[John and I are otherwise engaged these next few days, so just for fun we are re-publishing a post that went up on December 10, just after Romney’s “Faith In America” Speech (see it here) at the Bush Library in College Station, Texas. Read it and tell me: Was I wrong? Did things turn out the way I thought they would? That you thought they would? Comment away. Comment moderation is turned off. Let’s get a comment thread going.]

Romney’s “Faith in America” Speech: Changing The Discussion Forever

John and I were on Hugh Hewitt’s show Friday for a few minutes and Hugh asked us if we thought The Speech put The Question to bed. We didn’t have time to answer fully.

On reflection, I think what has happened is that Romney has irrevocably and forever changed the discussion about The Question. (K-Lo seems to agree.)

As John notes below, Romney has drawn a line in the sand, and everyone watching this race — candidates, commentators, or voters– will need to decide which side they are on.

Why? Because Romney has taken the high ground on the issue of religion. From this point on, the following statements from his “Faith in America” speech will guide the discussion:

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What We Face…

I posted yesterday how religious squabbling in the political arena was hurting the church; it is also hurting religion’s voice in politics. The long knives are coming out against the religious voice in politics. Consider:

A book that blames religious resistance to teaching evolution in schools as the enemy of intellectual strength in the nation in general:

For Jacoby, Protestant fundamentalism, particularly in its resistance to the teaching of evolution in public schools, is intellectual enemy number one.

A book that claims that playing the religion card in politics is bad for democracy:

Q: You say in your book that the God Strategy in some ways threatens the democratic vitality of the nation? Can you elaborate?

A: In many respects the fusion of religion and politics is absolutely contrary to what the founders desired for the country. They fled religious sectarian violence, religious persecution and they set out build a new place where God would be part of the equation but there wouldn’t be a state, a national religion. And that was unprecedented …

E.J. Dionne, hawking his new book, is claiming the end of the religious political voice:

In truth, Bush’s victory rested both on 9/11 and on enthusiasm from religious voters. But what’s most important is that 2004, like 1928, is destined to be the last in a long line of contests in which culture and religion proved central to the outcome.

A University of Wisconsin student declares American politics a theocratic process:

For the last few decades, American politics have devolved from the democratic process into the theocratic process.

There is a striking commonality to all of this. They all have a limited definition of the religious voice in politics and that definition is identity-based. Religious people should be more sophisticated than that. The Christian religion is the basis of reason in the western world - we invented it. We should be able to arrive at reasoned positions on any issue that reflects our faith without resorting to mere labeling. When we just label, this kind of stuff is what we get.

Amazingly, given the way the Republican primaries went down, I am somewhat sympathetic to some of what is written here. That is an enormous problem!

What Is Going On Out There?

Are Evangelicals going to vote for McCain or the Dem nominee this fall? The answer is, of course, both - depends on the Evangelical in question. That is the problem with trying to be an identity group…

A Little Lightheartedness…

Wouldn’t this comment by James Dobson be considered an “admission against interest”? [Okay, that is a pretty mean joke on my part, but come on, it was earned.]

And this blog post made me laugh out loud. (Lowell: Me too.)
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Amid all the post-Romney candidacy analysis, I find most interesting the notion that Romney was “too perfect” to be president.  That is  because, the argument goes, he lives up to high personal standards, by all accounts, and seems extraordinarily successful and fortunate, both in business and in his personal life.  On the day Eliot Spitzer resigned because of his, well, imperfect personal life, that notion seems especially fascinating.

Libby Copeland of the Washington Post is the latest to express the “too perfect” view:

Romney seemed so Mormon, so squeaky clean. His seeming normalcy isn’t the norm anymore. Maybe we understand better those who’ve strayed or failed and recovered — or, for that matter, those who aren’t fabulously successful and can’t put tens of millions into their own campaigns. Maybe we relate to the family lives of other candidates, candidates who have been divorced, who have blended families, whose children don’t all campaign with them (and may not even like them). Sure, they’re messier, but messy is authentic.

“Messy is authentic.” What an interesting way to express the difference between the real and the ideal. In other words, we like what is real because it seems familiar and comfortable to us and doesn’t make us feel inadequate, doesn’t challenge us to aspire to something better. (But wait, I thought Obama’s slogan of “Change” was what people found so inspiring about him. Maybe that’s because he’s talking about changing government, which is appealing, and not about changing ourselves, which is not.)

Now compare Ms. Copeland’s view, which seems to prevail in the MSM, with that of Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online:

What a breath of fresh air the Romneys on the public stage have been. Way too often in pop culture, men are portrayed as dopes; think about just about any sitcom. The dad/husband is portrayed as a doofus. What’s wrong with having somebody in public life who’s like Mitt Romney — a capable, experienced executive who loves his country and also happens to be a God-fearing father and husband? That’s not a bad thing for Americans to see. Forgive him for being easy on the eyes.

