It’s Not Over Until Rush Sings? — That and More…
Well, Rush No Longer Resembles “The Fat Lady”…
But he is not so sure we are done with The Question.
CALLER: Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Do you think that Mitt Romney has overcome the Mormon issue?
RUSH: Uh, maybe in the primaries, but it will be back if he wins the nomination. It will be huge.
CALLER: Well, we’re not as bad as everyone makes us out to be.
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wrong way to look at it. The truth is not relevant. The economy is not bad, either, but look what everybody thinks.
Of note here – the “maybe” with regards to the primaries. I tend to agree but can foresee circumstances where it will arise again. Of more important note here – “The truth is not relevant.” That is just a crying shame.
But it is a fact reflective of that polling data we featured Friday. It was also reported Friday in the third item in the Boston Globe’s campaign notebook, along with a bunch of other identity politics news. Speaking of identity politics – here is some pure identity analysis from Great Britain.
Analyzing The Weekend . . .
. . . will last until Florida because people have to talk about something. Saturday, Lowell briefly mentioned my concern about the fact that THE spin from NV is the overwhelming vote for Romney among NV’s Mormon population. Some interesting commentary:
PoliGazette (Netherlands)
The Mormon vote helped Romney crush the opposition by an incredibly wide margin, but it didn’t cause him to win. In fact, if the Mormon vote was as divided as that of other Christian voting blocs, he still would’ve left the others way behind.
Whereas without Evangelicals, Huckabee makes a MUCH faster trip to the dustbin of history.
It is, as far as it goes, a good point. I myself never held Huckabee’s appeal to his fellow evangelicals against him. The trouble with the way he has campaigned, as far as I’m concerned, is that it means that he will have a very low ceiling to his support from non-evangelicals. Huckabee ran behind Ron Paul in New Hampshire and Michigan among voters who didn’t share his religion. Romney has shown that he can do just fine among non-Mormons, who were a negligible percentage of the vote in the other states where he has placed first or second. [Emphasis added.]
Yep, it is one thing to have a group attach itself to you and another thing altogether to cut that group out of the herd and declare dominance. One unites, the other divides. One builds a coalition, the other attempts to railroad the others. One wins elections, the other is a power play.
In the pulpit…
Byron York looks at Obama here and here.
In a nutshell…
Certainly the thought that someone who stakes his (eternal) life on certain claims about a guy’s reading some gold plates in a hat, and all the rest of it, will be running the free world, makes a thinking person nervous. Beliefs are cognitive judgments and therefore do speak to a candidate’s ability to lead.
As Galileo said,
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
Yet the psychology of Romney’s faith is almost certainly no different from that of any other protestant or catholic – largely a consequence of upbringing and exposure. Moreover, prima facie, is the Mormon myth any more absurd than the pope’s speaking ex cathedra, or the fundamentalists’ history of the world in six thousand years? Probably not.
The plan fact of the matter is most people do not get past the level of psychology or prima facie when it comes to faith. Certainly, the American agreement is that in the public square we will never reach beyond those levels.
Another way to put this is that the personal is not the public. We have agree to build a nation around the greater public good as perceived by most people, and in so doing we have also agreed to not try and force our deeply personal onto the greater public square through the force of government.
Most Troubling About Identity Politics . . .
. . . is the press’s contribution. Let’s face it, it is easy to find and write an identity based story. This is a classic out of Canada, about a female, black Mormon. First of all, I would find it insulting to insinuate that my vote was based on stuff like this, like I somehow lacked the intelligence to research the issues and make a rational decision. Secondly, there was a time in this nation when the press viewed its role as uplifted, not sinking to the lowest common denominator. But then I remember dinosaurs.
Lowell: Actually, I didn’t mind the article and thought it was pretty fair, if not terribly respectful. But another Mormon might think just the opposite.
Update from Lowell: I was hasty in my comments. Reader Raymond Takashi Swenson observes:
The political digs aside, I would just point out that the article is inaccurate in talking about the Mormon priesthood before 1978 being conferred on “Caucasians”. There was never any restriction on ordaining Asians (like me), Polynesians, Hispanics, American Indians or anyone else classified in America as a “minority race”. For the record, almost half of Mormons are in Latin America, including many American Indians and blacks (especially in Brazil). There are a million spread through Asia and Polynesia (Tonga is 33% LDS, Samoa 25%), and about a quarter million in African nations like Ghana, Nigeria and Mozambique. Mormons never had any close identification with the Southern whites who were the promoters of black slavery. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan was just as ready to lynch Mormon missionaries as blacks. Mormons never had racially segregated congregations, and actively proselyted among Indians, Asias, Polynesians and Latin Americans for the last century. Most acceptance of Mormonism in Europe these days is among immigrants (so that a Mormon ward in London, for example, can have a predominantly black membership and leadership). Indeed, non-Mormon historian Jan Shipps has argued that the only “pressure” leading to the 1978 change was the growing population of black Mormons in Brazil and the interest among Africans who asked for missionaries.
