not the plea of the persecuted dissident for toleration, but the demand of the ideological cadre for a takeover of the entire operation at the expense (obviously) of the religious-cons whose views they loathe so. 

The only trouble is that the religious-cons are not the wicked establishment that the heroic skeptical rebels are trying to overthrow.  Far from being a great and all-powerful force ruling over the movement, religious-cons are actually much more like the Kansan fellow behind a certain curtain who could put on an impressive show.  Much like religious conservative leaders, who enjoy boasting about their access and their influence far out of proportion to what they actually achieve in policy terms, he was able to convince people who were willing to believe in the display of power that he was much more powerful and mighty than he really was.  The heroic rebels are not so much engaged in a struggle to liberate the conservative mind as they are simply engaged in conservative fratricide as a way of pushing views they dislike even farther out to the margins than they already actually are.  It annoys the skeptical conservatives that many pundits and intellectuals pay lip service to Christianity or religious “values” as things important to the conservative movement, but what they never seem to grasp is that so much of this is nothing more than lip service.  It is weird how anyone could come away from the last six years and think that conservatism had been too much pervaded by the teachings of the Lord!

Mr. Orlet then goes on to say something that is categorically untrue:

This, and MacDonald’s earlier piece for The American Conservative, led to many loud catcalls for her excommunication from the communion of conservative Republicans.

One need only go back through the NRO archives to prove this false.  Many loud catcalls?  From whom?  How many?  How loud?  Mr. Orlet doesn’t say, and no wonder.  The response to her article was so low-volume that you could hear a door hinge squeak.  NR, ever that engine of ideological purges, bent over backwards to appease, flatter and butter-up Ms. Mac Donald.  Every criticism was prefaced by a paragraph of how much the critic liked and admired Ms. Mac Donald, and how she was just the best.  Her, I’m sorry to say, rather commonplace and predictable objections to revealed religion were treated as if they were the utterances of one of the Muses herself.  You see, there are deviationists on important things, such as the Iraq war, and they must be roundly denounced in the strongest possible way (”unpatriotic,” etc.), but those who deny the existence of God are typically sporting folks from the metropole with whom one can laugh about the mad evangelicals over cocktails.  There’s no need to turn your backs on people who reject the Creator, but those who reject the empire are clearly a bunch of lunatics. 

It’s true, most of her interlocutors there and elsewhere disagreed with her claims and her atheism (no surprises there), but far from calling for her “excommunication” many of the participants in the conversation almost seemed anxious to accelerate her on the path to conservative sainthood, so great was their praise of her.  Rather than simply ignoring her, as might be done to those whom conservatives wanted to shun and drive out, all of us from the various conservative factions engaged with her arguments; I found the arguments severely wanting, but there was never really any question in my mind of declaring her persona non grata (as if I were in any position to declare anything of the kind!).  I did question how it was possible to be a conservative while being an atheist, and I think it is a legitimate question, but when even Santayana makes it into The Conservative Mind I am inclined not to harp on the question as much as I could. 

Never has a dissident received a less stinging rebuke and correction than Ms. Mac Donald did at the hands of the First Things and National Review crowd.  This kid glove treatment is striking for what it said about the participants themselves and their perceptions of what was at stake in responding to Mac Donald: while some of her respondents are religious people, they seem to have endorsed the idea that numerous conservative pundits and intellectuals are not and they concluded that they risked alienating large numbers of these folks if they savaged Mac Donald in the way that they would denounce and belittle traditional conservatives talking about agrarianism or antiwar conservatives.  For them, Mac Donald represented a large number of their current allies, while other dissidents from consensus positions within the movement about, say, corporations or interventionism were of no consequence and could be run off without a second thought.  Going against God, or tolerating those who did, was easy; going against corporations or the foreign policy establishment would have required real conviction. 

While I opened up, figuratively speaking, with both barrels against Ms. Mac Donald’s spurious claims about the nature of modern conservatism (in which there is, she says, a “crippling” reliance on religion) and also against her atheism, I do not recall urging her anathematisation.  Indeed, if pressed I suspect Mr. Orlet will have a hard time coming up with even a handful of catcalls, loud or otherwise, calling for Ms. Mac Donald to be expelled from “respectable” (or even marginal) conservative company.  She is in no danger of any expulsion, because, as she herself has said, probably half of the pundits covertly share her views, thus proving that the core of her complaint about conservatism (i.e., it is too religious) is unfortunately based on the most superficial analysis of a few rhetorical and symbolic nods to religious voters.  The martyrology of Heather Mac Donald will have to wait for another day.

Mr. Orlet says in his closing remarks: “Conservatives have, in a sense, made a deal with the diety [sic]…”  But we know this to also be untrue, since Mike Huckabee has been languishing in the polls for weeks.

“That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture,” Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday. ~AP

The “persecution of our migrant brothers”?  Clearly, these folks don’t know who they’re dealing with.  If only they knew just how non-persecutorial Dobleve is, they might reconsider their ritual cleansing and give him a hero’s welcome instead.  There are still the wars, I suppose, so maybe they could purify the land of just those war-related ”bad spirits” and be done with it. 

However, in spite of this, I believe that Mr. Bush might be able to find some common ground with the Mayan priests.  It is said of classical Mayan religion:

The life-cycle of maize lies at the heart of Maya belief. This philosophy is demonstrated on the Maya belief in the Maize God as a central religious figure. The Maya bodily ideal is also based on the form of the young Maize God, which is demonstrated in their artwork. The Maize God was also a model of courtly life for the Classical Maya.

If this holds true today, Mr. Bush could make an appeal to Mayan traditionalism by promoting ethanol, as he has been doing all over Latin America.  Sam Brownback really needs to get on the ball with his fight for Mayan rights.  As this would suggest, it would be the perfect marriage of his ethanol pandering and his bleeding-heart need to meddle in the affairs of other countries.

Dave Weigel (via Matt Yglesias) on the video of “awkward fanboy” Romney and Ann Coulter prior to Coulter’s failed joke:

The most interesting exchange is Coulter’s defense of Romney’s Mormonism (most probably how the media covers Romney’s Mormonism).

COULTER: No, they don’t understand! We hate liberal atheists! You can’t get these sectarian wars going with us. We’re all Christians.

ROMNEY: We’re not Sunni and Shia here!

Iraq civil war humor - slays ‘em every time. But seriously, this is evidence that Coulter doesn’t actually go to church. I’ve been to Baptist Bible studies where the question of whether Catholicism is a cult was heatedly debated. Romney may be doing a good job of papering over his differences with evangelical Protestants, but the differences exist.

I don’t know which is more amusing: that one of the few famous right-wing pundits to endorse Mormonism’s claims to being Christian is Ann Coulter (which pretty much proves those claims false right there if nothing else does) or that Ann Coulter has effectively affirmed here that she must approve of all theists anyway (which tends to render moot her whole “we’ll convert you to Christianity” shtick), since it is apparently only “liberal atheists” that “we” hate.  There is something grimly ironic about sectarianism jokes from the sort of people who wouldn’t have known or cared about the differences between different sects in Islam four years ago.  With the invasion they backed having stoked and even more sharply politicised those sectarian rivalries than they already were and turned them into the source of widespread violence, it is now a throwaway line to laugh about the supposedly enduring hatreds of two groups that this war has encouraged and inflamed. 

This is not unlike when ham-fisted internationalists were meddling in the early break-up of Yugoslavia, which precipitated open war between the constituent republics of Yugoslavia and then, through foreign recognition, turned that internal war into an international one.  Their own meddling, which helped reopen the old wounds and politicise the ethnic and religious identities of the peoples in the region, then gave way to scenes of exasperated Americans and western Europeans puzzling over the supposedly “ancient” and “centuries-old” rivalries between the different groups.  Having thrown fuel on the fire of relatively recent resentments from their own century, about which they knew nothing and cared even less, these buffoons then pretend that the entire conflict is some timeless, inscrutable blood-feud that cannot be understood by “rational” and “enlightened” people such as they are.  This allows them to pose as the superior, benevolent outsiders who have come to make the squabbling child races stop their petty bickering–but, remember, it is the people who acknowledge and take seriously the reality of ethnic and religious difference that are the ones denigrating the humanity of other peoples!    

There is something else worth noting.  Prior to the invasion and during the early years of the war, paying attention to those sorts of different identities would mean that you think other peoples privilege “tribe or religion or whatever” over sweet freedom (the public assertion of which is obviously “racist,” and we have that on good authority).  If these loyalties supposedly weren’t important for Iraqis in 2003 and afterwards, because that would evidently be a mark of some kind of backwardness (rather than being, oh, the normal experience of humanity), it is no wonder that Republican elite figures have no clue that the same kinds of religious and cultural identities make relatively quite strong claims on Americans (albeit not as strong as in many other parts of the world).  This tells you something about the superficiality of the religious identities they publicly hold if they literally cannot imagine how confessional or religious differences might cause tensions or political opposition.  In this they are as blind as they were when calling for the invasion of Iraq on the assumption that the “Iraqi people” would all join together in the work of rebuilding the country together.  On the other hand, to the extent that they might be able to acknowledge that such religious identities are tremendously powerful in this country, they would almost certainly view people committed to such identities as regressive or dangerous.  One gets no sense from this little exchange that these people use their respective religions as anything more than a flag with which they can rally seriously religious people to their side, while they meanwhile snicker and laugh about potent religious identities in private.  That is in its way far more damning of both Romney and Coulter than anything else they have said in the past, because it makes their public pose as some sort of Christian or religious conservative vanguard to be little more than a pose. 

And so I think people’s faith in the United States is their, certainly, you know, what it is. Each person has the right to choose whatever faith they want and it’s a very important part of our country. ~Laura Bush

And they say that she’s the one with the firm grasp on the English language?  Imagine the conversations these people must have.

The Romneyites and everybody else seem to be terribly annoyed with the Associated Press for running a story about Romney’s ancestors.  When the same evil media run stories on Barack Obama that talk up the fact that he is the “son of a Kenyan goat-herder,” no one assumes that they are hit pieces or attempts to destroy him, even though one might think that referring to someone as the “son of a goat-herder” could hardly be considered complimentary.  Instead, people assume that this is what journalists call “reporting.”  But there is nonetheless a lot of whining about how this is part of the nefarious media conspiracy to get the ”conservative” candidate (the language of the article is appaarently “ominous”!), and other moaning about how this is unfair coverage (”disgraceful hit piece”).  Here’s Philip Klein:

But to cite a sermon given by his great-great-grandfather almost a century before he was born in a desperate effort to associate him with the stereotypes people have of his religion, is really a new low for the media.  

But it isn’t a “desperate attempt to associate him with the stereotypes people have of his religion.”  First of all, it doesn’t associate him with those stereotypes.  It plainly states that he, Mitt Romney, has nothing to do with polygamy except through the most distant genealogical connections.  The story does yeoman’s work in exploding those stereotypes and showing them to be a thing of the past as far as the LDS church is concerned.

If I were Mitt Romney, I would be thrilled.  I’m absolutely serious.  Maybe it’s because I don’t like Romney the candidate and I have my strong reservations about a Mormon presidential candidate that I seem to be the only one to see this, but I think this story is great for Romney.  The less Romney says about the specifics and history of his religion, the more he reinforces misunderstandings and prejudices in the public.  Suspicious people begin to think, “He doesn’t want to talk about it because there is something embarrassing or scandalous about his religion–he has something to hide!”  Except that he doesn’t really have anything to hide, but he is acting as if he does.  Rather than proudly talking about it and displaying it as part of the “lustre of our country,” he treats it as if it were something that could damage him.  Maybe he is right to not want to talk about it, since I think opposition to a Mormon candidate goes deeper than misunderstanding (the people most fervently against a Mormon candidate believe they understand Mormonism only too well), but if he is to have any chance of overcoming the tremendous obstacles in front of him he would be better served to say a lot more about it. 

Part of the reason many people are wary of a Mormon candidate is that Mormonism is strange and unfamiliar to them, and every story that makes it seem less strange and more normal the better it will be for Mormon candidates nationally.  It may be that some people know plenty about Mormon doctrines and find them simply unacceptable in a candidate, and these people he will be unable to persuade in any case, but quite a few people probably know next to nothing about Mormonism.  The AP is showing the public that whatever may have happened in the past remains firmly in the past.  This may have the effect of improving Romney’s standing with many voters, in which case Romney critics like me should be the ones complaining about the AP’s obvious pro-Romney bias.  Of course, it would be silly to complain about that, just as it is silly to complain about the conspiracy to take down Mitt Romney.     

If Romney were as smart as his supporters think he is, he would make a big deal about this change in Mormon practice and he would turn it to his advantage.  How could he do that?  By using this family history to reinforce his own understanding of the importance of traditional monogamy for society.  He could say, “As someone whose family members experienced the suffering that other kinds of unions inflict, I am convinced that the best and only marital bond is a lifelong monogamous union between man and wife.”  This has the potential to offend some Mormons, who could see it as an attack on their church’s early leaders, but the upside for Romney here wikth other voters is tremendous.  He could make arguments that monogamy is better for women than polygamy, and use that as a springboard for arguments that various alternatives to traditional monogamy are worse for women than marriage.  He could potentially gain tremendous credit as a cultural conservative in this way (or he would if he were not a monumental fraud of a conservative).  Since it is often an argument against same-sex “marriage” that recognising such unions legally would pave the way for other kinds of “marriage,” such as polygamy, Romney could take this connection up and argue very forcefully that his background as a Mormon gives him special insight into understanding why anything other than the monogamous union of man and woman is wrong.  As the ultimate venture capital turnaround artist, he could take the tremendous political liability of his Mormonism and turn it into something of an asset.  Instead, he chooses to say nothing and play the “separation of church and state” card, which goes over like a lead balloon with his target audience.    

Journalists, doing their jobs as reporters of facts, are explaining things about present-day Mormonism, which is explicitly contrasted with past practices, that many people in this country apparently do not know.  The article gives a quick synopsis of the history of polygamy in Mormonism, which makes it clear that it is no longer accepted.  The story also states quite clearly that for three generations Romney’s family has had nothing to do with the practice.  Anyone who was skeptical of or hostile to Romney because of the false understanding that polygamy remains a modern LDS practice will come away realising that he was terribly wrong and ignorant.  This can only help Romney’s candidacy with poorly informed voters who don’t know very much about Mormonism.  

How does the AP story begin?  Like this:

While Mitt Romney condemns polygamy and its prior practice by his Mormon church [bold mine-DL], the Republican presidential candidate’s great-grandfather had five wives and at least one of his great-great grandfathers had 12. 

This is at least as interesting as the ”Thurmond’s ancestors owned Sharpton’s ancestors” story.  It’s a little weird, yes, but it’s part of the story of American history, and it makes for interesting reading.  This knocks down a prevailing misconception that the LDS church continues to allow and/or mandate polygamy and makes clear that Romney rejects the practice in the first sentence.  The nefarious media conspiracy will have to do a lot better at burying this lede if they want to destroy Romney’s candidacy.  (Of course, if the media wanted to destroy Romney’s candidacy, they need only to ignore him, since publicity is his best ally right now.)

The AP is doing the educating about Mormonism that he cannot afford to do while also running a presidential campaign.  He can apparently not be bothered to do it, and finds it annoying to have to talk about his religion at all.  The story manages to do several things: talk about something interesting and unusual (Romney’s polygamous ancestors) while clearly saying that Romney has nothing to do with his ancestor’s practices or beliefs in this area.  It is like putting up a big, blinking sign that says, “Romney’s own Mormonism isn’t nearly as strange as some of you people probably think it is!”  Romney should send the authors of the piece a fruit basket or something of that sort as a gesture of his appreciation.

I must be doing something right.  One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has declared one of my recent posts, to which Sullivan linked, to be “conservative humbug.”  Unfortunately, in his haste to declare my view humbug he seems to have read in that post a claim that I did not make and don’t actually believe.  The Sullivan reader writes:

I find it difficult to stomach this kind of conservative humbug, that Modernity is anti-spiritual. Western society is the mechanism that allows groups like the Pentacostalists (and cosmos-loving atheists, and Wiccans, Buddhists, et al.) to exist. It is the ground in which they survive. What seems to irritate some conservatives is the fact that they cannot impose their will upon all of society and poison the soil which succors them. If anything, and the USA is the exemplar of this, modern Western society is besotted with spirituality. 

You cannot drive down a street in the greater Los Angeles area, a zone of the country supposedly noted for its secular ways, without encountering churches, synagogues, mosques, reading rooms, meditation centers, Scientology storefronts and other physical manifestations of the “higher” realms. Spiritual desert, bah! It’s an earthly garden of a thousand blooms.

