Article VI Blog

In the latest Imprimis, Fred Barnes, talking about the MSM, says:

With regard to religion, Christianity in particular—but also religious faith in general—is reflexively treated as something dangerous and pernicious by the mainstream media. Back in the early 1990s when I was still at The New Republic, I was invited to a dinner in Washington with Mario Cuomo. He was then governor of New York, and had invited several reporters to dinner because he was thinking about running for president. At one point that night he mentioned that he sent his children to Catholic schools in New York because he wanted them to be taught about a God-centered universe. This was in the context of expressing his whole-hearted support for public schools. But from the reaction, you would have thought he had said that one day a week he would bring out the snakes in his office and make policy decisions based on where they bit him. He was subsequently pummeled with stories about how improper it was for him, one, to send his kids to religious schools, and two, to talk about it. It was amazing. The most rigid form of secularism passes as the standard in mainstream journalism these days.

President Bush is similarly treated as someone who is obsessive about his religion. And what does he do? Well, he reads a devotional every day; he tries to get through the Bible, I think, once a year; and he prays. Now, I know many, many people who do this. Tens of millions of people do it. And yet the media treats Bush as some religious nut and pursues this story inaccurately. Again, it is clear that partisan bias is involved, too, because in fact, Bush talks publicly about his faith much less than other presidents have. There is a good book about Bush’s religion by Paul Kengor, who went back to every word President Clinton spoke and found out that Clinton quoted scripture and mentioned God and Jesus Christ more than President Bush has. You would never get that from the mainstream media.

Which begs the question – What’s the real source of “the Mormon question?”

Lowell: Barnes’ point hits home with anyone who takes his or her religion seriously and works in a “blue” environment. I am such a person, and live and work in West Los Angeles– one of the bluest places in the country. My colleagues and professional acquaintances treat me with respect, now that I am more established; but when I was younger, I was often treated as if I had two heads. (I still am by some people who don’t know me, but it’s more muted now.) That’s the way the secular left (excuse the redundancy) looks at religious people. John rightly suggests that the MSM is the source of “The Question,” but I’d take it a step farther– it’s the left generally, whose thinking dominates the MSM, who finds religious commitment scary because they don’t understand it.

I’d also add that the way one talks about religion is important. President Bush is characteristically blunt, unvarnished, and sincere as the day is long when he mentions his faith. That also drives the MSM nuts. Romney is more of a Yankee and will address faith with language reflecting his Anglo-Saxon Mormon reserve. So with him, the MSM will not be able to seize on what he says; they’ll try to focus on what he is. Analyzing the impact of that approach is a major goal of this blog.

On Romney’s political strategery. Smart or not? Time will tell – but I should remind everyone it’s way early, earlier than any previous presidential race to even be having this kind of discussion – we’re in unprecedented and uncharted territory here strategically.

Lowell: My guess is that the explanation for the early video is that Romney wants to define himself before he is defined by others — who are incessantly raising The Question.

This Hotline post absolutely dominated the Romney discussion yesterday. I’m with KLo, Ambinder is a overstating things a tad. [Lowell: More than a tad, I think.] This blog has consistently wondered whether Romney is really right and moderated to govern Mass., or whether his current rightward move is posturing for the sake of the national run – that, frankly is THE question concerning his candidacy, as opposed to the religious one. Meanwhile someone at RedState piles on.

Lowell: I’m going to go on a mini-rant here, so I apologize in advance. I will try to suppress my pro-Romney sentiments.

Concern over Romney’s ideological purity is vastly overblown, I think. Only a small slice of the GOP actually cares about such things anyway. Yes, they are the activists, and they vote; so their opinions matter disproportionately. In the primaries, the real question will be whether Romney can convince enough of such voters of his sincerity. In light of his interpersonal and communications skills, I’d say the odds are good that he can. In the general election, his views will sell very well in Middle America.