But It Is Refreshing…
. . . to know that at least one identity group gets it right. While Huckabee is mobilizing evangelical churches, the LDS:
The LDS Church’s mission is “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ,” LDS spokesman Scott Trotter said Friday. “As a church we are politically neutral and have instructed our missionaries to focus on that mission and to respectfully decline any invitations to discuss politics.”
I’m not sure that the wall of separation is quite this hard, there is a place for political discussion in church, but I do find it very ironic that the church everybody was concerned was going to dictate to “their” candidate, is in fact being far, far more circumspect about this whole thing than my group.
All of which means the outcome of this situation will be very interesting.
A reader emails…
Today I saw the photo of Gov Huckabee signing bibles in South Carolina after a campaign rally. I have never heard of this, though I have never been to South Carolina. I have given away scriptures as a gift to close friends with a personal handwritten testimony or message inside, but this notion of signing bibles like a rock star, well, sort of cheapens the sacredness of the God’s word in my mind. Please tell me if I should consider another perspective. This also seems like a egregious crossing of boundaries for a presidential candidate. This behavior would not fly in my home town.
Nope, I agree. Heck, I wouldn’t even want a “real” pastor signing my Bible.
Additions from the Mormon half of this team (that would be Lowell):
Here’s a story from the Christian Post with an encouraging title: Candidates Asked to Reject Divisive Religious Talk. You need to read the whole thing, but here are some key ‘graphs:
More than two dozen Evangelical, mainline Protestant and Catholic leaders signed the statement titled, “Keeping Faith: Principles to Protect Religion on the Campaign Trail,” which affirmed three principles to protect religion during the presidential race.
The principles are: avoid using religious or doctrinal differences to marginalize or disparage each other; acknowledge that no single faith has an exclusive claim to moral values; and recognize that policy positions should reflect the best interests of all citizens regardless of religious belief.
How refreshing. (Thanks to our reader JL Fuller for the tip.)
And by the way . . . Romney appeared on Fox News Sunday and did not get single question about religion. That’s progress, isn’t it?
Also by the way: Day by Day has some Article VI – style humor today. And the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund lays out the utter failure of Huckabee’s approach to religious identity politics:
Once again, Mr. Huckabee failed to achieve significant support outside his evangelical base [in South Carolina]. Only 1 in 7 non-evangelicals voted for him, placing him behind not just Mr. McCain but Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney. He finished a close second overall only because he won more than 2 out of 5 evangelical voters, who made up 60% of South Carolina’s primary turnout. And he pandered to his base, too, running TV ads proclaiming himself a “Christian leader.” The vote among voters who considered themselves evangelicals and those who said TV ads were “very important” in determining how they voted was the same: Mr. Huckabee defeated John McCain 43% to 28% in both categories.
This repeats a pattern seen in other states. In Iowa, where evangelicals also were 60% of the electorate, Mr. Huckabee won but carried the votes of only 13% of non-evangelicals. In three states with more secular Republican electorates–New Hampshire, Michigan and Nevada–he has won between 4% and 8% of non-evangelicals, trailing even fringe candidate Ron Paul.
A Final Addition From John…
Check out this video, really it’s interesting. It is also funny, and that is certainly how Romney played it, yet I cannot help but reflect that some candidates in this race might actually claim divine interruption. Funny thing – is it is not the one from the religion that still believes in a direct prophetic voice. Hmmmm…
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coltakashi on 21 Jan 2008 at 11:14 am #
The assertion that (a) Mormon beliefs are irrational, (b) Romney is a believing Mormon, therefore (c) Romney is irrational, is a deduction that depends on the truth of both premises (a) and (b). But the most basic feature of logic is that one cannot assume that one’s assumptions and prejudices are correct. Logic demands that our assumptions be tested. In this case, the hypothesis is eminently testable. Romney has a long record in business, as a leader of the 2002 Olympics, and as governor of Massachusetts. We can determine objectively if he has acted irrationally.
Any evidence? Nope. If there were, you can bet that it would be all over the media and the internet. But Romney is demonstrably sane and intelligent. This is a plain old observed FACT. Any deduction that conflicts with that fact is falsified. That is the scientific method, testing our prejudices and abandoning those that are invalid.