I have had many things to say against modernity and even more against those who think there is virtue in modernism in most areas of life, but one thing I have not said and do not really hold is that “Modernity is anti-spiritual.”  Modernity is anti-traditional and possibly is inherently anti-Orthodox, but it is certainly not anti-spiritual.  I also don’t think I ever used the phrase “spiritual desert,” nor did I imply the existence of such a desert.  There is a spiritual desert in this country, but it is assuredly broken up by numerous oases.  As spiritual deserts go, it is much better than many.  Still, I defy someone to find anything remotely related to such claims in the post in question.  

What did I say?  I referred on numerous occasions to immorality and cultural decadence or, in one place, to “rampant immorality” and in another to “trashy popular culture.”  Perhaps the reader will be able to persuade me that Los Angeles (or any other major metro area) does not have more than its fair share of all these things, but I doubt it.  Perhaps the reader will disagree with what traditional Christianity would deem to be immoral, but that is an entirely different question.  What did I want to see as the remedies?  “Moral renewal” and “cultural regeneration” were my exact words.  Of course, those phrases call forth a number of questions (whose culture? what morality?), but since I took it as a given that my readers would understand that I meant the regeneration of a traditional Christian culture and a renewal of traditional Christian morality I did not go into greater detail about what I meant. 

Modernisation does not automatically equal secularisation and “de-spiritualisation” as such.  Islamic revivalist movements of the last three hundred years, Christian fundamentalist movements of at least the last one hundred years or so, Tenri-kyo and Soka Gakkai originating in 19th century Japan, the enthusiasts for Hindutva in India, Mormonism, and the ”progressive” Christianities of liberation theology and feminist theology, to take a few well-known examples, are all products of the modern age and are themselves modern.  “Modernity” is not all of one thing or all of another, but refers broadly to a mentality of self-determination and an orientation towards the self, and it also refers to a culture in which religious and political authorities have been stripped of their traditional claims to deference and obedience.  This is certainly not an exhaustive definition of an extremely complex subject.  Many modern religious movements, even those that stress quite seriously their fidelity to religious tradition, are based on the fairly anti-traditional assumption that it is acceptable to redefine, reorganise or refound a religious traditon.  In modern cultures, change and innovation often possess a predominantly positive meaning, such that even traditionalists and fundamentalists find themselves using the language of newness, dynamism, and choice, much to the annoyance of people like me.   

Obviously, critics of pluralism and ecumenism have no doubt that the modern world is beset by a rather staggering number of religious and other beliefs.  Some of these critics regard this great number of beliefs as the evidence of the inherent undesirability of pluralism, while others are content to stake their own claims in a pluralistic society.  Since I actually tend to lean towards the latter, one will be hard-pressed to find in me much of an enemy of the wide variety of religious expression in this country.  As an Orthodox Christian, I do not regard the claims of these other religions as true claims, and I think it is a crucial part of religious discourse in this country to state these oppositions and contradictions as flatly and plainly as possible.  Ecumenism offends me, for example, to the extent that it declares doctrine to be irrelevant to the proceedings and sees inherited truths as barriers to union to be removed rather than serious obligations that must be paid the proper respect.  Today being the Sunday of Orthodoxy, it is rather fitting that there is an opportunity to note the freedom afforded to the Orthodox in this country to gather for services today for the  reading of the Synodikon to remember and re-enact the condemnations of many old heresies (Demetrios of Lampe, this means you!), and to acknowledge that it is far better that the Orthodox are free to do this in a country that is overwhelmingly non-Orthodox.       

Intellectually sloppy models, in which we ignore truth and privilege some supposed underlying unity of all religious beliefs (as Romney would very much like to do), do seem to appear in the modern age with far greater frequency than in previous periods in human history.  This is not because these fundamentally ecumenist models are any more compelling than they have been in the past, but because it was not until the Enlightenment’s attempted emptying of religious doctrines of their claims to being the embodiment of absolute truths that it was even conceivable that vying religious truth-claims could be reduced to the category of opinion.  To the extent that religious doctrine and traditional religion in the modern age truly have been devalued and marginalised in social, political and cultural life, the mentality and culture of modernity are hostile to traditional religion and are very supportive of every wind of doctrine and vague “spirituality” that might work to undermine the role and the claims of our civilisation’s religion.  Modernity anti-spiritual?  Far from it.  It is all together too spiritual, like the ages of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, and not grounded enough in an incarnate Faith.    

It’s true that the polls mean Romney’s religion is a legitimate news angle for political and religion reporters, but I think there might be something to Kurtz’s criticism. Sure, Romney faces some hurdles because of his religion. But at this point in the race, most of those polls are meaningless — imagine what a similar poll would have indicated about John Kennedy’s prospects in 1959. ~Mollie, GetReligion

But this is quite wrong.  Not only do we have reason to believe that the poll cited here is underreporting the level of anti-Mormonism among likely voters, but speculation has been focused heavily on whether Romney could somehow even manage to win the nomination of his own party because opposition to a Mormon candidate is so intense among evangelicals (Rasmussen claims 53% against).  In 1959, no one doubted that a Catholic could theoretically win the Democratic nomination, since ethnic Catholics made up a significant part of the party, they controlled party machinery in some states, and Al Smith had previously won the nomination (before going down to rather ignominious defeat in the general).  What fires the media coverage of Romney’s Mormonism (besides the relative novelty, unfamiliarity and potential for conflict, plus the “religion divides Republicans” angle) is the evidence that key voting blocs in his own party apparently cannot stand the idea of someone from his religion as President. 

Some hurdles?  Yes, I suppose Romney faces “some hurdles,” in the same way that Barack Obama has received “a little bit” of favourable media coverage.

It goes without saying that this argument can and should be, I think, at least partially contested on every point: it is not necessarily obvious either exactly how America’s culture and society fits into Western civilization’s historical Christian identity or how affirming that identity will strengthen us; a presidential election is far from a plebiscitary affirmation (and would Daniel even want it to be?); and the Mormon teachings on “the apostasy” are a good deal more nuanced and in flux then might at first appear, anyway. ~Prof. Fox

Prof. Fox is a long-time reader of and friend to Eunomia, and I appreciate his thoughtful engagement with my post on anti-Mormonism, especially when that post may have been more than a little irritating to him and any other LDS readers I may have.  First, an explanation about that post.  The article I was responding to seemed to say: ”You either object to Mormon candidates out of the democratic identitarian belief that your candidate should be like you in most or all respects, or you are a bigot.”  This implies that, unless you take the “Christian majoritarian” or identitarian approach, you oppose a Mormon candidate because you actually hate Mormons.  I believe this to be profoundly untrue for the vast majority of Christians who are averse to voting for a Mormon candidate, since I find it difficult to believe that many people could work themselves up into a hatred for Mormons (who are, as a general rule, the most unhateable people you are ever likely to meet), and so I wanted to explain just what it is about a Mormon candidate that concerns me rather than my usual shtick of explaining others’ reservations.  Perhaps few will find my reasons convincing, but it seemed important to insist that there were a number of other arguments, some of them that I think are fairly reasonable, that went beyond the two options, “I prefer Christians” or “I despise Mormons.” 

We live in a mass democracy.  This is the unfortunate reality.  I wish that it were not so, and that we had something much more like the Old Republic in which the mixed constitution of our ancestors provided slightly greater balance and sanity.  A country this large should not be selecting its government this way, or rather there should be no central government for an entire country this large; it is doubtful that any polity can be this long without sinking into demagogic despotism (and some of us would say that it already has).  But for the present, a working alternative is not on offer. 

In this mass democracy, we make the election of Presidents into plebiscitary endorsements of what a certain candidate represents or at least what he claims to represent.  The Electoral College, while still legally binding, slavishly follows the mass of voters in each state.  Our debased, televised political culture makes the selection of a President absolutely into a plebiscite on the two charged symbols of the major candidates.  Part of the flaw of mass democracy in a large nation-state of semi-literate, largely historically ignorant people with no interest in civic duties is that most voters will respond to candidates viscerally and emotionally, which inevitably makes the candidates into symbols to which voters ascribe meaning.  I am, if you like, acknowledging this sorry state of affairs, of which I don’t really approve, and then arguing over what kind of symbols we should be endorsing given that our political system is a hulking mess.    

Our method of choosing chief executives undoubtedly invests presidential candidates with far too much importance (just watch as all of us, myself included, get terribly involved in tracking the peregrinations of a dozen mediocrities you would not entrust with the most basic responsibilities of the neighbourhood watch or street cleaning to get a sense of how inappropriate our fixation on these candidates is).  That does not change the reality that Americans will continue to invest such candidates with this excessive importance and will continue to attribute meaning to the victory of one or the other.  Since this is the reality, and since we should strive to work in the real world, much as we may find many of its traits obnoxious and distressing, we ought to make the best of it. 

In this case, it is something of a moot point whether or not I think the election of a Mormon President represents a vote of “no confidence” in Christian civilisation or, if you prefer, a vote that endorses the practical irrelevance of Christianity in this country, since no such President will be elected in the foreseeable future, but it seems to me to be an objection worth raising.  I will continue.

Obviously, this kind of symbolic plebiscite is an inexact and often error-riddled process in which evangelicals could confidently rally behind a man like Mr. Bush, who could talk a good game about his faith and had a life story familiar to many who have had dramatic conversion experiences, even though the man was culturally, politically and socially alien to their world and worldview.  Even though he had virtually no intention of doing anything for the causes to which they were devoted, these voters have loyally stuck by the man in no small part because he is “one of them,” which has helped Mr. Bush get away with all sorts of un-Christian mischief.  (Most of this mischief overseas, I would note, is something Gov. Romney endorses and wants to see more of, so this is hardly helping his claims to be a defender of moral “values.”)  So voting on the basis of such questions of identity is often not the smartest kind of voting with respect to getting the policies that this or that group of voters claims to want, but then it is precisely because of the secondary importance of policy in making these decisions that we wind up with identitarian voting in the first place.  Thus, Christian voters can be satisfied with extremely superficial similarities and overlook the deeper divergences of belief and even “values” that lie beneath the surface; they can empower bad representatives and base their selection on a candidate’s claims to share their faith and values.  However, this appears to be an inevitable characteristic of our mass democracy so long as a significant number of Americans remains fairly religious. 

It is worth noting that this superficiality problem is also precisely the problem with Romney and his appeal to “shared values.”  In the same breath he tells us, “My faith teaches me my values, but let’s not get hung up on any of the details of what that faith is, because my particular religion is actually irrelevant to the question.”  Frankly, if Romney were truly confident that his religion was really fundamentally in agreement with Christianity on the essentials of these “values,” he would not have to engage in this double game.  Like many a “values” dodge, be it the “Judeo-Christian” or “family” variety, the appeal to “shared values” presupposes that, for instance, people coming from a significantly different religious cultures and backgrounds will actually be able to acquire the same “values” that are nonetheless tied into and linked to a specifically religious source.  This makes them eminently flexible and changeable while also retaining the sheen of immutable truth–but this is also obviously nonsense.  It is first of all this assumption that differences of religious culture are irrelevant to the shaping of political and cultural “values” that seems quite questionable.  If your religious culture and my religious culture appear to wind up producing the same generic “values,” the odds are that we haven’t come to agreement about these “values” because our religions are terribly similar (except in Romney’s lowest common denominator way) but because we have come to these “values” by another route and have convinced ourselves that our respective religions endorse these probably thoroughly secular “values.” 

This usually involves a lot of backtracing of basically secular political ideas back to some putative or real religious source, which can somehow be done by people of any number of religious backgrounds, or it involves the attempt to pare back doctrine and worship to get to the bare bones of “values,” usually meaning morality.  Yet you would be hard-pressed to find conservative-minded moral theologians who actually think that you can somehow abstract moral reasoning from within a religious tradition to get the “value” nuggets that you can then present to people from outside that tradition as generic and obviously desirable “values” on which everyone can agree.  Even the claim that there is a natural law accessible to the reasoning of every person comes from within a religious tradition and hinges on any number of potentially contestable assumptions about the nature of reason and its relationship to revelation that remain unspoken or out of view.  This is not a scandal for people who recognise the tradition-boundedness of all things, particularly all religious things, but it makes it difficult to believe that people from what are basically radically distinct religious traditions even use the same language and references when they discuss moral or other questions.  In many cases, they do not.  That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t try to discuss them and even seek those areas where they may be in agreement, but it does mean that you cannot take for granted that people of various religious traditions all mean the same things when they speak in terms of generic “values.” 

The “people of faith”/”person of faith” dodge signals to someone like me that the ”values” under discussion are so nebulous as to be almost indiscernible.  Take “marriage,” for instance.  All kinds of people are “for” it in the abstract, which is fine, but we would be kidding ourselves if we claimed that different religions all value and understand marriage in the same way–that would require us to believe as well that they all understood the roles of men and women, among other things, in essentially the same way.  It may be that some religions do have appreciably similar understandings of certain things, but that is a claim that has to be demonstrated.  The appeal to “shared values” takes it as a given that no demonstration is necessary.  In this view, what you mean by morality in your tradition is automatically what I mean by it in mine, but this isn’t true and, I would have to insist, can’t be true if either the teachings of your religion or mine have any significance and importance in the real world.  Whatever we think of the other fellow’s religion, we would have to acknowledge that the teachings of our religion are meaningful and important for how we conduct ourselves–otherwise, what are we doing in this religion? 

Presumably it is precisely the conservatives in each religion who are most confident that their doctrines and forms of worship are not mere frippery or there for the sake of elaborate decoration, but rather they assume that these things are at the heart of their religion and form the basis of their understanding of everything else pertaining to the religion.  If, in the Orthodox context, for example, Orthodox doctrine and mystical theology pervade the liturgy, and liturgical action forms a key component of ethical action and if sacramental life and prayer are inextricable from the life of the virtues, it is impossible to conceive of talking about moral “values” as some sort of category that is anything but integrally linked to the teachings of the Church.  Put bluntly, when I speak of justice as an Orthodox Christian, I am also indirectly confessing the Holy Trinity as the model of perfect interrelationship of persons.  Someone’s doctrine of God is pertinent to how he, as a religious person, engages in moral reasoning and it is relevant to his understanding of reason itself, as Pope Benedict’s inclusion of Manuel II’s provocative quote in his Regensburg address suggested.  If you do not have the same doctrine of God, let’s say, or do not have the same understanding of the Word Incarnate and His relationship to the Godhead, that will affect what you have to say about other matters.  Conservatives have tended to shun theological reflection, which I regard as one of the great failures of modern conservatism, since this effectively cuts conservatives off from the living water that nurtures their entire intellectual and cultural history or its forces them to turn back to this source of cultural renewal only sparingly in the most sporadic and arbitrary ways.  Yet it seems to me that it is only through a thorough reacquaintance with that theological inheritance that conservatives can once again make coherent arguments about the nature of society, human nature and political life that are not utterly dependent on false liberal assumptions.  As a matter of cultural renewal, it also seems unlikely that any enduring Christian culture can be built up in the modern wasteland without drawing on the deep wells of patristic wisdom that we have at our disposal.  To the extent that Christian conservatives are willing to chase after a superficially appealing non-Christian candidate out of nothing more than a mix of desperation and media hype, when that candidate is cut off from those sources and the tradition they represent, they commit themselves and this country to a path that is ultimately fruitless if the building up of a Christian culture is actually what Christian conservatives desire.   

Going back again to Romney, he says that he is not a spokesman for his church, but as a public figure and someone trying to put on the mantle of religious conservative leader, that is exactly what he is trying to be, because he wants to get the credit for being a faithful member of his church without accepting any of the potential political ramifications of that membership.  He wants to say that his faith and values are integrally linked, but not so integrally linked that anyone needs to consider what his faith is.  Having wheeled his faith into view, he tells us we cannot look at it and that he is not speaking on behalf of his religion, when the core of his credibility, such as it is, as a man of good “values” is his religious faith.  He just wants to avoid the inevitable complications that bringing his religion into public discourse has, while reaping the benefits of being a “person of faith.”  Since a great many Christians take it for granted that Mormons are not Christians, how he links his faith and “values” becomes a pressing question that goes to heart of the entire matter.        

All of this ought to be troubling to Christian conservatives, especially when they take it for granted (or at least I think they do) that the origins and underpinnings of their civilisation and the roots of American order are closely bound up with our Christian inheritance and are inexplicable without constantly referring back to that inheritance.  This sometimes leads to pious absurdities where modern Christians bend over backwards to show that the fairly conventional religiosity of many of the Founding generation “proves” the Christian foundations of our polity, that is, the confederation of the United States, when this is a quite distinct and very different sort of claim from the claim of being a Christian people in culture, history and habits.  Related to this assumption, then, would be an unwillingness to speak of “Western civilization’s historical Christian identity” and a desire to speak of Christian civilisation instead. 