Meanwhile, I hope bloggers, pundits, and voters alike will keep their critical thinking skills handy and look hard at the motivations of those who attack Romney on ideological grounds. One recent attacker is a Gingrich operative, for example. Gary Glenn, the subject of the the Hotline post, is described as a type of very conservative gadfly with which we are all familiar: “[I]f Glenn is for you, he doesn’t help much. If he’s dead set against you, he can hurt you.”

So who is Gary Glenn? Is he really someone who should be driving voter thinking on these issues? This site gives a little insight into his agenda. Glenn also is the chairman of Campaign for Michigan Families, described as “a group allied with the religious right,” and the president of the American Family Association in Michigan. If you Google those organizations and Glenn himself, you’ll see that Glenn has a history of trying to defeat Republican candidates whom he considers insuficiently committed to a pro-family agenda. Same-sex marriage is one of the issues Glenn follows most closely, so his opposition to Romney seems counter-intuitive at best.

Let me be clear: I am not attacking Glenn; I’d never heard of him before today. Nor have I consulted any pro-Romney websites (or any pro-Romney sources at all) in response to the Glenn story. I’m just raising questions. Does Glenn have a favored candidate in the race? Is there any religious bigotry at work? What else is going on behind the scenes here? One of this blog’s purposes is to shed light on the facts behind the issues. I’m just suggesting that blogs like Hotline apply the same careful analysis to very conservative attackers that it applies to true believers on the left.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting angle: McCain is trying to use Romney’s shift on abortion against him in Iowa. By taking Romney to task on that issue, will people like Glenn end up helping McCain?

John adds: One thing does baffle me about anybody coming out hard against Romney for being too moderate, or RINO, or whatever you want to call it – in comparision to the MSM declared frontrunners, McCain and Guliani, his conservative credentials are much stronger.

[tags] Fred Barnes, Mormon, evangelical, Mitt Romney, Campaign for Michigan Families, American Family Association in Michigan, John Glenn, John McCain, [/tags]

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The Salt Lake Tribune looks at Romney’s ancestry.  SURPRISE! – they were Mormons too, and did what Mormons did back then - Imagine that.  The Corner reacts.  Lowell:  Kate O’Beirne’s analysis is hilarious.  I’m going to post some more about this when I have time.  For now, I’ll just note that I have some polygamous Mormon ancestors too, dating back to the 19th century, and that fact is about as consequential in my life as it might be if some of them were left-handed.  What is more important to me is that by all accounts they were fine people,  Anyone who is a Mormon and happens to have several generations of Mormons in their family history, with Utah roots, is likely to have the same kind of genealogy.  In other words, it’s just an interesting part of our past.

Meanwhile, is “the Mormon question” an MSM construct?  Lowell:  The comments to this blog post are pretty interesting.

In other potential Republican candidate news:

• Ponnuru says Allen is dead in the water.  Lowell:  I tend to agree, but I’m always wary of premature pronouncements of political death.  Then again, Brendan Miniter has some comments about Allen that can only be called devastating.
• RCP Blog says McCain is getting all the good people. — And yet . . . .  Lowell:  Remember, the RCP Blog is quoting a New York Times article, and the Times has been in a swoon over McCain for at least a decade now.

And, at the general intersection of faith and politics:

• This struck me as an excellent brief treatise on how they intersect – from a Biblical perspective
• And this is an example of the wrong way to do it.  This reminds me so much of the Soviet Union (I was there in 1991 – just before the revolution, leaving the day it started) and it’s many beautiful Orthodox “museums.”

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Last Friday I went on a bit of a rant arguing that everybody keeps saying that Romney’s religious affiliation is an issue without much evidence to that effect.  Given the very heavy readership (courtesy Hugh Hewitt) I am somewhat surprised that no one has challenged my statement that we don’t have much evidence. (Lowell wondered about it in a private communication!)  So, I want to lay out what we do and do not know.

First we have the LATimes/Bloomberg poll with it’s now widely quoted 37% “will not vote for” number.  Then there is the RunMittRun.com South Carolina poll that sets the “will not vote” number at 33%.  That’s about it, and that is somewhat woefully inadequate to conclude that Romney’s CJCLDS affiliation is a significant issue.