Since the conclusion fails, the assumption must be wrong. In other words, given the counter-example of Romney, the assertion that “Mormon beliefs are irrational” fails.
This does not prove that Mormon beliefs are true, only that a rational person can hold those beliefs. The import for the political process is that Mormons in general and Romney in particular cannot be logically attacked as irrational and untrustworthy for positions of government power. Romney disproves this and other prejudicial assumptions against Mormons and their belief system.
In fact, the awareness of this is precisely what makes some people worry about Romney being elected president. In such a case, it would be glaringly obvious to the rational people in America and the world that Mormons are rational people, and it will become untenable to maintain that Mormons are irrational people loyal to their church only because of their inability to think clearly. Since this has been a major premise of much of the anti-Mormonism industry in America for 170 years, a major segment of the religious economy would fall on hard times if Romney were elected.
The notion of Mormon irrationality has been used to discourage people in other churches from even investigating Mormon beliefs. There is clearly a fear among many anti-Mormons that, without that barrier of (ironically) irrational fear, more people would discover that, upon reflection, Mormonism is in some way preferable to their current religious affiliation. And so there is a strong incentive for people who have invested in the “Mormons are irrational” doctrine to oppose Romney’s nomination and election.
When the most dangerous religious truth is that there is no basis for a particular religious prejudice, one hopes that those who actively encourage that prejudice will ask themselves whether their own attitude is rational.
coltakashi on 21 Jan 2008 at 11:53 am #
Re: The Canadian article by Mr. Abel–
While Abel can’t resist throwing in the Canadian-style digs at every aspect of American politicians, and a few at Mormons, the Mormons he spoke with come across as articulate people who know their own mind and are not going to vote for anyone based on “identity politics,” including Romney. I like the fact that he made it clear that no one is telling Mormons how to vote in church, and that it would be bad manners to even talk about politics at church meetings.
It is not hard to find black Mormons in Maryland. I lived there for two years, back in 1978-80, and there were black members there who predated the 1978 revelation liberalizing priesthood ordination, just as there had been in my ward in Salt Lake in the 1950s and my ward in Colorado Springs in the early 1970s. I went visiting with the missionaries when they were actively following up on referrals in a predominantly black neighborhood in the District of Columbia (where any white guys in suits are assumed to be police officers).
For that matter, it is not that hard to find Mormon Democrats who are on the lookout for someone from their party who is unapologetic about traditional moral values. Support for unions, for aid to the poor, for affirmative action in support of racial equality, for more government support to health care are not logically intertwined with embrace of abortion, of gay marriage, and a weak armed forces. One accessible example is Orson Scott Card, Mormon author of science fiction and fantasy books, whose web page carries his views on political issues.
The political digs aside, I would just point out that the article is inaccurate in talking about the Mormon priesthood before 1978 being conferred on “Caucasians”. There was never any restriction on ordaining Asians (like me), Polynesians, Hispanics, American Indians or anyone else classified in America as a “minority race”. For the record, almost half of Mormons are in Latin America, including many American Indians and blacks (especially in Brazil). There are a million spread through Asia and Polynesia (Tonga is 33% LDS, Samoa 25%), and about a quarter million in African nations like Ghana, Nigeria and Mozambique. Mormons never had any close identification with the Southern whites who were the promoters of black slavery. Indeed, the Ku Klux Klan was just as ready to lynch Mormon missionaries as blacks. Mormons never had racially segregated congregations, and actively proselyted among Indians, Asias, Polynesians and Latin Americans for the last century. Most acceptance of Mormonism in Europe these days is among immigrants (so that a Mormon ward in London, for example, can have a predominantly black membership and leadership). Indeed, non-Mormon historian Jan Shipps has argued that the only “pressure” leading to the 1978 change was the growing population of black Mormons in Brazil and the interest among Africans who asked for missionaries.
JLFuller on 21 Jan 2008 at 12:55 pm #
The difficulty Rush has overlooked is that perception drives behavior. It is a human trait. Things are or will become what we believe they are. There appears to be some legitimate concern about the economy by more than just inept political observers. The world’s stock markets are reacting to something. They could be reacting to what they see as a failing American economy. All the other candidates offer rebates as a spending stimulus. If perception drives behavior, and it most certainly does, then jumping onto the “free money today”bandwagon could be at the cost of jobs tomorrow. It could be a disaster for Republicans and our country. You know the Dems and libs will be squealing like pigs if they don’t come out looking like heroes. In the end, though, I hope thinking Americans will react positively to Romney’s offer of a job over a couple hundred bucks even if Congress makes things worse again.