Prof. Fox is right to point to Mark Davis’ telling remark that “a candidate’s faith is of no consequence…unless it harbors the possibility of guiding his or her actions in a way I would disapprove of.”  Even though I read things like this all the time in articles on this topic, I confess that I cannot quite understand such a statement.  What can it mean to say that a candidate’s faith is “of no consequence”?  At some level, if a candidate’s faith compels him to worship a radically different deity, surely that is consequential.  How you understand and relate to God has a great deal to do with how you treat and relate to your fellow man; a distorted image of God will lead to flaws in your relationships with others.  Mr. Davis’ statement is so all-encompassing that one might reasonably think that his disapproval might extend to actions including the worship of a radically different deity, but we can tell from the context of his article that he has absolutely no interest in such things.  This statement is a roundabout way of saying, “I wouldn’t trust a potential jihadi, but a Mormon is pretty harmless.”  Nonetheless, it is a remarkable statement for the extremely low opinion of faith it expresses.  In this, I assume that Mr. Davis is highly unrepresentative of conservative voters. 

Given the enthusiasm of plenty of movement activists for Romney, we can already see that some of these folks prefer chasing after the superficially satisfying “values” candidate rather than looking for someone representative of the broad Christian tradition.  Whether or not many Christian conservative voters will be willing to make that same leap will tell us a great deal about just what it is these voters are interested in building.          

As a candidate, he can appear slightly overproduced, a little too smooth for the hurly-burly of the hustings. Lately, Romney has been courting the evangelical vote, key to winning Republican primaries. He knows that some evangelicals regard his religion, Mormonism, as heresy (according to the National Journal, more than a quarter of self-identified evangelicals tell pollsters that they won’t vote for a Mormon). So last week, at a lackluster rally in the Bible belt of South Carolina where maybe 300 people half-filled an auditorium, Romney was trying, a bit unctuously, to show his down-home piety. As the crowd trickled out, Romney, his voice still at full decibel from his stump speech, grabbed the hand of state Rep. Bob Leach, a Baptist. “This man,” proclaimed Romney, “his prayers bring down the power of the Lord!” ~Jonathan Darman and Evan Thomas, Newsweek

Bob Leach must offer up some pretty impressive prayers.  So here’s a good example of what’s wrong with Romney.  He doesn’t just pander.  He panders really badly.  This is the religious version of “some of my best friends are…”  The thing is that you don’t get to play the diversity card when some old guy heckles you in Florida for being a “pretender” and then turn around and talk about how your political ally calls down the power of the Lord.  You don’t get to gin up the crowd with that old-time religion and in the same breath say, “We are blessed to have many persuasions and faiths in our great land!”  Something’s got to give. 

The Mormons, critics say, are secretive and strange, and they are controlling more and more of your world. ~Stephen Stromberg

As the blogosphere’s foremost critic of Romney (or something close to it) and as someone who has thought about the “Mormon issue” more than is probably necessary or reasonable, I can confidently say that this is complete nonsense.  Not once in any of the criticisms of Romney’s Mormonism have I ever read anywhere that people are wary of Romney’s Mormonism because of LDS expansion and property holdings.  Weisberg thinks Mormons are unusually gullible, and no one really cares what he thinks; Linker uses elaborate webs of logic to conclude that Mormon theocracy is just around the corner, but no one acquainted with any actual Mormons believes this.  For that matter, probably very few people are agreeing with anything I have to say about the subject.  But the most vocal critics are not saying what Mr. Stromberg claims we are saying.  

For people to know that the LDS church is expanding or acquiring more properties, they would have to know something about Mormonism.  For people to know that there is no clergy in the LDS church would require people to know certain details about that church, which I bet most people don’t know.  I wager most people know next to nothing about Mormonism, except for the condensed version of Mormon history as revealed to them by South Park and other such edifying vehicles of public education (”Joseph Smith was a prophet, dum-dum-dum-dum!”)–therein lies Mormonism’s biggest problem with the American public.  It is not an obstacle that can be overcome in a presidential campaign, as I feel compelled to repeat yet again, especially when the candidate is making no effort to address the issue at all. 

But Mormonism isn’t Scientology–critics and observers don’t think that the religion is a gigantic racket for making money and controlling other people’s wealth or some enormous con aimed at dominating more and more of society.  That is what Scientology is, but that’s a subject for another day.  The critics of Mormonism view it with skepticism on religious grounds or for one of the many other reasons outlined here, but “critics” don’t say that Mormons are “controlling more and more” of our world, because most of the critics are not terribly concerned about this kind of “control.”  High levels of involvement in church are least likely to strike highly active conservative Christians as “cultish” or weird, since they, too, are extremely active in their churches.  It is significant here to note that the strongest opposition to a Mormon President of any one group comes from people who attend church services more than once per week.  

Opposition to Mormonism is not nearly so great among Protestants and Catholics of the “Chreaster” variety.  These folks are more inclined to shrug off the “Mormon issue” because they aren’t that fired up about their own religious observance (however, even among the fairly lacadaisacal and the lapsed, anti-Mormonism never goes below 30% of any cross-section of the population).  It isn’t intensive church involvement that strikes Mormonism’s strongest critics as kooky and worrisome–it is (how can I put this diplomatically?) Mormonism that is the problem.

“We’re completely invisible to this debate,” said Eduardo Penalver, a Cornell University law professor who writes for the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal. He said he was dissatisfied with the Edwards campaign’s response. “As a constituency, the Christian left isn’t taken all that seriously [bold mine-DL],” Penalver said. ~The Politico

I await (almost certainly in vain) the avalanche of corrections that will be coming from progressive bloggers who believed that, “Oh, yeah, well so’s your old man!” (usually by digging up some of Bill Donohue’s more, um, colourful statements from the past) constituted a serious response to the controversy over Edwards’ two awful bloggers.  If run-of-the-mill Irish Catholic Democrats were also deeply offended by the trash Amanda Marcotte wrote, because what she wrote was actually hideously blasphemous and obscene, that would seem to suggest that complaints about her flagrant anti-Catholic and anti-Christian hatred are not simply the product of the “noise machine” and the “wingers.”  Of course, Edwards is under no obligation to fire the two women, and they are perfectly free to rant against Christians with as much obscenity, sacrilege and blasphemy as they please (such is the appalling kind of thing allowed under creative interpretations of free speech protections).  Then again, no one is under any obligation to view them with anything other than contempt.  Gauging from the average progressive’s reaction to this controversy, I would guess that the Christian left isn’t taken seriously as a constituency because most of their progressive allies regard them as amusing eccentrics and consider them to be occasionally useful for providing cover against the charge of the left’s obvious impiety and general godlessness; most of the time, they are completely irrelevant and are treated accordingly.

Michael Medved has no idea what he’s talking about when he writes:

When people respond to Mitt Romney at this stage in the campaign, they’re expressing their attitudes toward Mormonism –not their reaction to a specific and dynamic candidate.

Yet, as of the infamous Rasmussen poll last fall, only 19% of likely voters could identify Romney as the Mormon in the race, but this didn’t stop likely voters from giving him fairly high unfavourable ratings (30%).  It is possible that all of the voters who could identify Romney as Mormon had an unfavourable impression, but it is not likely.  Since then, Romney’s unfavs have gone up to at least 35%, which could very well mean that the more people get to know Romney, the less they like him.  While he remains a blank slate on which they can inscribe whatever they’d like, he’s much more of a desirable candidate.  In the end, it will be a combination of widespread anti-Mormonism (reflected in that same poll) and Romney’s own numerous flaws as a candidate trying to run as the social conservative that he probably still isn’t that will bring down his candidacy.  Medved also underestimates the depth and breadth of anti-Mormon sentiment if he allows only that roughly 20% would never support a Mormon for President–the figures are more likely in the high 30s or low 40s according to polls taken in the last four months.

Medved also errs badly here:

His devout adherence to the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints may look like a huge handicap at the moment, but the vast majority of GOP voters will base their ultimate decisions on factors other than the faith of the candidates. 

Sure, Medved, whatever you say.  Even though the same Rasmussen poll tells us that 53% of conservatives and 72% of evangelicals believe that a candidate’s faith is “very important” and another 28% of conservatives and another 20% of evangelicals believe that a candidate’s faith is “somewhat important,” I’m sure Medved must be right.  Even though 48% of Republicans say that a candidate’s faith is “very important” and 30% say that that it is “somewhat important” (obviously more intense than the Democrats at 29/26%), I’m sure the view that Romney is from a little-known, non-Christian religion will not be a major obstacle for his campaign.  After all, once the voters learn about his egregious and almost certainly cynical flip-flopping on social issues, his signature on that horrible health-care bill and his well-nigh mad rhetoric about Iran, they won’t need to know that he is a Mormon to cause them to run screaming from the room.

The Politico is reporting that a “well-connected” McCain supporter is “circulating” the fact that Mitt Romney gave $250 in 1992 to the campaign of former New Hampshire Representative Dick Swett (D) has made a point of noting that Swett is a Mormon. Is this an attempt to bolster the Damon Linker note of caution that Mormon politicians hold their faith above their allegiance to their country? ~Marc, Law Students for Romney

Er, no, since the point of mentioning the donation would be that Romney was supporting a fellow Mormon who was a Democrat rather than being a good, little partisan and backing only GOP candidates.  As the story at The Politico says:

“Some activists are beginning to wonder: does Mitt support Mormons over Republicans?”  muses this person.

By “some activists,” of course, the McCainiac means “some activists who support John McCain.”  It’s rather funny that any of Romney’s opponents would attempt to make an issue out of this (if Giuliani tried to question Romney’s party bona fides, that would take some chutzpah).  What I think the McCain people are trying to do here is to cast doubt on Romney’s reliability as a Republican.  This will play on the “flip-flopping” argument that Brownback is using as a club to beat Romney, and it will tie into GOP primary voters’ anxieties about candidates from Massachusetts.  On the other hand, if Romney can show that he has a record of supporting candidates from both parties while also convincing people that he is now a serious conservative (no laughing, please), this might work to his benefit by combining his social conservative appeal with evidence of pragmatism.  It would, that is, were it not for the roughly 40% of Americans who have already determined they would never vote for a Mormon. 

These voters don’t need to know that Romney supported a Mormon Democrat in a congressional race nearly 15 years ago to view him with suspicion; they just need to know that he is a Mormon.  To the extent that the McCain people’s whispering about the donation emphasises Romney’s Mormon identity, it will have a greater effect on his candidacy than some meager donation he gave back in ‘92.  However, the purpose of the whispering does not seem to be aimed at his Mormonism in a Linkeresque or Christian conservative way.  Far worse than (obviously absurd) dangers of a national Mormon theocracy or adherence to a false religion in the eyes of the McCainiacs is a lack of lock-step allegiance to the Red Republicans.

Update: Something else about our Romneyite’s question just struck me as fairly silly.  Linker said some provocative and fairly insulting things about Mormonism, but he did not say that Mormons put their faith ahead of their loyalty to the country.  On the contrary, he identifies one of the principal threats from Mormonism to be their theologically-fortified Americanism.  As Linker would have it, this supposedly dictates that Mormon millennial expectations will drive Mormons to political action to hasten the return of Christ here in America.  As his critics have already pointed out, this is a fairly loopy argument in that it has very little to do with what actual Mormons are interested in doing.  Nonetheless, as wrong as Linker was about this and as bizarre as his complaint against Mormons was (they’re too patriotic!), he did not claim that they put their religion before their country.  The problem is supposed to be, rather, that their faith and their sense of patriotism are too closely intertwined.  The notion that anyone is accusing Mormons of putting religion ahead of country in a practical way is a product of misleading and annoying comparisons between old anti-Catholic tropes and present-day anti-Mormon opposition.  I swear, if I see one more mention of JFK… 

At a time when religion and politics are increasingly intertwined, it would be an opportunity to remind all Americans why the wall between church and state has served the country well. ~David Campbell & J. Quin Monson

Yet again, the conventional arguments deployed in favour of Romney (tolerance!  separation of church and state!) are the very sorts of arguments that make the people Romney needs as supporters grind their teeth.  Many Christian conservatives believe, quite rightly, that the “wall of separation” does not exist, or at least they hold that it is not enshrined in the Constitution and has nothing to do with the fundamental law.  The prohibition against establishment in the First Amendment was, is, not the same as an absolute ”separation.”  If ”the wall” exists now, it is a function of some of the very judicial excesses that have contributed to the judicial tyranny these voters have resented and opposed for decades. 

If Romney were to make an appeal for his candidacy in the name of a “wall of separation,” it would just be one more reason why many Christian voters in the GOP primaries could not vote for him.  He may be currently be good on the issues that matter to them (his spotty record here hardly helps him), but their acceptance of his candidacy would then be predicated on an endorsement of certain ideas, such as “the wall,” that they firmly reject as later misreadings of the law and an arbitrary interpolation of Jefferson’s letter to the Baptists into constitutional rulings (if only the Court were always so interested in original intent!).  Now, with a Brownback in the race they have no need now to “settle” for Romney’s late-in-the-day discovery of moral truths that Brownback has been defending, to some degree, for ten years.

Just like the challenge for Kennedy in 1960 and for born-again Christian Jimmy Carter in 1976, Romney’s candidacy will provide fresh opportunity for the US to reassert that its democratic traditions are above religion and serve as a protector of religion. ~The Christian Science Monitor

This may be the source of one of Romney’s problems with Christian voters.  It requires them to accept that, as the CSM rather clumsily put it, ”democratic traditions are above religion.”  Put like that, you might be hard-pressed to find a lot of conservative Christians who would want to endorse such a message, since “religion” for them means Christianity and we can be fairly sure that for many of them democracy is not “above” or ahead of Christianity.  This ties into the other reasons why Romney’s Mormon identity will be a problem for him.  On the one hand, his candidacy runs up against the natural democratic impulse to elect people like ourselves who represent us and in whom we can recognise ourselves, and on the other hand his appeal must seek to transcend and so, to some degree, set aside religious identity, which runs the risk of appearing to trivialise the place of religion in public life.  Like so many other pols, he turns to the weasel word “values” to convey his basic agreement with Christian voters on social issues of importance to them, but unlike most of these other pols on the GOP side he does not have the built-in credibility with many conservative voters that goes with being from a Christian background.  He is hemmed in on every side and, as the polls indicate, he just can’t win.

TOM Cruise is the new “Christ” of Scientology, according to leaders of the cult-like religion.

The Mission: Impossible star has been told he has been “chosen” to spread the word of his faith throughout the world.

And leader David Miscavige believes that in future, Cruise, 44, will be worshipped like Jesus for his work to raise awareness of the religion. ~The Sun

Presumably, the Scientologists will charge people for the privilege of asking for Tom’s forgiveness.  Just when you thought that he couldn’t sink any lower…

Religious zealotry has been responsible for killing more people than any other thing. ~Chuck Hagel

Taken on its own, there are few sillier statements.  If we can attribute the deaths of the French Revolution to liberalism, and I think we can, right there liberalism in France accounts for more deaths in the 18th century than religious conflict throughout the world in the same century.  Liberalism would seem to fare better in the 19th  For every extremely violent and extremely rare T’ai-P’ing Rebellion critics of religion can cite, defenders could point to ideologically-driven state-induced famines caused by collectivisation or nationalist genocides on the other.  For every Thirty Years’ War on one side of the ledger, defenders of religion could invoke the secular and nationalist Thirty Years’ War of 1914-1945.  In sheer numbers, ”religious zealotry” at its worst usually cannot compete with the power and passion of revolutionary ideologies.  (The death tolls from the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 and the T’ai-P’ing Rebellion are as high as they are because of the famine and pestilence that resulted from constant, large-scale campaigning.)  The point is not to cheer on religious zealotry as such, nor is it my purpose to ignore the atrocities of zealots, but rather I am trying to recognise that there are far more destructive and virulent ideas out there that have done and will continue to do more damage.  This is not to dismiss the damage that religious zealotry can do, but to keep in perspective that there are worse things–and things that are responsible for killing more people–than that. 

I am unfortunately reminded here of Dawkins, who rattled off a list of all the violence that would never have happened without religion, all the while failing to notice that most of the killing done throughout history was done for entirely different reasons.  Predictably, Sullivan approves of this bakvas. 