Both Powerline and Kathryn Jean Lopez on National Review Online have analyzed the LATimes/Bloomberg poll and determined the data is insignificant to conclude that Romney has a problem.  Lowell and I have seen the questions from the RMR poll and they are very similar.

I’m not sure I have much of a point to make here beyond those I have already made, I just thought I ought to anticipate the objection and pull together the resources I have to defend myself.

[tags]polling. Mormon, Romney, Powerline, NRO, issues, evidence[/tags]

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This “study” that came out last year claiming to demostrate that religion is a bad influence on society, was widely discussed and largely discredited at the time.  There are all sorts of methodology problems, as well as underlying assumptions, etc.  However, I recently came across this post, also about a year old, that I think deserves some comment.

The post makes a huge mistake, it confuses atheism with a lack of religion.

All believers learn that God holds them responsible for their actions. So far so good, but for many, belief absolves them of all other responsibilities. Consciously or subconsciously, those who are “born again” or “chosen” have diminished respect for others who do not share their sect or their faith. Convinced that only the Bible offers “truth”, they lose their intellectual curiosity and their ability to reason. Their priority becomes not the world they live in but themselves. [emphasis added] 

Note the fallacy there?  There are many non-diestic religions, Buddihism, and Japan’s prevailing Shintoism being the one’s that leap immediately to mind.  We’ll return to that in a minute.

The other fallacy in that analysis is a complete misunderstanding of what precisely it is that faith teaches us.  Consider this bit of scripture shared by creedal and Mormon Christians alike:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.

At least to Christians, the other is, in fact, a much higher priority than the self.

But let’s return to the non-diestic Shintoism for a moment.  the post says:

Top of the class, in both atheism and good behavior, come the Japanese. Over eighty percent accept evolution and fewer than ten percent are certain that God exists. Despite its size – over a hundred million people – Japan is one of the least crime-prone countries in the world. It also has the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy of any developed nation.

I will agree that Japanese culture functions better in the ways described than ours, and while atheism may hold, the kind of societal cooperation that marks that nation is deply rooted in their non-diestic religion and the very deep affirmation of those cultural values that that religion provides.  Conclusion: when it comes to societal functioning (setting aside for a moment issues about higher truth, etc.), the values are what matter, religion’s role is to provide non-coercive reinforcment of those values.

Thus, it is possible for a religiously pluralistic society to function at the same level, provided the religions present affirm the same essential values.  For a purely societal viewpoint, the role of religion is not truth, or salvation, or any other idea that may be important to the religion, no from a societal viewpoint, the role of religion is to affirm and reinforce values that allow the society to function.

So, when it comes to a democratic society such as ours, and the particular religious affiliation of a candidate, the issue should never be that particular religious affiliation, but the values proported and affirmed by that religion.  Thus, creedal Christian and Jews should be able to readily vote for each other – they share virtually the same ethical/value code.

And so too does the CJCLDS. From the book “How Wide The Divide” I quote Stephen Robinson, the Mormon scholar half of that book’s authorship:

The eigth article of faith, written by Joseph Smith in 1842, states that “we believe the Bible to be the word of God,….”

The value structure of the CJCLDS calls upon the same sources as does traditional Judeo/Christians.  While there were historical deviations from current Judeo/Christian ethical thinking in the CJCLDS, those have been changed in the last 100 years, and from the best of my study, no significant deviations remain. 

I find it fascinating that a blog post designed to discredit the role of religion in society can actually lead to points in favor of the role of relgious plurality on societal functioning.  But there you have it.  It is often what we don’t know, or misunderstand that creates the problem.  Not what we believe.

[tags]atheism, diesm, Christian, Jew, Mormon, Shinto, society[/tags]

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Joe Carter has some interesting comments on Michael Barone’s US News comments on a McCain/Leiberman ticket.  I just love this:

McCain is (rightly) despised by conservatives and Lieberman, an incumbent Senator, can’t even win his own state primary to keep his job. McCain couldn’t win the Republican nomination if his running mate were William F. Buckley, Jr.; having a running mate who is liberal on every issue except the war on terror would only seal his status as a pariah.

