Article VI Blog

More staffing news.

The Corner points to a Boston Herald piece on Romney's Christmas card. Incredibly, Evangelicals are worried that Romney will work to hard to spread his religion, while the MSM is complaining his card is not religious enough!!! Sometimes the intersection of faith and politics is in the Twilight Zone.

It's old news now that the argument that the Mormon faith is "too irrational" will be a favorite stone for Evangelicals to throw at Romney. But here it is from a leftie at Slate! The most amazing part of the piece is that the writer comments that "not enough attention" was paid to the irrationality of Bush's faith, but that Mormonism is somehow different, worse even than Bush. There is no evidence or reasoning involved in the piece, just the writer's apparent impressions. It's hard to tell, but I guess it is simply a matter of age that makes the irrational claims of creedal Christian faith, from the virgin birth to the resurrection, to Daniel in the lions' den and Shadrach et al. in the fiery furnace somehow more acceptable to an admittedly secular mind than the irrational claims of Mormonism? Given the lack of reason and argument exhibited by the piece, I cannot help but think this is the pot calling the kettle black.

Lowell adds: The Slate article is surprisingly superficial for a writer like Jacob Weisberg, who is an intelligent guy. His argument — "no one who believes that crazy stuff should be president"– is actually pretty tired already, at least among those who've been thinking about the issue for awhile. We've cited to John Mark Reynolds' still-definitive analysis of that point several times. It's the best discussion I have seen (and from an Evangelical perspective) of the tests one should apply for deciding when a candidate's religion is relevant to a voting decision.

Still, the point is specious enough, and easy enough to articulate, that we'll probably see it raised often over the next 10 months or so. Perhaps as real political issues come to the fore, sneering bigotry like Weisberg's will recede.

A final comment on the notion of Mormonism as a "fringe" religion. As one e-mail correspondent notes:

It’s amazing to hear people call the LDS Church "fringe," given that it has more US members (depending on whose numbers you use) than several prominent mainstream churches, including the Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Pentecostals. The Southern Baptist Convention is much larger, but the other Baptist groups are smaller.

Interesting.

Back to John: I participated in a conference call yesterday with Mark Earley of The Interchange Freedom Initiative (IFI) and Anthony Pickering of the Becket Fund. IFI has recently been victimized by a pretty extreme federal court ruling. This is of interest on this blog because the ruling, quite wrongly, attempts to define what "evangelical" is in theological, not institutional, terms. Something out of the jurisdiction of the courts. But the result of the effort is fascinating for it ends up grouping the Mormon faith with the denominational creedal Christian faiths like Roman Catholicism, Prebyterianism, Methodism, and sets Evangelicalism quite apart from them. I think this points out, firstly, the inanity of trying to figure out religion in a legal context. But most fascinating is that it makes Evangelicalism look "cultic" and Mormonism look mainstream.

Now bear in mind, the ruling is utter nonsense as Evangelicalism is a school of thought and not a church in any recognizable sense. There are evangelical Presbyterians, evangelical Catholics, etc. Regardless, it is fascinating to see how perception and bias can affect how people view questions like this. We are back in the Twilight Zone.

Lowell updates: It seems that many are looking for evidence that Romney is not a true conservative. This is actually a positive development, I think; at least the focus is on issues, not religion. Unfortunately, even in the political arena accuracy suffers. This blog post, for example, claims that "Romney, who was an independent in the early 1990s, voted for [liberal Democratic Senator Paul] Tsongas in the 1992 Dem primary." The only link in the post, however, is to this Washington Post article, which says nothing at all about Romney ever voting for Tsongas. (Even if it's true, I wonder about the ideological significance of voting for a friend in a primary of the opposing party.)

Lowell update II: Looks like they love Romney in New Hampshire. More to the point of this blog, the article does not mention religion once. How's that for refreshing? Of course, the Globe sees the same event differently. Compare the two stories for an interesting example of reporter bias. Even so, still no mention of religion, even in the Globe story. Progress!

John Updates: K-Lo makes a Romney funny at The Corner. There, I feel much better entering the holiday on a laugh. I loathe being serious at Christmas.

Sphere: Related Content

Posted in Reading List | No Comments yet » | Print this post | Email This Post