You know that Romney has relatively high unfavourable numbers (35% at last check), but how does Mormonism itself do?  Alerted to the problem by Friday’s HotlineTV,  I was intrigued to find that the numbers are just as staggeringly bad for Mormonism nationwide as the earlier Rasmussen poll results indicated.  According to the new Diageo/Hotline poll from this month (question 10b), Mormonism has an unfav rating of 39% (17% strongly unfav) compared to a fav rating of 27%.  The main good news for Mormons?  34% had either heard of Mormonism but couldn’t rate it either way, or hadn’t heard of it or didn’t know enough to say, and it receives a barely more favourable response from the general public than Islam (18/41).   

Nonetheless, among Republicans, Mormonism is viewed somewhat or ”strongly” unfavourably by 48% (strongly unfav is 24%).  Mormonism receives the best response from independents (31/26) and fairly negative numbers among Democrats (27/38).  The infamous Rasmussen poll from last year showed that only 19% of likely voters could identify Mitt Romney as the Mormon in the race–how much worse will his unfavourables get when more of these voters learn of his religious affiliation?

Other interesting religious items from the poll: 24% of Republicans have an unfavourable opinion of Catholicism (which is higher than Judaism’s unfav rating of 16% among the same people), which may help explain why there has still never been a Catholic Republican presidential nominee (and one reason why there probably will not be one for a while yet). 

The current concern about Romney recalls anxieties about Mormons and Catholics from the nineteenth century, when both churches evoked suspicion. Critics thought of them as “fanatics,” a stereotype applied to Catholics, Mormons, Masons, and Muslims. They feared that leaders of these groups would employ their spiritual authority over blindly loyal followers to magnify their own power. Any prophet claiming to speak for God, they reasoned, must necessarily try to impose his beliefs on everyone else. But this argument, while based on logic, was impervious to fact. The real-world actions of Mormons and Catholics, and their protestations of innocence, meant nothing. ~Prof. Richard Lyman Bushman

It may be worth noting that Prof. Bushman frequently returns to this old charge of fanaticism when discussing this issue.  It is something like the lens through which he is viewing the entire controversy over Mormonism in our presidential politics today.  It was part of one of the replies (sorry, the TNR overlords have locked up the previously free debate) that he gave to Linker during their online debate.  Linker complained that he had never used the word fanatic–while doing everything he could to hint that Mormons were all basically fanatics-in-waiting–but Prof. Bushman had him pretty well cornered.  As I noted at the time, Linker was proceeding with a pretty impeccably logical polemic that brought his negative assumptions about the political dangers of Mormonism to their logical conclusions.  The only trouble with this was that the actual history, the reality of Mormons in American politics, did not support his nicely designed polemic.  Linker was convinced that he had proven his polemical point, and the targets of the polemic were equally convinced that he could not possibly be referring to them because he could not cite a single real episode where his fears of Mormon church interference in politics had been realised.

As I wrote at the time of the debate just a little under two weeks ago:

It seems to me that it is quite one thing to note that Mormons are not Christians and for Christian voters to take that into account when judging a Mormon candidate.  It is quite another thing to conjure up rather far-reaching, implausible scenarios of Mormon domination when the historical record suggests that nothing could be further from the minds of the Mormons themselves. 

To that I would add that Prof. Bushman’s latest article is very good but ultimately ends up targeting a kind of anti-Mormon criticism that barely exists anymore.  The concern of secularists who are anxious about a Mormon President is much more basic: they don’t trust anyone who believes as divinely revealed things they regard as patently absurd.  There is virtually no reasoning with such a view, since every attempt to show reasonableness or coherence within a religious framework will simply leave such critics cold.  Yet the Weisbergs of the world do not fear rule from Salt Lake City–they fear giving power to someone who thinks that the Lamanites actually existed.  Other opposition to Mormonism is of a fairly different nature as well.  The concern of most Christian voters who are put off by Romney’s Mormonism is not that Mormons are “fanatics” as such or that they are liable to follow the orders of their church authorities with blind zeal, but that they are Mormons in the first place.  It is a concern about what kind of symbolism and identity they are willing to endorse, and whether Mormons fit within their Christian identity.  Pretty plainly, a sizeable number of Christians hold that they do not fit. 

This should not distress true-believing Mormons, as I have said in the past, since they claim to be the true successor to the Church of the Apostles and view all others as frauds.  Given such a view, it is inevitable that Christians would consider Mormon and Christian identity to be mutually exclusive, just as Mormons, if they are serious about their founding claims, must see their true “Christian” identity and our “apostate” identity to be mutually exclusive.   

And yet, literally billions of our neighbors deem the contents of the Bible and the Qur’an to be so profound as to rule out the possibility of terrestrial authorship. ~Sam Harris

If I made it my business to be a professional religion-basher, and if I thought getting my criticism of religion was right as an important way to shine the light of reason on the darkened corners of religious minds, I would at the very least get my facts straight about certain key elements of the religions I was bashing.  Christians and Muslims agree that their scriptures are authored by God in the sense that they accept that the revelation comes from God.  They do not agree that revelation came in unmediated form and that the text as set down in its complete form (which, of course, was a redacted and edited form also in the case of the Qur’an) is the uncreated Word of God.  Muslims believe this, Christians do not. 

Therein lies one of the most significant differences between the two religions, and the one that has possibly has done the most damage of the intellectual culture of the Islamic world than any other.  As I understand it, the Qur’an is not open to hermeneutics of any kind, and there is no other way to understand it except literally, where by literally I mean there is no possibility of interpreting the same text in several different senses.  That creates certain obvious problems for the possibility of reconciling revelation and other sources of truth, since multivalence in a religious text is effectively impossible without some room for interpretation.  On the other hand, Christians acknowledge, as they have acknowledged since the beginning, that Scripture is a divine revelation mediated through inspired authors and the composition of the texts is attributed to various patriarchs and apostles.  (We can set aside for the moment the high criticism’s doubts about the traditional attributions of books of the Bible.)  Terrestrial authorship, in the sense that it was understood that the Scriptures themselves were set down by men according to the revelation, is not only a possibility for Christians, but it is taken for granted and assumed to be the case. 

Muslims do not have a tradition of remembering the Composers of the Qur’an as they remember the Companions of the Prophet, because they believe that Jibril spoke the Qur’an to Muhammad and that was it.  Christians commemorate and many venerate the Evangelists and others in recognition of what can only be called terrestrial authorship of Scripture.  That they also take Scripture to be true and inerrant is not surprising, but they plainly do not rule out “the possibility of terrestrial authorship.”    

There was an awareness from the beginning that the accounts of the Gospels differed and there was also an awareness of the potential problems and contradictions in Scripture.  Because of the possibility of having multiple senses in which one could read Scripture, it became possible to interpret revelation on the assumption that God guided the Fathers and the authorities of the Church in this work of interpretation and teaching.  Undoubtedly Mr. Harris will spew forth venom at all of this as well, but for him to do that he would first have to know about it, which he evidently does not from the comments that he made.  

Andrew Sullivan, the vicar of doubt, is debating Sam Harris, ueber-atheist, in a blogalogue.  For me, this is like watching the Raiders play the Cowboys: the only thing to do is simply root for injuries and mistakes. 

Yes, Gov. Romney is a Mormon. We are not. According to the liberal media, this is an unbridgeable gap, and evangelicals will never turn out to support a faithful Mormon like Governor Romney. As usual, the media have it wrong. And they root their error (as usual) in a fundamental misunderstanding about American evangelicals—seeing us as ignorant and intolerant simpletons who are incapable of making sophisticated political value judgments. ~Evangelicals for Mitt

A reader has alerted me to this pro-Romney site.  It is worth a look to see the arguments of evangelicals who are willing to look past Romney’s Mormonism and support him based on shared policy views.  For what it’s worth, I don’t think evangelicals who refuse to vote for Romney because of his Mormonism are “intolerant simpletons” incapable of making “sophisticated political value judgements.”  I think these evangelicals actually believe someone’s religion really matters for the formation of his worldview and they actually prefer having a Christian, probably preferably a Christian who shares their entire faith and experience as evangelicals, as the person to represent them.  This is completely understandable and even laudable.  There are evangelicals for whom Mormonism is a bridge too far, and there are those for whom it is not, but the first group outnumbers the latter and, I suspect, feels much more strongly about it.  In the primaries, the antis will overwhelm the pros. 

Back to the quote.  Perhaps it is because of their disdain for evangelicals that the liberal media have played up Romney’s Mormonism as being in conflict with evangelical voters, or perhaps it is because they enjoy pushing the “religious politics has come back to haunt the GOP” narrative, or perhaps it is just because they like to report on conflict that will generate interest in presidential election reporting in early 2007 when most people are more concerned with the NFL playoffs or paying off their Christmas bills.  I don’t know the real reason why they’re talking about it. 

But it probably has something to do with anecdotal evidence of anti-Mormon opposition among evangelicals and the slightly more scientific evidence that half of all evangelicals would never consider voting for a Mormon.  It certainly has to do with evidence that four out of ten voters from the general population would likewise not even consider it.  Maybe the other approximately half of evangelicals will enthusiastically vote for him and “evangelicals for Mitt” will not have the odd, out-of-place sound to it that “hawks for Kucinich” or “pacifists for Gingrich” have.  Even so, losing half of the evangelical vote before he was even officially in the race on the Mormon issue alone is a political death blow to an avowedly social conservative candidate. 

Let’s go back to those Rasmussen numbers and look at how they break down.  Who are these anti-Mormon voters?  It turns out that they are from pretty much every possible group.  Some are more likely to refuse consideration of such a vote, but there are high levels (30%+)of resistance across the board.  Remember that this is a straight-up yes or no question: would you ever consider voting for a Mormon for President?  Those opposed are not leaving Romney any room with which he can work: they will never consider it.

43% of Catholics say they would never consider voting for a Mormon, and 36% of Protestants (classified separately from evangelicals) and 53% of evangelicals say the same.  That’s a lot of people with religious affiliations who say, “No, thank you” when presented with a Mormon presidential candidate.  That’s without asking any other questions of him.  What about his policy views, his “values”?  These are apparently irrelevant. 

Opposition intensifies in direct proportion to a voter’s frequency of religious attendance: only 37% of those who rarely or never attend services are unwilling, 44% of weekly attendees are unwilling to consider such a vote and 59% of people who attend services more than once a week are unwilling.  This makes sense.  The more practically religious you are, the more a candidate’s religious identity will probably matter to you.  But that doesn’t get away from the startling fact that over a third of people who almost never go into a church will never vote for a Mormon presidential candidate.  Against such huge numbers and strong opposition no candidate can hope to prevail.  There is not enough time, even if he had the luxury of trying, to “educate” the voters on what it means to be Mormon.  This education is almost certainly needed, if only to root out egregious and obvious errors of fact that have lodged in the public consciousness, but the middle of a presidential campaign is neither the time nor the place for it.  In popular culture (see Big Love or Entourage), mainstream Mormonism is still associated, incorrectly, with polygamy, which has not been helped by Romney hamming it up with jokes about marriage being between “a man and a woman…and a woman and a woman.”  Yes, that’s very droll, Mitt, but it only works if everyone knows that Mormons no longer practice polygamy.  It would not be a surprise to me if a great many people still don’t know that or if they easily confuse Mormon splinter groups with the main LDS church.  In any case, Romney is banking on the public being relatively well-informed about the internal affairs of a relatively obscure religious group with which most people have no dealings, and this is a losing bet.   

The chances of a Mormon candidate are worse among women than among just about any other group: 47% would not consider voting for one for President, while only 38% of men would not.  Party affiliation does seem to make some significant difference.  Pat yourselves on the backs, Republicans–you are marginally more accepting of Mormon presidential candidates than much of the rest of America!  Among Republicans, 42% would consider voting for a Mormon, 40% wouldn’t.  Among Democrats, opposition is greater (32% willing vs. 51% unwilling).  Of the three options, those not affiliated with either are least likely to be opposed to considering a vote for a Mormon (42/33).

Ideology does not seem to matter in determining a refusal to support a Mormon candidate.  Each group (conservative, moderate, liberal) has equally high levels of refusal to consider such a vote (43, 44, 41% respectively).  Liberals are slightly more likely (44%) to consider voting for a Mormon, and conservatives the next most likely (39%).  Curiously enough, “moderates” are the least willing (34%).  People of indeterminate ideology (”not sure”) are just as opposed (43%) and even less willing to consider voting for a Mormon (25%).  The conservative numbers seem to mirror the overall national results of 38% willing to consider a vote and 43% unwilling.  Obviously, if Romney loses almost half of conservatives from the beginning before he even opens his mouth, he has no realistic chance in the primaries.  To have a fighting chance, he would have to get every single vote of those who are open to voting for a Mormon, and he simply isn’t going to get all those votes.

How important a candidate’s faith is to voters heavily determines opposition.  Among those who say it is “very important,” opposition is intense (59%), and among those who say it is “somewhat important” opposition is still considerable (38%).  Almost inexplicably, though, among those for whom a candidate’s faith is “not very” or “not at all important” there are still large numbers who would never consider such a vote (31 and 30% respectively).  There is clearly not just an intense religious opposition to a Mormon presidential candidate, but what seems to be a generalised, nationwide, cross-cutting cultural hostility that can be found in virtually every group of people in America. 

If Mitt Romney could somehow get himself elected President in the midst of this, he would have to be considered one of the great political and campaigning geniuses of the last century.  No offense to Gov. Romney, but however good he is he isn’t that good of a campaigner.  I don’t think someone with the political skills of Clinton and Reagan combined could pull this off.  What he is trying to do is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.  At best he might hope for a few decent second-place finishes in a few places and shoot for the VP slot, but even in that case his Mormonism seems likely to be a weight that will drag any GOP ticket down (after all, if all these people won’t vote for a Mormon for President, why would they vote for a Mormon to be first in line for the Presidency?).

With all of this in mind, there is something that needs to be said clearly and as often as necessary to make the point: Romney’s religion is a problem not just for the Jacob Weisbergs and evangelicals out there, but it is more or less a problem to some large degree for every kind of non-Mormon American out there.  It roughly splits the country down the middle between those who would never even consider the possibility of a Mormon President and those who are open to that possibility.  It would be worth inquiring how it is that Mormons can be distrusted this much by such a wide variety of people.  Christians are obviously more likely to view Mormonism poorly for religious reasons, and secularists are apt to view it at least as poorly as they view other religions, but how exactly does anti-Mormonism become such a general phenomenon such that at least one-third of every group into which they broke down this polling information was firmly opposed to a Mormon President?  Is it mainly a product of Christian opposition to Mormon theological errors?  Is it leftover disdain for past polygamous practices being transferred to the modern church?       

Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

Up to half of the conservative writers and thinkers whom I know are non-believers. And yet because of the rule that one may never ever question claims made on behalf of faith, they remain in the closet. At some point, however, they may emerge to challenge the idea that without religion, personal and social anarchy looms.

8) If you are 18 and figuring out what course of study to pursue for the next 4 years what changes would you make to your educational path now that you have some hindsight?

I would study a lot more history. Thanks to my college’s refusal to tell its ignorant students what an educated person should know-heaven forbid that it actually exercise intellectual authority!-I was required to study no history and didn’t know enough to do so on my own. ~Heather Mac Donald

Okay, for those who are in danger of being all “Mac Donalded” out, I have just one more thing to say about Ms. Mac Donald’s review before I turn to other things.  The juxtaposition of the remark about theocons arguing for the necessity of religion and Ms. Mac Donald’s admitted lack of study of history caught my attention.  It struck me that her admitted lack of a proper education in history, which she laudably wishes to remedy, might explain a lot about Ms. Mac Donald’s atheism. 

Atheists are great ones for posing what they think are really baffling conundrums for believers, but their acquaintance with history, as far as religion is concerned, is typically with the black marks and scandals.  There was religious fanaticism!  Well, yes, and there was far, far worse atheist fanaticism, so which would you rather see dominating society?  They seem uninterested to query why it is that every organised society from the earliest tribes to the most technically sophisticated civilisations have had one form or another of propitiating, worshipping and otherwise interacting with the supernatural and divine.  If they do ask the question, they have ready-made answers handy: ignorance, fear of death, fear of the unknown, opiate of the masses, etc.  It usually does not seem to trouble them that the greatest minds in every period of our history not only acknowledged one divinity or another but insisted on the importance of reverence for God or the gods for the well-being and virtuous life of man.  They were caught up in the superstitions of their time, or they were afraid to challenge the religious authorities, the atheist will reply.  Maybe, but what of the numerous philosophers who claimed to be able to show, by means of reason, the necessity of the existence of God?  Though all these men considered the possibility of atheism, at least in passing, the absurdity of it always prevented them from embracing it. 