Amy Ridenour puts a nail in George Allen’s coffin.  Speaking of Allen, it seems Instapundit has discovered his real problem.

Speaking of Allen – KLo blames him for a pro-polygamy rally in Utah.  Every time these wacko-Mormons stick their heads up it worries me.  They generate more press coverage than a city full of normal Mormons.  Lowell:  One quibble:  They’re not Mormons And even if they were some kind of dissident group within the church, they would represent perhaps six-tenths of one one-thousandth of all Mormons.

A Christian version of Snopes.com called TruthMiners.com and Answers.org.  (HT: Reformed Angler)  This could be interesting in a season when many, many urban legends are likely to spring up about faith, politics and Mormonism.  Both sites seems to be creedal Christian – it will be interesting to see if, and if so, how, they tackle Mormon related rumors.

Romney in California:

1. He appears to have the OC wrapped up, which, given that there are few other reliable Republican strongholds in California, is a big deal.
2. His remarks to the California Party Convention are somewhat remarkable – told here and here.  When I heard him, I thought he had slightly misplayed the immigration issue, and given the levels of anti-immigrant rage in this state, I would have thought comments as moderate as those he made at the convention would have gotten a mixed reception, but it appears I was wrong.  Maybe he has his finger on this issue better than I expected – but then he has a lot of family in Southern California.  Lowell:  In my view, as one who’s blogged a great deal about immigration and has followed the issue closely, Romney has adhered to the most important general conservative view– control the border first and foremost– while refining the issue by taking the position that we need more skilled immigrants.  I do not think that approach will offend the hard-core base at all.  What will be more interesting is what Romney will say about a guest worker program or any kind of “path to citizenship.”  The base goes nuts when anyone proposes a solution that includes those ideas.

This post is about “blogging as a social construct.”  It’s heady Christian stuff, but I thought it worth a comment here in light of my shots at “the Mormon question” asking punditry last week.  Blogging, and journalism in general, certainly have social aspects, which results in “memes” – ideas that get echoed and echoed – often until they become fact, even without substantiation.  I am genuinely concerned about that and the “Mormon question.”

Michael Novak responds to Heather MacDonald’s athiestic claims.  It’s a great bit of apologia.  Most fascinating, however, is Novak’s necessity to respond to MacDonald’s atheistic desire to group Mormons and creedal Christians.  This demonstrates two things 1) save to the religious themselves, the difference between Mormons and creedals are insignificant and 2) Mormons and creedal Christians have virtually everything in common in the political realm. Lowell:  It seems to me that viewed from the skeptic’s perspective, we are all indeed “in the same boat.”  We all believe incredible stories or doctrines, whether those be Noah’s ark, Moses dividing the Red Sea, Christ’s bodily resurrection, or Joseph Smith translating ancient golden plates given to him by an angel.  In a way, that diverse community of believers is what the notion of a larger community of Christians is all about.

Speaking of which, this is an interesting analysis of why Evangelicals are unlikely to ever vote Democrat.  Question: Is there anything in the analysis that would not apply equally to Mormons.

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Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers! If you are here for the first time, please take a minute to check out the rest of the blog. Writing on the fine Real Clear Politics Blog this morning, John McIntyre writes approvingly of Romney's recent progress, notes that "2008 was probably not going to be George Allen's year," and concludes that "Romney is fast emerging as the alternative to the two moderate heavyweights McCain and Giuliani." Then comes this provocative statement:

But back to Romney: If the Mormon issue wasn't floating around in the background, he would almost certainly be the clear frontrunner for the nomination. Expect to see Romney's stock continue to rise as many conservatives unhappy with the prospect of McCain or Giuliani start to line up behind the Massachusetts Governor.

"If the Mormon issue wasn't floating around in the background." If McIntyre is right, then we really have come to a place where the only thing standing between Romney and front-runner status as a presidential candidate is . . . his religion. As much as my mind rebels against such a thought, politics is the ultimate realists' game. It doesn't matter whether it's fair or right for Romney's religion to be so important; if that's the way it is, then that fact must be dealt with. What does this mean?

