Today’s Reading List – September 13, 2007
Things from all over…
The Christian Science Monitor takes note of last week's Pew poll..
USAToday proves my point, to a point. On Monday I wrote:
My personal opinion is that when people wonder about this what they are really asking is if Mormonism is consistent with the American public religion which most people think of, quite vaguely, as "Christianity."
Says the new USAToday poll:
Most Americans believe the nation's founders wrote Christianity into the Constitution.
The point made, that most people do conflate the public religion and Christianity. This, of course, causes USAToday to get all exercised about the first amendment, but the poll does not go far enough. If you asked those same people to define "Christianity," I am fairly certain you would get something far more resembling the vague outlines of the public religion than you would the orthodox doctrines of any brand of Christianity.
Religion and politics, the next generation.
This is ridicule. What is notable about it is that similar things could be and have been written about Lourdes, of the Church of the Nativity, or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and any other sacred site about any other religion. Which is why religious people of one stripe cannot afford electoral bias against those of another without risking the same.
Lowell: Jokes at the expense of others are simply part of life, but religious jokes at the expense of the religious other are something else altogether. It's a much commented-on and widespread phenomenon that religious jokes about Mormons are acceptable. We are used to that. Still, I am always surprised (and somewhat gratified) when someone outside my faith notices the inappropriateness of such humor. I'm just inured to it, I guess.
And still there is no "ideal" evangelical candidate. But then that is unsurprising if you thnk about it. The question is, if Thompson's lack of religion is not a problem, why is a different religion a problem?
Lowell: I find this fascinating. Fred Thompson is unabashedly not a church-going guy. Do I care? Not really. I am more interested in what kind of a man he is. What's interesting is that religious voters don't seem to care either. Of course, Ronald Reagan was no church-goer, and yet conservative Christians voted for him in droves and did not care a whit about his theology. Romney's problem with some people seems to be that he is a church-going guy and takes his own religion seriously. Strange but true, isn't it? Someone should write a book on this.
By the way, I wonder if Dr. Dobson is going to decide soon whether Thompson is a Christian? Can you be one if you don't go to church regularly?
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