It is no wonder then that, when faced with something like the ontological proof, which they no longer even attempt to answer, most atheists retreat to tired arguments from theodicy.  Having repeatedly failed to disprove God’s existence in the realm of logic, which was their only real chance, they now hope to shame believers with the scandal of the fallenness of the world.  “Look, a tsunami!  What about your loving God now, eh?” they cry.  This can sometimes scandalise believers, but it does not do much to disprove God’s existence.  

Doesn’t the awesome weight of all of these historical precedents make the ”skeptical conservative,” the conservative atheist, think twice about whether he has gone awry somewhere?  Surely it is one of the marks of conservatism to defer to the authority of tradition on the assumption that the “individual is foolish, but the species is wise” and that the tradition has accumulated the wisdom of centuries as compared against your brief lifespan.  These are not definitive proofs in favour of the claims of the tradition (deference to tradition is based heavily on experience and an assumption that time-tested ways are best, which do not yield proofs as such), but for the conservative they are important claims that have to be taken into account when forming a view about anything. 

Perhaps the most stunning thing about atheism is the sheer presumption of it.  I don’t mean simply the presumption against God, which would be enough in itself, but the presumption that you and a few other adventurous souls have figured out something that the vast majority of mankind has never known about a subject for which the atheist can obviously have no empirical evidence one way or the other.  Heady stuff, indeed.  Say whatever else you will about it, this setting of the ideas of the self over and against the inherited wisdom of ages is one of the main things that is unconservative about atheism.  Even if atheists were right, we should be clear that there would be nothing conservative about their position, but would, if adopted by society as a whole, quite obviously involve a cultural revolution and destruction of a significant portion of our cultural inheritance.  In the end, what is it that atheists would conserve of our civilisation, when so much of the substance of our civilisation has its origins in Christianity or in the cultural derivatives thereof? 

Would greater familiarity with history weaken an atheist’s certainty that religion is unnecessary for the healthy flourishing of society?  I almost have to think that it would.  The nightmare of the 20th century, defined to such a great extent in so many parts of the world by organised godlessness and the official repudiation of all religion, should give any convinced atheist pause.  If man does not flourish in a godless regime, and if godless regimes have a record of unusually great barbarity and human cruelty, it does at the very least suggest that religion aids in human flourishing and probably has some moderating effect on the use of political power.  On sheer pragmatic grounds alone, someone familiar with the historical record would have to conclude that atheism, at least if embraced officially, is bad for the health of society.     

I have always been amazed that the liberal media is willing to let stand the right’s equation between “religious voters,” “values voters,” and opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. There is no necessary relation between being religious, having values, or opposition to stem cell research or gay marriage, in my view. That having been said, the current obsession with homosexuality on the part of the Religious Right would seem to assure it a political relevance for the Republican Party for some time. ~Heather Mac Donald

This isn’t all that amazing when you think about it.  The media indulge this conceit, to the extent that they do, for two main reasons.  The first is that specifically tying “religious voters” to abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research helps to confirm their image of these “religious voters” as intolerant, meddlesome, fanatical and potentially dangerous.  By setting things up this way, they have done religious conservatives no favours in the PR battle.  The message that comes across–the message they make sure comes across–is: “These people want to tell you what you can do with your own body and would rather see you die in agony than allow science to save you.”  This is tendentious and wrong in many ways, but that is why the media have been only too glad to emphasise these aspects of religious conservatism.  These aspects obviously exist and are important to religious conservatives, but by making these the end-all and be-all of what the rest of the public knows about “religious voters” the media succeed in making “religious voters” and their views appear very unattractive to “moderates” and independents.  In this way, they make the pro-life view into a test of religious fundamentalism: if you don’t want to be considered a fundamentalist, don’t oppose abortion.  Likewise, according to this narrative, if you don’t want to oppress people, don’t oppose gay marriage; if you don’t want to inflict endless suffering on the sick and dying, don’t oppose any kind of stem-cell research.  Of course, religious conservatives make up most of the people who oppose these things and they certainly make up a large proportion of the activists against all of them, so it is not entirely a media creation.  However, no one has suggested that it is impossible to oppose these things without being religious. 

The second–this is where the ”values” scam comes in–is that to call them “values voters” functions a way of avoiding any talk of morality or virtue as such.  Instead of, say, ”culture war,” which implied that one side was fighting for our culture and the other was fighting against it (and this had obvious negative political implications for the latter group), talking about “values” helps make the issues in question less powerful and can make the policy implications of the strength of a “values voter” bloc far more obscure.   To refer to someone as a “values voter” is actually not a move that invests them with some special claim to being concerned with living well or doing the right thing and so on.  This move undermines any strong claims about serious moral questions by making support for the virtues and opposition to vices into interchangeable, malleable preferences (”values”) rather than commitments to moral truth.  In end, speaking of them as “values voters” is much less favourable than referring to them as cultural or religious or socially conservative voters, since all of these other terms can sound appealing to many people.  In the end, calling them values voters is a way of lumping together a whole class of people who are voting on a number of disparate cultural concerns and putting them under a bland, meaningless label.  The phrase functions as a way of watering down the significance of these voters and effectively reducing their power by diluting or even negating what it is they stand for.  Voting against moral and cultural decline, for example, which might be conveyed by the label cultural conservative, sends one message and carries more weight, while voting for “values” carries as much weight in its effect on the political debate as going to a clearance sale.  Naturally, secular conservatives such as George Will and now Heather Mac Donald take offense that they have been excluded, so to speak, from the camp of “values voters,” not seeing that the entire “values voter” conceit is a way to reduce and weaken the impact of religious conservatism on the public debate.  They should instead welcome the empty-headed “values” talk, since it helps to reduce religious conservative views on so many questions of social policy to just so many preferences and/or prejudices.  It tacitly assumes that the people who “value” life and marriage are basically sentimental about what they “value” and lack good arguments for their preferences or it can imply that they devalue other people’s rights.  Either way, it is a way of subtly undermining religious conservatives.  It is not a compliment, and the possession of this label is not something that other people should envy.      

7) You’ve labelled yourself a ’skeptical conservative.’ Would you also say you are hopeful about the trajectory that this republic might take into the future, or do you warrant that the corner is likely turned and we’ll be fighting a rearguard action for most of our lives?
I will interpret your question to mean whether I think secularism will strengthen in the U.S. over time. I am not ordinarily an optimist, but I take heart from the incensed response to the existence of a mere three contemporary books debunking religion. While the proportion of Americans who believe in Biblical revelation remains depressingly high and doesn’t yet show much sign of decline, the reaction of religion’s conservative apologists to a few atheists sticking their heads out of the foxhole suggests to me a possible nervousness about religion’s hold in the future. First Things editor Joseph Bottum calls secularists “superannuated,” in the aforementioned book Why I Turned Right. Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger claims a religious provenance for the following “American” virtues: “fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, charity, hope, integrity, loyalty, honor, filial respect, mercy, diligence, generosity and forbearance.” Yet Classical philosophers and poets celebrated many of these “religious” virtues as vigorously as any Evangelist or Christian divine, and these ideals are in any case human virtues, which is why religion can appropriate them. As for Henninger’s suggestion that mercy and hope had to wait upon Christianity to make their appearance on the scene, I would need more evidence. Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

Up to half of the conservative writers and thinkers whom I know are non-believers. And yet because of the rule that one may never ever question claims made on behalf of faith, they remain in the closet. At some point, however, they may emerge to challenge the idea that without religion, personal and social anarchy looms. ~Heather Mac Donald

I don’t want to keep harping on similarities between Ms. Mac Donald and Andrew Sullivan, because this really isn’t fair to Ms. Mac Donald.  She is, for the most part, a clear and logical thinker who can make compelling arguments based on solid evidence.  Sullivan is a egoist who likes to throw tantrums and wrap them up in philosophical covering.  For the most part, it is complete coincidence that both he and Ms. Mac Donald call themselves skeptics.  She demonstrates an intellectual rigour and coherence, whatever else you would like to say about her views, that Sullivan does not possess.  She at least has the decency to throw religion right out the window rather than mangle it and distort it to suit her own preoccupations as Sullivan does. 

However, the first part of this comment, which I first saw at The Corner, was the thing that annoyed me and got me to read the interview in its entirety because it struck me as such an unreservedly silly thing to say.  Since there is no one who better embodies unreserved silliness than Andrew Sullivan, a comparison with him was unavoidable, but in this case there is another similarity.  As some may have noticed, whenever someone criticises Andrew Sullivan (not counting me, as he has so far studiously ignored everything I have said) he will write a post citing the criticism and then commenting on it with a remark that goes something like this: “Ha ha!  Now I’ve got them on the run!  I have hit them where it hurts.  See how they mercilessly reject everything I have said?  See how they have eviscerated my rather embarrassingly poor argument?  They will soon be mine!” 

Ms. Mac Donald’s comment, though not nearly as obnoxious as anything Sullivan has written in this vein, reminds me of this.  Strong and perhaps indignant response is, according to this view, a sign of weakness and proof in this case that the grip of religion is slipping.  The theocons must be very perplexed about all of this.  In the space of a few months they have been accused of being virtual masters of the universe and on the verge of destroying secular America (that’s Linker’s thesis) and now they are said to be nervously watching the collapse of religion in America and are possibly “running scared.”  I happen to think both are wrong in different ways, but it is curious how two people equally appalled by religious conservatism can come to such radically different conclusions about the strength of their foe.   

This part strikes me as particularly odd:

Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

First of all, this has to be the first time I have ever heard anyone call Daniel Henninger a theocon, but leave that aside for the moment.  What is the evidence that “theocons” are “running scared”?  Because they have responded to a few atheists with many arguments?  The “incensed response” to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, to take two of the three atheists in question, comes from the natural irritation that their insult-laden polemics cause and from what must be the offensive nature of their claims.  Any given atheist advances his view by telling the vast majority of people that they strongly believe in utter nonsense, and everyone else quite understandably responds poorly to being told, for all intents and purposes, he is a fool and a cretin.  If the response were anything other than incensed, then perhaps the meaning that belief in God held for people might be said to be weakening.  Rarely does one see the active, robust defense of something that is shared by a great many people taken as proof of that thing’s decline.  It is when religion no longer inspires and no longer commands loyalty and defense that something can be said to be declining and failing.  Reaction is evidence that something is alive and still able and willing to fight.  If religious conservatives sat still and did nothing while they were figuratively prodded and poked by atheists and secularists, that would be much more clear proof that the spirit had gone out of them and their beliefs were headed for the scrapheap.       

Religion is an important buttress to social order.  Is it possible to have social order without religion?  Yes, but it will often be of a more brutal, unethical and tyrannical kind.  It will be much less likely to be good order.  More to the point, it is not so much anarchy, but the crushing weight of some form or other of totalitarianism that man without religion has to fear.  Dostoevsky reminded us that man has a natural need to worship something.  If he will not worship God, he will worship other men, the state or things of this world.  Personal anarchy is not the great threat of a man without God.  Some atheists have been the most regimented, humourless, abstemious people on the planet.  It is personal debasement and personal degradation within a godless system that makes the conservative turn away in horror from what an atheist society will do to its members.  As Eliot famously and memorably said, “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.”  

Incidentally, if half of all conservative writers and thinkers whom Ms. Mac Donald knows are non-believers, where would she ever get the idea that religion has come to rule over conservatism?

Around that time, I had started noticing the puzzling logic of petitionary prayer. What was the theory of God behind prayer websites, for example: that God is a democratic pol with his finger to the wind of public opinion? Is the idea that if only five people are praying for the recovery of a beloved grandmother from stroke, say, God will brush them off, but that if you can summon five thousand people to plead her case, he will perk up and take notice: “Oh, now I understand, this person’s life is important”? And what if an equally beloved grandmother comes from a family of atheist curs? Since she has no one to pray for her, will God simply look the other way? If someone could explain this to me, I would be very grateful.

I also wondered at the narcissism of believers who credit their good fortune to God. A cancer survivor who claims that God cured him implies that his worthiness is so obvious that God had to act. It never occurs to him to ask what this explanation for his deliverance says about the cancer victim in the hospital bed next to his, who, despite the fervent prayers of her family, died anyway.

As I was pondering whether any of these practices could be reconciled with rationality, the religious gloating of the conservative intelligentsia only grew louder. The onset of the Iraq war expanded the domain of religious triumphalism to transatlantic relations: what makes America superior to Europe, we were told by conservative opinionizers, is its religious faith and its willingness to invade Iraq. George Bush made the connection between religious beliefs and the Iraq war explicit, with his childlike claim that freedom was God’s gift to humanity and that he was delivering that gift himself by invading Iraq.

I need not rehearse here how Bush’s invocation of the divine gift of freedom overlooks the Bible, the persistence throughout history of hierarchical societies that have little use for personal autonomy, and the unique, centuries-long struggle in the West to create the institutions of limited government that underwrite our Western idea of freedom. Suffice it to say, the predictable outcome of the Iraq invasion did not convince me that religious belief was a particularly trustworthy ground for political action. ~Heather Mac Donald

The remarks about prayer and claims of divine healing or grace are stunning to me.  These are the kinds of objections college freshmen come up with in their religion classes in the first few weeks before they learn that they don’t know anything.  If man is free, prayer must exist.  God is always seeking to draw us to Himself, but He does not, would not compel us to draw nigh.  Likewise, He is willing to provide for us in many specific instances, but will not do so unless we ask it of Him.  There are occasions where God, in His infinite wisdom, will refuse our petition because what we ask for is not what we actually require for our edification and sanctification. There are other occasions when God may approach us unbidden, but it is only through the practice of prayer and the habits of mind and spirit that this practice establishes in us that we are prepared to receive Him. 

Imagine, if you will, a man on an island in the middle of a wide and deep river.  On the far shore there is a fisherman casting his nets.  The fisherman has a boat and has a large catch of fish, and could bring the man food or even take him over to the shore if the man were to ask it of him.  The man has no nets and nothing else on the island with which to fish, and he has no other means of sustenance.  In the course of time, the man will gradually starve if he does not humble himself and ask for help from the fisherman.  If Ms. Mac Donald were there to advise him, she would tell him that he should not say anything to the fisherman.  He should not have to ask the fisherman, because he should already know that the man is in need and should provide for him without any word from the man.  Perhaps Ms. Mac Donald would be more satisfied if everyone spiritually starved in their own autonomy rather than engage in something so irrational as prayer. 

Indeed, it would be even more absurd, according to Ms. Mac Donald, for other people on the shore with the fisherman to ask the fisherman to intercede on behalf of the man.  Ms. Mac Donald would interrupt: “What possible difference could that make?”  (Of course, the number isn’t really what matters, but the spirit in which the prayer is offered and the purity of the petitioner’s intention.)  All that it might take for the fisherman to answer could be one petitioner, but supposing that there were more than just one the fisherman would see the love that these petitions represent and would probably hasten to fulfill the good desire of so many people.  Beseeching the fisherman on behalf of the man is part of the fulfillment of the Christian obligation to love one another, and it is at least partly to instill in men love for one another that we are called to offer up prayers for others.  On this point, I would borrow an idea from Lewis’ apologetics and frame the question this way: “How much worse might a person’s suffering be without others praying on his behalf?  How much better might his condition be because others have prayed for him? ”  If the atheists’ grandmother is truly beloved, does Ms. Mac Donald think that this love is in vain?  Presumably not, or she would not have brought it up.  If it is not in vain, but is indeed truly love, how is it that God will ignore this beloved person, since all love comes from Him and participates in Him?  Will Ms. Mac Donald be grateful for this response?  I am somehow doubtful.

A cancer survivor would credit his survival to God out of humility and gratitude for having been spared a painful death and shortened life.  I literally cannot imagine anyone who gives thanks to God in such a case offering up this praise with the sense that he was saved because he was worthy.  In Christianity, at least, the presumption of wretchedness and unworthiness of all of God’s gifts is strong (this is one of those parts of the Faith that really grates on people, especially those who are pretty pleased with themselves and think that they would be worthy of God’s special attention) because of the recognition of two things: man is fallen and sinful and God is nonetheless merciful and does not treat us according to what we deserve.  If Thou shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, O Lord, who shall stand? (Ps. 130:3)  As Fr. Rutler once put it simply (I am paraphrasing a little), “The question is not why bad things happen to good people, for the Lord said, There is none good save My Father in heaven.  The question, then, is: why do good things happen to bad people?”  Secularists and atheists, and probably a few Christians, groan when they hear statements like this, not so much because they find the argument lacking but because they don’t like the implications.  The first implication is that we may not ever understand the reasons for why two people suffering from the same disease  have entirely different fates.  These people don’t like this because it means there are things they will never know, which reminds them of their finitude and limits.  The second is that God wills, or in this case permits, different things for different people according to their needs.  If one cancer patient lives and another dies, God has provided for both what is most fitting.  Does that make such a loss any easier to bear?  Often, no, it doesn’t, but it is nonetheless true.         

