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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).
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 IntelligentsiaTM 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.