Article VI Blog

First of all – many thanks to the people at Sunstone.  The panel that Lowell and I were on was interesting and challenging.  I hope there are many more in the future.

And Now…

It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.  That came out in spades as I read Jon Meacham's American Gospel this past week.  Reading this passage below, I thought that maybe Teddy Roosevelt was still alive and ghost writing this blog:

A BULLY DEFENSE OF LIBERTY

Partisanship, however, poses a constant threat to civility, partic­ularly on religious questions. In 1908, when William Howard Taft was running to succeed Roosevelt, who had chosen not to seek another term (a decision he would come to regret), Roo­sevelt found himsef devising replies to religiously motivated at­tacks on Taft, a Unitarian. “There is considerable opposition to him. . . on account of his religious views,” noted Taft’s oppo­nent, William Jennings Bryan. “Think of the United States with a President who does not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but looks upon our immaculate Savior as a. . . low, cunning imposter!” the Pentecostal Herald said in July 1908.  Reaching back into history, Roosevelt sought to reassure “Will,” as he called Taft in an August 1908 letter written from Oyster Bay. “I would simply say that you decline to permit any such gross violation of the first principles of our government as an effort to make you subscribe to any given principles of dog­matic theology before counting you as eligible to receive votes,” TR wrote Taft. He should say, too, Roosevelt went on, “that the same attack was made upon Lincoln as being a nonorthodox Christian as upon you, and far severer attacks upon Jefferson.”

 

Roosevelt grew more furious as Election Day approached. In an October letter to a correspondent who had asked him to ad­vise Taft to speak out on the religious question, Roosevelt pounded his beloved bully pulpit. “If there is one thing for which we stand in this country, it is for complete religious free­dom and for the right of every man to worship his Creator as his conscience dictates,” Roosevelt said. “It is an emphatic negation of this right to cross-examine a man on his religious views before being willing to support him for office. Is he a good man, and is he fit for the office? These are the only questions which there is a right to ask, and to both of these in Mr. Taft’s case, the answer must be in the affirmative.” Roosevelt then spoke of his experi­ence with such questions in the White House. “In my own Cabinet there are at present Catholic, Protestant and Jew—the Protestants being of various  denominations,” he said. “I am incapable of discriminating between them, or of judging any one of them save as to the way in which he performs his public duty.

 

Finally, after the campaign, in yet another letter on the sub­ject, Roosevelt sounded ever more Madisonian. “Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths,” he said. “The inevitable result of en­tering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful con­ditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.” In his penultimate paragraph, Roosevelt offered both prediction and benediction:

I believe that this Republic will endure for many cen­turies. If so there will doubtless be among its Presidents Protestants and Catholics, and, very probably at some time, Jews. I have consistently tried while President to act in relation to my fellow Americans of Catholic faith as I hope that any future President who happens to be a Catholic will act towards his fellow Americans of Protes­tant faith. Had I followed any other course I should have felt that I was unfit to represent the American people.

In the end Bryan lost—which meant, if one takes the Pentecostal Herald’s argument at face value, that Americans were more comfortable with a president who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus than with one who took the Bible literally, and who would die shortly after defending that Bible in a hot Tennessee courtroom in 1925.

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