Was religious belief really the ground for Mr. Bush’s War?  It certainly suits some people to think so.  Nothing would satisfy secular conservatives, who made up the overwhelming majority of the policymakers and pundits who vociferously backed the war, more than to be able to pretend that this war was not the outcome of incompetent policy wonks pushing a senseless conflict based on poor assumptions about human nature, culture, history and politics that have more to do with Ms. Mac Donald’s beloved Enlightenment than with anything found in the Gospel.  Secular conservatives would love to be able to pin the war on religious conservatives, many of whom foolishly trusted the President and lent him their support out of a (misguided) sense of patriotism but almost all of whom had no role in the pushing, planning or execution of the war.  

This line of criticism is to treat Mr. Bush’s references to God giving the world freedom as the source and foundation of the drive to invade Iraq, when I propose that it was at best some platitudinous religious window dressing for what was an avowedly secular, revolutionary campaign that Mr. Bush justified precisely in terms of bringing the fruits of liberal modernity to the Near East.  That his policy instead produced mass theocracy and sectarianism is par for the course, but let us not confuse the undesired results for the goals of the administration.  Let us also not confuse the icing of saccharine religiosity for the cake of democratic revolutionarism and projecting U.S. power for what was supposed to be our hegemonic control of the region (that it turned out to advance Iran’s hegemonic control of the region is again par for the course). 

Ms. Mac Donald also said:

I need not rehearse here how Bush’s invocation of the divine gift of freedom overlooks the Bible, the persistence throughout history of hierarchical societies that have little use for personal autonomy, and the unique, centuries-long struggle in the West to create the institutions of limited government that underwrite our Western idea of freedom.

No, she need not, because I, benighted Christian that I am, had already said very much the same thing in protest against the foolish, unorthodox and dangerous idea that God bestows political freedom on humanity.

Thus does the left casually open the door to the baldest sort of bigotry, a first cousin of the anti-Catholicism thought buried in 1960, or the anti-Semitism that continues to plague Europe and of course the Middle East. The not-so-deft substitution of “religious heritage” for “religion” is supposed, I guess, to protect Jews willing to abandon the outward display of their faith, but for anyone believing in the miraculous of any sort, well, those days of the great tolerance in American politics are over. ~Hugh Hewitt

Yes, Hewitt, if someone thinks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is a reason not to support his candidacy, he is practically just one step removed from joining the Klan (that would be the anti-Catholicism) or perhaps Hamas (that would be the anti-Semitism).  That’s not an absurd thing to say at all!

There is no doubt that Weisberg doesn’t like anyone who actually believes what his religion teaches and takes it seriously.  He doesn’t trust people like that.  That’s just about what you would expect from someone like him.  But do the 53% of evangelicals who say they will never consider voting for a Mormon for President listen to Jacob Weisberg?  Are their reasons the same as his?  Well, yes and no.  All of them are opposed to a Mormon presidential candidate because they believe he believes things that are plainly false.  They are judging by different standards, and where Weisberg’s test would exclude anyone who believes in claims of revealed religion as actually true theirs would effectively reject anyone who does not believe as they do in Jesus Christ.  

Incidentally, it was precisely this bias in favour of a fellow evangelical that rallied evangelicals behind Mr. Bush.  Identity politics of this sort is not exactly an attractive feature of mass democracy, but it is a central and abiding feature.  Those who actually believe that democracy is the best form of government (I certainly don’t) have absolutely no business complaining when their beloved democratic process is simply working as it always has.  After cheering on the bestowal of the great gift of “democracy” on Iraq, now it turns out that Hewitt doesn’t like this particular expression of the popular will.  Rather than face up to the potential evils of democracy that make it possible for identity politics to dominate all other considerations and shut out ostensibly qualified candidates, Hewitt cries about bigotry, yet the very nature of all democratic identitarianism involves the mobilisation and politicisation of prejudice.  All candidates in democratic elections try to show that they are ”like you” and that they represent you, and they want you to identify with them and to see them as a symbol of your hopes and aspirations.  Romney is trying to play this game in a lame, late-in-the-day attempt to prove that he is really “one of us” as far as social conservatism goes, but what his supporters don’t seem to appreciate is that a whole lot of Christian conservatives don’t think of him as ”one of us” because they cannot even accept that he is really a Christian.  If a Muslim, Jew, Sikh or Hindu, or any other non-Christian, ran for the Republican nomination, he would assuredly meet with the same icy reception.  For Hewitt to be loudly complaining about anti-Mormon prejudice, he has to pretend that most evangelicals, whose interests and “values” he often purports to defend, do not fundamentally agree with Weisberg’s rejection of the “founding whoppers” of Mormonism.  That Weisberg’s critique involves far more than that and is a general assault on the role of serious religious believers in public life is for the moment beside the point.  The point is that the problem Hewitt has with Weisberg is one that he would inevitably have to have with a huge percentage of evangelical voters.  Ultimately, Weisberg’s opposition will be neither here nor there.  If he and Damon Linker were the only ones who found Mormonism to be a problem for Romney’s candidacy, it would be irrelevant to Romney’s chances and to the rest of society.  Of course, they are not the only ones.  It is huge numbers of voters, both evangelical and otherwise, who also agree that it is a problem, indeed a dealbreaker, and it is they who will be the ones deciding the issue just as it was decided in 1928.  Unlike 1928, though, Gov. Romney will not even get the nomination.     

What Hewitt laments as bigotry would be what a reasonable observer would call the workings of the much-vaunted freedom and democracy in these here United States.  Ever notice how quickly the greatest enthusiasts for both of these modern god-words abandon their commitment to them when they become inconvenient?  Notice how Republicans are the first to start whining about intolerance when it is their ox that is being gored?  Perhaps it ought to be the case that left-liberals should practice tolerance towards all as they demand that everyone else does, but once you recognise that “tolerance” is a tool and a weapon in the hands of the left to dismantle the traditions and authorities that they despise you begin to understand that it was never a legitimate or desirable principle in the first place.  It was always a deception aimed at the exclusion of left-liberals’ enemies from power and influence in society.  It is suicidal for someone on the right to invoke it in the defense of religious conservatives or to use it as a bludgeon to shame religious conservatives into supporting his preferred candidate (Hewitt might as well have said to his conservative audience, “If you don’t vote for Romney, you are also a bigot.”).

Hewitt calls us all to solidarity with Mormons with rhetoric as treacly as anything on offer from the ADL:

Weisberg’s attack on Romney is exactly the sort of attack on other Christians and believers in the miraculous that the secular left would love to make routine. To mainstream Protestants and Mass-attending Catholics, the virtual mob against Romney because of his LDS faith may seem like someone else’s problem, but it is really another step down the road toward the naked public square. Legitimizing bigotry by refusing to condemn it invites not only its repetition, but its spread to new targets.  

In every pro-Romney article that I have read, everyone reaches for the Kennedy comparison, usually followed by a “I thought we had left all of this behind” and an inevitable, “Never again!”  Now the Niemoelleresque Hewitt warns us, “First they came for the Mormons…”  But no one is coming for them.  No one is doing anything to them.  A very few people are writing (critical) columns about Mormonism, and other people are going to withhold their vote from a Mormon candidate.  Never have “oppression” and “bigotry” been so passive and unremarkable.  But we are supposed to believe that this is the “first step” towards a naked public square.  But the public square was stripped down years ago, and it is only in the last 25-30 years that the attempt to cover it up with any sort of decent clothing has been underway.  Who forms the beating heart of the religious conservatives who most wish to “clothe” the public square in a mantle of righteousness, so to speak?  Obviously, it is the evangelicals.  Who also make up one of the most openly and intensely anti-Mormon groups in the country?  Again, evangelical Protestants.  The Christian people who are against Romney’s Mormonism are precisely the people who want a fully-dressed public square with the clothing options provided by their own tailor.  Like it or not, there are limits to what kind of generic religiosity such people want to promote in public life.  Religions that appear to these Christians to be clearly non-Christian or, at best, wildly heterodox are not going to qualify as part of the clothing of the public square.  You will not be able to scare these people with threats of galloping secularism, because they are already convinced that galloping secularism is here.  They are also probably convincced that the last thing they need to fight secularism is to support a candidate who doesn’t even believe in the same God as they do.  That is what this entire controversy is all about. 

For the actual believers we’re talking about, who are not to be confused with any vague “believers in the miraculous,” but who are people who confess Jesus Christ as Lord, are these people supposed to believe that it will be pleasing to God to elect a non-Christian?  Matched against that far more basic concern, Hewitt’s pleas for tolerance and his long-term fears of providing a precedent for future secularist intolerance (which is a rather silly thing to worry about, since they don’t need precedents, as they make up the rules as they go) appear pretty weak and pathetic.

Andrew Sullivan has another one of his tiresome “Vive La Resistance” posts, this time (indirectly) citing Ms. Mac Donald’s interview with Razib when she is at her most petulant.  For her part, like Sullivan, Ms. Mac Donald sometimes likes to target a faceless “them” who manage to embody every flaw that she perceives in religious conservatives.  First, here’s Mac Donald:

In the American Conservative piece I wanted to offer some resistance to the assumption of conservative religious unanimity. I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law. I find it depressing that every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design, while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment. Which of the astounding fruits of empiricism would these Enlightenment-bashers dispense with: the conquest of cholera and other infectious diseases, emergency room medicine, jet travel, or the internet, to name just a handful of the millions of human triumphs that we take for granted?

But no one assumes “conservative religious unanimity.”  Just as Sullivan fabricates his enemy, the “fundamentalists,” to match his preoccupations, Ms. Mac Donald imagines that there is such a thing as an “assumption of conservative religious unanimity,” which helps her defend the position that she is defending ”reason and realism” against superstitious yobs.  In a spirit similar to that Sullivan’s own incensed attack on “fundamentalism” and his claim that this mythical ”fundamentalism” is taking over and displacing American conservatism (which is far more ludicrous than Ms. Mac Donald’s more modest critiques), Ms. Mac Donald gives the impression that she is doggedly fighting against the overwhelming religiosity of modern conservatism.  As I have argued earlier today, this overwhelming religiosity is not nearly as great as she makes it out to be. 

I should say that if conservatism were governed by the truths of Christianity and leavened by the wisdom of the Fathers, I think it would generally be all to the benefit of conservatism.  The alternatives have always been an acquiescence in false Enlightenment liberal understandings of human nature and society or an acceptance of the Christian understanding that man is fallen (but capable of virtue) and in need of good order and the conservative wisdom that social organisation arises from inherited customs and structures and not from contract or consent.  When conservatives belittle the Enlightenment, it is normally the social and political theories of the more radical French thinkers that they are targeting, but they are in any case objecting for the most part to false understandings of the origin of society, how polities arise and function and what the rightful sources of legitimacy and authority are.  They object to a distorted understanding of the human person and a tendency of many Enlightenment thinkers to be hostile to rooted, traditional society and its numerous institutions and customs.  They do not reject scientific method, nor do they even necessarily hold an empiricist epistemology in low esteem.  The suggestion that they reject “empiricism” entirely, and the implication that most conservatives form a mass of hidebound ignoramuses who would abandon all scientific advances are both false.  

The strangest part of this charge is the connection between the Enlightenment and, for example, “the conquest of cholera,” since the major thinkers of the Enlightenment did not cure cholera and were not even close to understanding vaccination or many of the principles of public sanitation and hygiene that helped contain outbreaks.  There were still cholera epidemics in the 19th century, many of them in the filthy, overcrowded cities of the industrial era brought to us by technological progress.  In any case, what good, one might ask, did Voltaire’s contempt for Christianity do for people dying of cholera?  That is the part of the Enlightenment that we take pots shot at most of the time, so perhaps it is no wonder that Ms. Mac Donald defends it, but what does that have to do the advance of medical and technological sciences?  Is there a new psychosomatic cure for disease achieved not through prayer, but through mocking God?  Ms. Mac Donald refers to “empiricism,” whence come all these astounding fruits.  Now suppose that we find Leibniz’s “innate ideas” more compelling and more consistent with modern neuroscience than Locke’s tabula rasa?  Do we at least get credit for not rejecting Leibniz’s differential calculus?   

Ms. Mac Donald says that she finds it “depressing” that “every organ of conservative opinion reflexively cheers on creationism and intelligent design while delivering snide pot shots at the Enlightenment.”  But this is simply untrue.  No major conservative magazine “cheers on creationism” as such, much less do they do so “reflexively.”  I have yet to encounter a serious conservative writer or scholar who accepts the Young Earth thesis.  These people do not exist.  There are conservative people writing online who believe this, and there are even academics who believe it, but those aren’t the people Ms. Mac Donald was referring to. 

On ID, National Review has no formal position, and they certainly don’t “cheer” on creationism.  With respect to ID, they have entertained arguments from both sides, but that is hardly “cheering” anything on.  At least one of their more prominent contributors in John Derbyshire has made it his business to basically single-handedly crush Intelligent Design’s pretensions to being science.  It was not a difficult task, and he succeeded quite well.  I am as much of a Counter-Enlightenment man today as you are likely to find under the age of 30, and I have ridiculed ID’s claims to being science on several occasions.  That’s because it isn’t science.  Amusingly, two of the main proponents of this intellectual swindle are none other than the grand old man of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, and the grand dame Gertrude Himmelfarb, as Derbyshire noted last year.  As Derbyshire observed, their boosting of ID as science is entirely cynical and aimed at placating some religious conservatives.  That is hardly evidence of galloping religiosity in “every organ of conservative opinion.”  

I should note that I do not ridicule the possibility of understanding some of the claims of ID as a legitimate philosophical view on the orderliness of the universe and the implications this has for the existence of God, but that is not what ID proponents want when they push for recognition of their “theory.”  ID advocates are people who accept everything about the theory of evolution except the mythology woven around it; in place of that mythology, they would like to posit a different story, equally unproven and unproveable, for perhaps well-intentioned reasons that end up being nonetheless rather silly.  But Ms. Mac Donald might have more in common with ID proponents than she thinks, though, since they, too, enjoy playing the wounded, oppressed victim fighting against a hostile and arrogant establishment. 

As for taking pot shots at the Enlightenment, there isn’t that much of that going around these days.  More’s the pity.  I am fairly sure that I have made myself obnoxious to many movement conservatives because I go out of my way to disparage and ridicule certain assumptions of Locke and some of the more high-flown claims of the Declaration of Independence.  I take snide pot shots at the Enlightenment, but I never cheer on creationism and ID.  I wouldn’t know where to begin.  Do I start by pretending that carbon dating doesn’t exist, or do I start by pretending that saying, “God did it” serves as an acceptable hypothesis?  Neither does my blog constitute much of an “organ of conservative opinion,” though I suppose it is a small one of sorts.  

Anyway, lately it has not been the case that conservatives have been too hard on the Enlightenment–many have rather become its latter-day cheerleaders as a sort of cultural one-upsmanship vis-a-vis Islam.  The Weekly Standard has not, to my knowledge, ever made a snide remark about the Enlightenment.  If they have, it would have to have been rare or fairly mild.  What about American Spectator?  We could inquire, but I am fairly confident that the only place where you might conceivably find respectful consideration of creation science is in a publication like World, and I’m probably not being fair to them when I say that.  Did American Conservative have a big “Yes, The Earth Is Only 4,004 Years Old” editorial and I missed it?  Of course not. 

This is because it is entirely possible to accept that God created everything without having to insist upon the absolute literal interpretation of every number (many of which are clearly symbolic in any case) in the Bible.  It is also possible to accept that God created all living things while also acknowledging that evolution is a plausible explanation for how living beings change over time.  It is possible to despise Voltaire as an impious fool and loathe Locke as a treacherous stockjobbing mountebank and to view their ideas with disdain without insisting that we live in caves and eat raw meat while dying of the plague.

Since no one has yet offered me a large pot full of treasures that would keep me otherwise occupied, I thought I would point readers to an interesting article (via Razib) about the Alevi sect in Turkey.  This is one of the many sects that fill the fissiparous and wildly diverse universe of Shi’ism.  Somewhat like the Druze, they have roots in Shi’ism, but have developed into an entirely different religious group.

Speaking of fairly obscure Near Eastern sects, I was introduced indirectly to the existence of a small religious minority in Armenia through reading the beginning of Namus, one of the works of Armenian author Alexander Shirvanzade.  Namus, as I have discovered, is a Mediterranean and Near Eastern code of honour, and would seem to form part of the Pashtuns’ pushtunwali surveyed by The Economist late last year. 