Leaving aside the question of whether pundits should raise the "Mormon issue" in such a cavalier manner, which John addresses toward the end of this post, here are a few ideas:

• If Romney does start to look more and more like a front-runner, then attacks on him will proliferate. No one will directly attack him for being a Mormon, but whisper campaigns may be attempted. The problem with whisper campaigns is that they are effective only in short-term situations (such as the last few weeks before a primary election). When there's time for the whispers to be countered, the effort usually peters out, and 2008 is still quite a ways off.
• He can probably expect more subtle attacks, such as this rather clever piece by a Gingrich operative, who suggests that Romney is the candidate of the blueblood elites– the modern-day Rockefeller Republicans. Trouble is, as a Mormon, Romney's already an outsider to the world of bluebloods; his only Ivy League connections are in graduate school; he didn't go to Yale and does not belong to Skull and Bones; and he's probably not even in the Bohemian Club either (too much drinking there, you know). So that one won't stick, but others will be attempted.

• Back to the religion issue. Would it receive such attention if pundits didn't bring it up all the time? Maybe not, but remember, politics is a realists' game. My hunch is that after all is said and done, Romney's Mormonism will simply die out as an issue in the GOP primaries. His lifestyle and wordlview are too simpatico with those of the religious conservatives who might care about a candidate's faith. If he's nominated by the GOP, Romney will be viciously and openly attacked by the Daily Kos crowd, who will paint him as a homophobe for his stand on same-sex marriage, a bigot because of Mormonism's all-male priesthood and its former policy on African-Americans and the priesthood, and who knows what else. Expect them to try to make him look like the American version of the Taliban. Will any of that stick? I am doubtful; time will tell. But it's going to be an interesting ride.

John adds: Lowell beat me to the punch on this one, frankly it honked me off when I read it very early this AM. Here's the thing. There appears to be two different attacks on the religion front. The first is from the left, who frankly cannot tell the difference between Romney and an Evangelical – their worry is that he will be more committed to the issues than a "normal" Evangelical. It's a blanket religion attack – it's the same attack that Bush had to deal with. It's the same attack Republicans will be dealing with as long as they remain closely aligned with religious interests.

The other attack, and the one that really bothers me, is what I call "The Question." It's from the right, it's from within. Everybody loves Romney, then comes one of Laura Ingraham's "But…Monkeys." "Can a Mormon get elected?" Nobody actually knows, but they have to ask.

I truly wonder if it has occurred to anybody that the mere asking creates and fuels the issue – an issue is, after all, a question the political process seeks to answer. While I was reflecting on McIntyre's piece this morning I think I figured out what needs to happen here. The Commmonwealth PAC needs to pay for a real study, not a quick phone poll, but a real study where polling is used to form focus groups, put together demographically, and get some genuine data.

Right now, from a purely political standpoint the only issue in terms of the primaries is "The Question." And that exists only in minds of the political watchers. I am beginning to resent it because it implies that Evangelicals are some sort of semi-bigoted rubes. "Of course, all we political insiders know it's not really an issue – but the great unwashed masses, are they really that sophisticated?" Either the insiders really do have a problem with Romney's religious affiliation, and they have found "safe" way to express it, or there is a problem. If the former, it's time for Romney to get busy dealing with them. We need data to even know how to proceed with the later – and the insiders above all should know that!

We are a humble blog and lack the resources to do the kind of polling and testing needed, but the insiders most assuredly do not. It's time for them to stop asking and start answering.

Lowell: I wish I had said that. Simply tossing the issue into a piece that is about something else seems intellectually lazy and borderline irresponsible. Further analysis from a pro-Romney site here.

John's Addendum: I have summarized my evidentiary support for the assertion that no one really knows if Romney's faith is an issue here.

[tags] Romney, Giuliani; Gingrich, George Allen, McCain, Mormon, Mormonism, religious bigotry, Rockefeller Republicans [/tags]

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