What was the obscure sect I discovered?  The Malakans (as transliterated from Armenian) or Molokans (as transliterated from Russian).  Not to be outdone by anyone else, the Molokans have their own webpage.  From what I have been able to learn about them so far, you could not find people less likely to follow anything remotely resembling pushtunwali than the Malakans, who appear to be the very embodiment of meekness and longsuffering. 

Relating this to some current events here in America, I would note that Molokans apparently also were supposed to have had a tradition of plural marriage at some point and were either pejoratively identified or otherwise associated with Mormons in the 19th century.  According to a 1993 New York Times article, the Molokans “comprise a rather late Russian sect that emerged at the close of the 18th century.”

The article continues:

Like other anti-clerical movements in Russia and in Europe, Molokan preachers focused on immediate personal contacts with God, refuting ritual and reverence for saints and icons as idolatry. They recognize as the sole fountainhead of truth the Holy Scriptures, emphasizing that both Old and New Testaments are to be viewed metaphorically not dogmatically.

Basic is meeting for prayer which reduce to hymn singing and the joint reading and interpretation of Scriptural texts. There is no hierarchy, with the congregations chaired by an Elder, usually one of the older and better educated members of the community. They resemble more the western Quakers and Baptists.

Apparently, along with other dissident sects, the Molokans were resettled in the Caucasus under Nicholas I.  This is presumably how they entered into the history of Armenia.

Update: Somehow I forgot to mention this earlier.  There is also a movie called Namus, which is based on Shirvanzade’s story.  There is now a restored version available.  From what I have heard about the story’s melodrama, it sounds as if it will be Armenia’s answer to a Bollywood plot.  Unfortunately, it is a silent film, so there won’t be any big song-and-dance numbers.

Razib’s Q&A with Heather Mac Donald deserves an extended treatment, so, as promised Saturday, I will try to start to tackle the most interesting and vexing parts of Ms. Mac Donald’s answers.  For those interested, Razib also has a new post on response to the interview.  If time permits, I’ll make a few remarks about that one, too.  I’ll take the interview questions in order, stopping along the way to comment.  Here is the first question and part of the first answer:

1) Okay, I’ll get this out of the way.  What prompted you to “come out” as an atheist in The American Conservative earlier this year?  A friend of mine suggested that you might have become frustrated with the lack of a “reality-based” conservatism during this administration, in particular in its attitude toward immigration.  Is he going down the right track? 

I wrote The American Conservative piece out of frustration with the preening piety of conservative pundits. I attended a New York cocktail party in 2003, for example, where a prominent columnist said to the group standing around him: “We all know that what makes Republicans superior to Democrats is their religious faith.” This sentiment has been repeated in print ad nauseam, along with its twin: “We all know that morality is not possible without religion.” I didn’t then have the courage to point out to the prominent columnist that quite a few conservatives and Republicans of the highest standing had no religious faith, without apparent injury to their principles or their behavior.

I can certainly understand Ms. Mac Donald’s frustration with conservative pundits’ “preening piety,” but I’d like to remind readers of a couple of things about the original article she wrote for TAC.  As I have said before, the article was part of a symposium asking what liberal and conservative and Left and Right meant, so straightaway the article’s focus on the folly of religion and its complaint that skeptical, non-religious conservatives were being somehow marginalised or culturally threatened by all of the God-talk struck this reader as odd and out of place.  However, I’m glad TAC ran the piece and provided a forum for Ms. Mac Donald to air her grievance against religion and religious conservatives, if only as a way of showing that a conservative operation full of religious conservatives was willing to entertain a variety of perspectives and to confirm that skeptical conservatives are really not the put-upon victims among conservatives that Ms. Mac Donald made them out to be.  Back then the impression one got was not that “quite a few conservatives and Republicans of high standing” had no religious faith but were nonetheless principled and decent and able to work side by side with religious conservatives, but that the religiosity overtaking conservatism was putting some sort of stranglehold on these skeptics and non-believers.  Back in August she wrote:

Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.   

But there was, is, no exclusion going on.  To see all of the articles and books published in the last few months blaming the woes of the GOP and conservatism on religious conservatives, one might conclude that it was the religious conservatives who ought to be worried about exclusion.  Following the publication of this article, not only did virtually everyone and his brother at NR fall all over themselves to be nice and accommodating to Ms. Mac Donald, whom they showered with so many compliments that it became embarrassing for everyone watching, but we were soon reminded of the rather large number of NROniks who were themselves either confirmed skeptics or very unorthodox sorts of Christians.  The debate was not as much between the zealous believers and the atheist, but between the moderately respectful and the intensely disrespectful. 

The large number of skeptics and unorthodox folk there is not in itself necessarily a problem for conservatives (though I think it probably depends on how unorthodox the unorthodox are willing to be), or at least it isn’t a new problem if it is one (the honour roll in The Conservative Mind is a veritable Who’s Who of skeptics, heretics and eccentrics).  Still, it goes a long way towards showing that the representatives of what it still (sigh) the flagship of “the movement” are not heavily leaning on religion to the exclusion of anybody.  Some of them aren’t doing any leaning at all, while the Catholics there are presumably believers, but they are by and large believers who tend to advance, for example, pro-life arguments in terms that reasonable skeptical conservatives could appreciate.  Indeed, this is not just the case at NR.  The pro-life movement’s own use of the rhetoric of “the right to life” should remind us that, while it is Christianity that motivates so many pro-lifers, they nonetheless retreat back to precisely the rights-centric language of Enlightenment liberalism to make their arguments for the defense of the unborn.  I certainly do not say this as a compliment to the pro-life movement, but this is the way it is.  Because these people do believe in God, they also mention God, but it is the appeal to protecting human rights that is doing all of the work in their arguments.  Perhaps this is a politically clever approach, or perhaps not, but what it isn’t is an example of conservatives “leaning heavily” on religion.  If you can’t even find such a habit among pro-lifers, where will you find it?  

To say that today’s conservative movement leans too heavily on religion, one must have a rather expansive and odd definition of what religion is.  It is possible to find extreme, actually rather isolated incidents of what we might take to be religious enthusiasm sweeping the conservative world and the GOP.  The dreadful Schiavo imbroglio might be considered such a one.  Arguably, though, that affair was the result of an absolute abstract commitment to the Right to Life that was so intense that it actually became impious and contradicted a Christian understanding of the purpose of human life, namely salvation in Christ, making it an episode of impious ideological excess.  It was a classic example of what happens when decent people are given simple ideological maxims: they go too far and commit injustice.  It is possible to see this episode, usually taken as a glaring example of religious conservatism’s supposed power within the GOP, as an episode where a galivanting, do-gooding rights-based liberalism generated hysterical overreaction among activists who pushed for government interference in the private affairs of a family.  But even if we accept that this really was a case of a religious impulse dominating the conservative movement, it is the relative rarity of these sorts of episodes that tells me that religion does not usually have too much hold on the modern conservative movement and that conservatives do not usually “lean” very heavily on the claims of revelation at all.  Rather, if anything, religion has not had enough of a hold.  As a theocrat of sorts (very different from a theocon, mind you!), I might be expected to say this.  As an inveterate critic of Andrew Sullivan and his dreadful book, I might be expected to say this.  But I say it for what I think are a couple good reasons. 

First, religion, more specifically traditional Christianity (which is almost entirely what we’re talking about when we speak of religion and conservatism in America), does not function as a crutch of the modern conservative movement, but all too often the movement uses it (or in some cases the weasel word “values”) as a rallying flag when it has run out of anything else interesting to say.  That is an important distinction.  Appeal to religion is the last resort of “the movement” and not one of its dominant aspects.  Second, for the last 25 years most mainstream conservative argument has fallen into four categories, only one of which can fairly be linked to religion, which are 1) social scientific arguments about the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of government policy and/or about causes behind patterns of social behaviour; 2) arguments written in defense of Western history, culture and “values,” usually “Judeo-Christian values” (under which dubious heading the great religion of our civilisation is filed away); 3) polemics against the stupidity, hypocrisy, elitism or “real” racism of the left, the academy, the government, the media, etc.; 4) arguments about dire foreign threats that “we,” the conservatives, “get” and the daffy liberals and Europeans do not (such as Venezuela!).  You can find arguments that fit more than one of these and some that fit none, but you will be surprised to find just how few conservative essays and articles have much to say about religion, revelation or God except in the most superficial or boilerplate ways. 

Specifically religious journals, such as First Things, will obviously have a very dense concentration of arguments tied very closely to, if not completely enmeshed in, a religious worldview, but in most other journals of conservative opinion and most other conservative columns you won’t find a lot of conservative writers “leaning heavily” on religion for much of anything.  All too often, when they do feel obliged to bring it up, the arguments go something like this: “We have capitalism because of Christianity” (in other words, you should respect Christianity because it helped make us fairly wealthy as a people) or “we have liberal democracy partly because of Christian respect for the person” or “we have the separation of church and state because of Christ’s teaching” (which can be among the worst, since it is usually an argument that calls Christianity as a witness for the defense of the superiority of the secular modern West, whose superiority is affirmed precisely in its capacity for secularism and pushing religion out of public life) and so on. 

These tend to be historical arguments, and they often can have some real merit as historical arguments, but they all fall under the category of “Christianity has done you Westerners a lot of good, so maybe you should give it a break now and then.”  You know the drill, repeated ad nauseam whenever the secularist and atheists come knocking: “Christianity inspired the abolitionists!  Christianity inspired Rev. King.  See–we’re not crazy religious wackos (like the abolitionists were)!”  This is usually a plea from the lukewarm to the indifferent and potentially hostile to acknowledge that Christianity may or may not be true, but that it nonetheless has served and will continue to serve a social function and, in the context of other debates, that its involvement in political life is not necessarily harmful.  This emphasis on the social utility and functionality of religion (both of which the NROniks cited repeatedly contra Mac Donald last fall) to the exclusion and detriment of interest in revealed religion’s substantive truth-claims has become, if anything, more common since the neoconservative ascendancy began and brought with it the habits and methods of the social sciences. 

It is in the context of these arguments about the social function of “religion” that the remarks Ms. Mac Donald recounts in her opening anecdote should be understood.  For the millionth time, yes, it is possible for nonbelievers to live what most people would regard as a “moral” and upstanding life; atheists presumably can have successful marriages and they probably even love their mothers.  When people speak of the necessity of religion for the maintenance of morality, they are almost always speaking of public morality and order, and they see religion as a necessary and well-tested support for these things.  I would go further and say that it is not really possible to live a truly virtuous life without entering into union with the God who was incarnate for our sake, but the people Ms. Mac Donald met at her cocktail party were not saying this, nor would they agree with it if I presented it to them.  “That’s some kind of crazy theological argument, “they would say to me,” and that has nothing to do with conservatism.”  Specifically theological arguments do not interest many conservatives very much, and most avoid referring to them or using them if they can possibly help it.  Even for the theocons, it is natural law teaching within Western Christian theological tradition that gets most of the attention because it is presumed to be “accessible” and intelligible by anyone who can reason.  That in and of itself would be fine, but this move has been seen as absolutely necessary to even begin to draw on our Christian inheritance to make arguments about public policy or social problems to which the wider public and most conservatives would pay much heed. 

This history is not, to my mind, evidence of a heavy reliance on the truth claims of Christian revelation to advance or define conservatism.  What I have repeatedly found, much to my agitation, is a decided indifference to the actual substance of much of our Christian inheritance that goes beyond the mere “patina” of pious nonsensical mumblings about God creating all men equal (today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so we should pay our respects to the Dream, shouldn’t we?) or Mr. Bush’s idea, which is at once both silly and dangerous, that political freedom is God’s gift to man.  Unless conservatives can find some way to tie Christianity in to the goods that most of “the movement” is today in the business of promoting (i.e., capitalism and democracy), they often will not say much, or at least nothing so terribly religiously inspired that it would make a skeptic bat an eye.  When religion, and here again we almost always mean Christianity, has taken center stage in conservative arguments, it is usually as the violated plaintiff outraged by some PC diktat, revisionist history or public criticism by, well, someone like Ms. Mac Donald.  In these cases, conservatives will once again defend Christianity with old liberal appeals to freedom of religion or will mitigate claims about alleged past Christian fanaticism by saying, “Yes, Christianity used to have a terrible history, but out of its internecine conflicts the Enlightenment was born and helped to reform and fix all of the unfortunate elements.”  In other words, these folks are saying, “Look, we find a lot of Christian history to be nearly as embarrassing as you do, but you should realise that we’ve become so much more respectably milquetoast and inoffensive in the last few centuries, we now embrace classical liberalism with gusto, and we do charity work!”  Most of the ringing defenses of the West setting it over and against the Islamic world possess an undercurrent of skepticism that says, “Unlike the Muslims, we learned to stop talking our religion very seriously a long time ago, and we’re all much better off for it–but, of course, we still have the fight the godless liberals in the War on Christmas.”  When Cal Thomas started singing the praises of secular modernity after 9/11 (as if to show you that he was no religious fanatic like those people), you could take it as a given that religion, and specifically the great significance attached to Christianity even by some old Moral Majority hands like Thomas, was potentially expendable for a lot of conservatives when supposedly more important things (such as the fight against “medievalism” and for “women’s rights” and “tolerance”) were at stake.  In the end, I don’t see that much modern conservative reliance on religion.  The “movement” certainly relies on religious people to keep it running with their support, financial and otherwise, and to that end they have to say nice things about the value of religion now and again (and I assume most honestly believe these things when they say them), but do they “lean heavily” on religion “to the exclusion” of nonbelievers?  Quite simply, no, they don’t.

Heather Mac Donald talks to Razib at GNXP about atheism, conservatism and the reaction to her much-talked-about American Conservative symposium contribution.  My comments on the Mac Donald article, the ensuing online brouhaha and other Mac Donald defenses of ”skeptical” conservatism are here, here, here, here, here and here.  There’s a lot in the interview that deserves some response, but I am pressed for time today and cannot go into the interesting and annoying bits just now.  Read the whole thing, and I’ll be back next week with my take.

Update: Okay, one quick note before I get ready to go to the symphony.  Ms. Mac Donald cites, with understandable frustration, the glib invocation of American religiosity as a reason for our superiority over Europe on the one hand and the daft claim by Mr. Bush that freedom is God’s gift to humanity on the other.  The first is the sort of trite thing that professional pundits write because they know it will play well with the crowd and can be set aside here.  On the second point, she is quite right to find this sort of rhetoric not only worrisome but actually opposed to Biblical truth.  That is an important part of what I was trying to argue in my TAC article on this very topic.  How Mr. Bush’s strange and unorthodox notions of some sort of divinely mandated revolution indict all Christianity or all religion continues to elude me.  In my view, Mr. Bush’s God-talk is the thin gruel offered to religious conservatives by people steeped in a very different, fairly unholy secular ideology.  If we count the invasion of Iraq against traditional Christianity, let’s say, or take it as some proof against the existence of God, we may as well endorse atheism on the grounds that Robespierre, too, believed in a Supreme Being and he also did terrible and despicable things. That strikes me as rather silly. 

There are many good reasons to write off the specific anti-Mormon critiques of Jacob Weisberg and Damon Linker: they both appear motivated by an undue hostility to religion in political life, they seem to view strong religious conviction itself as inherently threatening to liberal democracy, they either ignore or skate over the Mormons’ historical record in their arguments and they frame their arguments in such a way that it is inescapable that anyone who genuinely believes in any kind of revelation or miracle should be viewed with scorn and suspicion, as it is only to the degree that religious people have tempered, watered down or abandoned their older religious commitments that they have become capable of receiving the full respect of these secular liberals in the political arena.  However, not a one of these good reasons appears in the less-judgemental-than-thou article by one Timothy Rutten, who takes offense at the very idea that Weisberg and Linker would put Romney’s religion under scrutiny for any reason.  It is all so very private and personal!  He writes:

Religious belief is a matter of conscience and if there is no privacy of conscience there is no separation of church and state, a principle both Slate and the New Republic claim to defend. Do the editors of those journals really want to take us back to the 1960s, when as many as one American in four said they never would vote for a Catholic or a Jew for president?

Not likely.

What both journals are doing is playing with social fire for the sake of narrow partisan advantage, hoping to knock a potentially attractive conservative candidate out of the running in much the same way that some Republican commentators desperately attempted to prod some Catholic bishop somewhere into denying Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry communion because he’s pro-choice.

That effort didn’t succeed and this one probably won’t either because an instinctively tolerant American people understands the difference between legitimate journalistic inquiry and an inquisition.

As near as I can tell, this means that in Mr. Rutten’s world we cannot refer back to any kind of religion for its tradition of philosophical and ethical reflection, cannot speak about our religion in any public forum and certainly cannot inform our political views with truths our received religious teachings tell us are of ultimate and eternal significance.  To do any of these things is to violate a “separation of church and state” imagined here not simply as a lack of a federal institutional support in favour of or against any particular creed, but as a hermetically sealed bubble affecting our entire public and political life.  If religion does not remain strictly private, the mythical “separation” will have been overthrown.  Rutten’s suggestion would not simply push religion out of the public square entirely, but would insist that it stay indoors and go pray in its closet.  The broad-minded, accommodating rule of an “instinctively tolerant” people can endure nothing more burdensome that each person tending to his own garden of conscience!  For Mr. Rutten, anything more ambitious than that probably must set us on a path to sectarian massacre.

Mr. Rutten asks rather foolishly whether Slate and TNR want to return us to the 1960s when a quarter of the population said they would never vote for a Catholic or Jew for President.  I think it is probably fair to say that they obviously don’t want any such thing, and neither does anyone else.  (Query: Is this prejudice actually a thing of the past?  Has this percentage actually declined in the last forty years, or do we simply think that it has because very few are willing to admit to anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish prejudices today?)  Linker and Weisberg might not point this out, since they both claim is their purpose not to engage in any real religious prejudice, but instead of that one quarter of the American people being against a Mormon candidate for President there is something closer to one-half at 43%.  We don’t need to “go back” to the 1960s to find broad opposition to a candidate because of his religion.  This opposition exists here and now, and it isn’t going anywhere just because the Tim Ruttens of the world don’t want to hear about it.  The 43% of Americans are the people who have already decided, as of late last year, that they would never consider voting for a Mormon presidential candidate.  Perhaps Mr. Rutten would say that it is precisely this kind of attitude that Slate and TNR shouldn’t be encouraging, and that the greater breadth of anti-Mormonism makes talking about it all the more explosive.  Would Mr. Rutten say that we should avoid talking about something because it is potentially controversial and likely to promote social conflict?  Is that really the best liberals (such as I assume Mr. Rutten is) can manage? 

When such a large percentage of the population takes such a strong stand against Mormon presidential candidates as such, it seems to me fairly plain that it is the legitimate business of journalists and pundits to discuss and debate the merits of opposition to Mormon candidates.  The specific arguments Linker and Weisberg advanced were unfortunate and largely misguided in the way they made their criticisms.  No doubt they would find my theological objections to what I consider the falsehoods and absurdities of Mormonism to be equally misguided or beside the point, but that is part of the ongoing debate.  To their credit, Mormon scholars and intellectuals have been only too happy to engage in the debate, and they are doing their religion a world of good by facing up to the challenge rather than running and hiding or crying, “Bigot!” each time someone simply starts asking questions.  It is Mormons’ squeamish would-be defenders on the center-left who cannot stand the sight of an inquiry into anyone’s religion who are hurting Mormons’ chances for being understood more than anyone else. 

Most everyone participating so far assumes that it is legitimate to debate and discuss these things.  Among those who find this discussion distasteful are such luminaries as David Gergen and now Mr. Rutten.  Christian conservatives who believe that Christianity has an important and necessary role to play in the life of the nation have a great stake in ensuring that a combination of liberals and Romney supporters do not succeed in taking Romney’s religion off the table of legitimate discussion.  It cheapens our discourse and weakens our political process to declare such things off limits.  If Americans are, in fact, “instinctively tolerant” (which may be true within reason, but is not absolutely the case), there really is no reason for anyone to run away from this debate in disgust.  

For their part, Mormons have nothing to fear from the arguments of Linker and Weisberg: these are either so far-fetched or militantly hostile to revealed religion in general that they immediately turn off a huge swath of the public.  I am sharply critical of Mormonism’s theological claims and Mormon pretensions to being Christian, but I find their critiques to be poor and unconvincing in the extreme.  Indeed, in terms of content, the reaction to both pieces has been almost uniformly negative.  The only reason anyone has spoken in defense of either of them is when a few, such as Mr. Rutten, insist that even talking about Mormonism in this way is taboo and wrong. 

Similarly, Americans have nothing to fear from Mormons if their concern has been over Linkeresque suspicions of Salt Lake City issuing decrees for the entire country through the White House.  It is precisely this kind of fear and fundamental misunderstanding of the role of religious authority in the modern world that is absurd and laughable.  The things that aren’t absurd are the legitimate questions raised about what a candidate believes.  To my mind, the real argument about Mormonism and Romney’s candidacy is really over whether Christian voters are willing to accept someone whose religion they do not accept and with which they cannot really identify.  This has virtually nothing to do with Gov. Romney’s “fitness” for office, which his much more conventional flaws as an opportunistic politician already throw into doubt, or whether Mormons are “fit” to serve in public office (they are and they do serve all over the country) and almost everything to do with whether the majority of Americans that believes that this is a Christian country (however they mean that) is prepared to elect as President someone whose religion a great many Christians regard as non-Christian. 

Whether we like it or not (I am not a big fan of the idea), the President effectively represents all of the United States and, as the conventional view would have it, personally serves as a symbol of the country and the American people.  Those whom we elect to this office must be someone with whom we can identify to some significant degree.  Viewed this way, a member of an even smaller religious minority in America, such as an Orthodox Christian or an Armenian Christian, might meet with the same opposition and suspicion because of the unfamiliarity or perceived strangeness of the customs and culture of that minority.   This anxiety about someone’s background be less important at the level of statewide office, where what the office represents is possibly less meaningful to many people.  This is why I suspect that rejoinders about the Mormonism of Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch being irrelevant to voters (in states with sizeable Mormon populations) will fall on deaf ears–these are just individual Senators, will be the reply, not the President.  More than anything else, it is the cult of the Presidency that creates such high barriers to entry for members from marginal or minority groups: the nationalist obsession with the executive as the symbol of the nation makes it that much harder to imagine having someone from a perceived strange or unfamiliar group hold this office.  The imperial cult-like mythology woven around the Presidency–which is, in its way, kookier than any religious group’s beliefs–requires that the President to some extent embody the nation.      

There is a deeper problem with Mr. Rutten’s objections to Linker and Weisberg, and it is this: there is a weird, creeping assumption that many Westerners share that strong religious belief, up to and including strong opposition to another person’s creed, precludes the possibility of social peace and a well-ordered polity.  If men believe something strongly, they must ultimately want to oppress or kill someone.  But if a huge number of Americans expresses a strong preference against ever voting for a Mormon presidential candidate, their refusal and their preference do not imply that they lack toleration for Mormons.  What it means is that they cannot, in good conscience, lend their support to people who believe things that are radically different from their own beliefs.  That is not oppression, nor is it even a harmful kind of prejudice.  It is representation, and it is how candidates elected through mass elections are chosen. 

People who believe in the virtues of pluralism and multiculturalism (I am not one of them) should be among the first to jump into the fray about this basic question that their own commitments require them to address.  In an increasingly religiously diverse country, in which several of the minority religions are growing fairly quickly and where there is a larger number of atheists and agnostics, those who think that a candidate’s religion (or lack of it) should never be held against him by voters have to come up with an argument far more powerful than, “It’s a private affair!”  In democratic politics, for good and ill, people vote for the candidates with whom they identify, and religion has been and probably always will be a factor in national politics so long as Americans remain a predominantly religious people.  Whether most of the Christian majority will ever be willing to accept as President someone from a non-Christian religion remains an open question (at present, signs point to no as far as Islam and Mormonism are concerned), but it is one that cannot be wished away or shoved back into the closet.  Mr. Rutten’s horror at the idea of discussing these things shows that he does not really believe that Americans are “instinctively tolerant,” but must be kept from discussing at any length questions about this or that religion so that “social fire” is not unleashed upon the country.  This does a disservice to the very minority religions whose interests (and rights!) liberals claim to want to protect, since it is precisely by shouting down questions and discussion that negative preconceptions about a religion are reinforced.  It will be by hiding behind the (non-existent) wall of separation that Mormons will do more harm to the reputation of their religion than anyone else, because any refusal to defend their religion with public argument–a refusal that Mr. Rutten is trying to encourage with his attempt to shame liberals into being quiet about the entire thing–will confirm the worst impressions of Mormonism as something strange, unfamiliar and cultish. 

Jim Antle writes on the left’s recent anti-Mormon assaults:

The standards being set by the Mormonphobes could have the effect of excluding a lot of other believers from the political process.

Today is the Orthodox celebration of Nativity on the Old Calendar (some Orthodox have already celebrated the Feast on Dec. 25), and today seems a good day to make a few more remarks on the implications of the Linker and Weisberg anti-Mormon articles.  Weisberg is more explicit than Linker and takes a slightly different tack when he indicates his preference for older religions that have had centuries to more effectively dilute the stranger and more troubling (to secularists) aspects of their teachings.  Thus Weisberg:

The world’s greater religions have had time to splinter, moderate, and turn their myths into metaphor. The Church of Latter-day Saints is expanding rapidly and liberalizing in various ways, but it remains fundamentally an orthodox creed with no visible reform wing.  

Where Linker seems to favour the anchors of long-established traditions that keep a religion from becoming unmoored by the latest prophetic wind (regardless of how exaggerated his view of Mormon prophecy may be), Weisberg prefers really old religions on the implausible grounds that great antiquity results in a religion turning its truth-claims into mere metaphor and sentiment.  The venerability of a religion somehow guarantees its moderate, “reformed” state.  It is the lack of such “reformed” moderates (i.e., the lack of people like Bishop Spong to openly deny central tenets of the religion) that makes Mormonism beyond the secularist pale.  At least most of the other religions have some respectably black sheep and dissidents a secularist can admire and root for: “Go Kueng!  Go Armstrong!  Go Hauerwas!”  For a secularist looking for a ray of “enlightened” hope in different religions, Mormonism must present an unusually bleak picture.  For good or ill, these folks all really believe what they are supposed to believe (and they don’t even offer yoga classes!).  

While there are strands of Judaism and Christianity that make a virtue out of their progressiveness and just how “with it” they can be, these are precisely the strands (think Conservative Judaism or the Episcopal Church) that are dwindling in numbers.  The most robust and fast-growing religious groups tend to be those that emphasise the reality of what their revelation claims to be true.  (See The Economist’s survey of Pentecostalism for some interesting reporting on one of these groups.)  After all, what else would really be the point of religious observance if there were ultimately nothing behind it but some nice imagery or if it was nothing more than, as a much less friendly observer put it, “mucking about with half-remembered lines of bad poetry”?  (For the record, if there was any doubt, I don’t agree with that observer.)  

Today, for instance, the Orthodox did not celebrate a nice, imaginary idea of God coming down to earth out of compassion for us, but celebrated an event that happened and had to have happened if our Faith is to mean anything.  Today we marked the day when God was born in the flesh of a Virgin.  Perhaps that true miracle and the stories in the Book of Mormon appear equally plausible to someone like Weisberg, but if he is serious about his argument he can no more honestly accept anyone who believes in the Incarnation (which will always appear as foolishness to the Greeks) than he can a Mormon.  I say this not because I think the beliefs of the Orthodox and Mormons are comparably true on the one hand or equally implausible on the other, but because I think a rampaging secularist does not get to pretend that he tolerates religious non-Mormons as political candidates when he obviously cannot really do so (if he is telling us the truth about why he objects to Mormonism in a candidate) but gets some special exemption to regard Mormons as especially foolish. 

Jim has Weisberg dead to rights:

In other words, religion is fine if you are a Unitarian or can reduce your scriptures to poetry. But if you actually believe that stuff, you might be a fanatic.
  

The incessant chatter and talk about Mitt Romney’s candidacy, and particularly all of the back-and-forth on the question of his religion, have apparently not been good for his public image.  According to Rasmussen’s latest fav/unfav ratings out this week (sorry, subscription only), Romney’s numbers have changed for the worse over the past two months.  In their November 5 poll, he was at 30% fav/29% unfav and stands, as of January 4, at 29/35%.  His “very favourable” rating has been nearly halved from 11% to 6% and his “very unfavourable” has nearly doubled from 7% to 12%.  He has picked up a little ground in the “somewhat favourable” column, but this simply brings that rating to parity with his “somewhat unfavourable” rating: 23 vs. 23.  The intensity of those who dislike him is currently greater than that of those who like him, and the current trend is not promising for a candidate who only just officially announced his candidacy.  For a “fresh face” on the national stage, his unfav rating is stunningly high.  If this isn’t the result of anti-Mormon bias, I don’t know where it’s coming from.

Two such opinions hardly qualify as the last word, but in this case they’re clearly shared by most evangelical leaders who’ve spoken out to date (the rare exceptions include James Dobson, who’s said Mormonism still is a big deal).

In other words, the answer is no - it is almost certainly not 1960 all over again. Breathless pundits in search of religious intolerance are just going to have to look elsewhere for their quarry. ~Vincent Carroll, Rocky Mountain News

This little piece is so delightfully counterintuitive that one would expect Jonathan Chait to be its author.  No, an intrepid columnist at RMN has determined that a couple of guys with ties to evangelicals in Colorado don’t think Romney’s Mormonism will be a problem, which pretty much clinches it.  What about that Rasmussen poll that said 53% of evangelicals and 43% of all voters would never consider voting for a Mormon?  That’s all a lot of hearsay!  Not like the scientific study of what two guys in Colorado think.

One thing missing from all this discussion of religion and politics has been the increasingly evangelical character of American politics over the past generation. The key president here is not the impeccably secular John Kennedy, but rather Jimmy Carter, who presented his faith as central to his personal identity in a way that few presidents had done before him. In the wake of Carter’s presidency, and the rise of the evangelical Right, religion has come to the center of American politics, and, as such, deserves to be taken seriously, and questioned seriously.  

Richard Lyman Bushman gives a good example of not taking it seriously enough when, in his exchange with Linker, he uses the notion of freedom of conscience as a rhetorical trump card against any questioning of Romney’s Mormonism ( e.g. “Mitt Romney’s insistence that he will follow his own conscience rather than church dictates is not only a personal view; it is church policy.”) ~David Bell

This post from Mr. Bell is a good deal better than the last one, though still not without its own problems.  Fortunately, his colleague Jacob Levy had already discovered Prof. Fox’s response, which should improve the quality of the discussion over there a good deal.

In this post Mr. Bell thinks that Prof. Bushman has not taken religion seriously enough when he invokes the Mormon understanding of conscience, but here I think he has missed Prof. Bushman’s entire point in bringing up conscience.  Prof. Bushman mentions the role of conscience in response to Linker’s fear that the prophetic church authorities, which worry Linker because of their theologically instability, will be able to dictate to Mormon politicians how they should govern.  The point of Bushman’s explanation of how Mormons are supposed to make moral judgements is not to make a Mormon’s religion irrelevant or a way of pulling out a “rhetorical trump card” against any questioning of Romney’s religion.  He is attempting to explain that Mormons are actually obliged to make their own judgements, and that this tends to preclude the aforementioned danger of church authorities dictating policy positions to a Mormon public servant.  Regardless of whether the church authorities would try to do this (and, historically, they have not tried very hard), Mormon politicians would be obliged to judge the matter at hand for themselves.  As Prof. Bushman notes in his latest response:

Consider the Church’s own renunciation of control over the consciences of Mormon politicians [bold mine-DL]–a stand Catholics have not taken. Are you saying this is a false front? Keeping in mind the injunction in Mormon scripture to submit to lawful government, is there any real basis for concern? 

Would the politicians’ judgements be informed by their upbringing and life in their church?  Obviously.  It is so obvious, in fact, that it hardly needs to be mentioned.  What Prof. Bushman’s remark about conscience was meant to accomplish was to counter Linker’s suggestion that Mormon politicians are somehow potentially open to receiving commands from their church elders on matters of public interest and will blindly follow what those authorities tell them to do.  Prof. Bushman says this is flatly wrong and that official church teaching proves this.  Is Prof. Bushman right about this?  If he is, Mr. Bell really has no reason to object to this point.

Damon Linker should have written his book about Mormons and politics.  It might have been equally over-the-top and outlandish in its way, but it would have generated a lot more interest than The Theocons, not least because it ties in directly to presidential politics. 

The cover article got the attention of Chris Matthews, who talks about it with David Gergen:

MATTHEWS:  On another front in the Republican Party, Mitt Romney is about to announce an exploratory committee tomorrow.  And what happens, the “New Republic” runs a front page story on the cover of their magazine about the dangers of a Mormon president.  That is pretty rough stuff.  And I read the long piece.  I don‘t think it does the dam