And I’ll go one step further. I worry about a political culture that is a little too suspicious of a scandal-less, all-American-gee-whiz-this-is-the-American-dream-in-overdrive package. We should be glad that good people — who, while well-off, are not without their share of painful crosses — are willing to subject themselves to the ugliness that politics can inflict. We should be grateful that good families will make the sacrifices necessary to serve — and make those sacrifices with no guarantees they’ll succeed.

I agree with K-Lo. Let’s hear it for our political class setting a standard to which the rest of us can all aspire.

John comments:  What a sad commentary it is when we want leaders “just like us” - meaning “just as screwed up as I am.”  I also find it cognitively dissonant with the idea that the election is about “change.”  I am reminded of high school class elections that were essentially “social group showdowns,” you know, jocks vs. nerds, stuff like that.

Frankly, what Copeland expresses is identity politics in another guise - only in some ways much worse.  Instead of based on some identity group – that group being hopefully attached to some higher idea – this is pure identity, and negative identity to boot. 

I also think this is Democrat politics as well - think about it, all their candidates lately come rife with extensive personal problems, thus we see the governor of NY resigning just this morning, and the foibles of the Clintons have been worked out in public for a couple fo decades now.  Then there is Obama’s historical drug use.  All this when guys like Evan Bayh, fairly liberal Democrat to be sure, but decent, moral and honorable human being, is relegated to second fiddle status.  Do we really want to be like the Democrats?
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From time to time on this blog, we have cited Stephen Prothero of Boston University who has done some excellent work on public knowledge of religion and the intersection of religion and politics. He had an op-ed in USAToday yesterday in which he looked at the political/religious ramifications of the recent Pew Religous Landscape Survey:

The tale I take away from this study is that shifts in the political and moral winds are transforming American religion. Many believe that the Founders separated church and state in order to save the federal government from the interference of overzealous ministers. Not so. The purpose of the First Amendment’s establishment clause — which prohibits the federal government from passing laws that favor any one religion (atheism included) — was to safeguard religion against the encroachment of politics. And this new survey suggests that those safeguards are, well, going the way of the freak show.

[…]

Plainly, the Republican Party gained ground over the past quarter-century by attaching itself to family, morality and God, even as the Democratic Party lost ground by focusing on such matters as rights and reason. In the process, the Republicans became the party of God and the Democrats the party of secularism — not a good strategy for the Democratic Party in a country where 96% of voters believe in God. So Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both taking pains to pitch their party as a party of prayer and piety.

Even so, for much of the past generation, “Christian” and “conservative” have seemed to be interchangeable terms. It should not be surprising if at least some on the left who once upon a time might have described themselves as “Christians” have decided to jettison that affiliation for political reasons. Such reasons, it should be emphasized, are basically the same ones so many Europeans have divorced themselves from their country’s established churches: because the marriage of a given church with a particular political regime is never eternal, and when it ends it leaves a lot of angry children in its wake.

Let me break this down for you a bit. Essentially, what Prothero is arguing is that by making “Christian” and “Conservative” nearly synonymous, religion is losing because people do not want to affiliate with the church when its identity is primarily political, not spiritual. In the article, he cites this political-religious identification as a primary mover behind the decline of the church in Europe, and I would argue that the Founding Fathers saw that decline in its early stages and as Prothero points out, it is one of the reasons they wanted the separation.

A brief aside - that would argue for “religious” founding fathers, as interesied in preserving the church, any church, as the nation - something to think about in the great debate over whether they were Christians or not.

The real point I want to make out of this post, is that I think Prothero is essentially right - too strong a political identity for the church is bad for the church. Further, by voting on the basis of religion, whether it be positive identity attraction with Huckabee or the negative “don’t vote for a Mormon” expressed by some of my less-enlightened co-religionists, is one very concrete way of cementing that political identity for the church. If there is a one-to-one correlation between religion and vote, the identity is solid and unbreakable - and the church loses.

Prothero has, in this piece, had an extraordinary insight, and it is something that religious leaders who played the religion card in the primaries need to think about very seriously - Short term advantage with extraordinary long term costs. Read the whole thing. Right now, the Mormon stand-offish approach to politics is looking a lot smarter than the Evangelical hands-on.

Lowell adds:  I will share one anedcote that I found striking.  I was discussing this very subject with a deeply intelligent, sophisticated, believing and committed Mormon friend.  I suggested that we Mormons ought to insist on a new name.  After all, “Mormon” began as a pejorative term for members of my church, the real name of which is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Why not insist on being called “Latter-day Christians?” I asked.  Sure, some members of other faiths would find that outrageous, but it would be more faithful to our church’s name and does express what we proclaim to the world we represent.

Her response: “I’m not so sure I like that, what with the perception of the term ‘Christian’ these days — as a group of very strident, intolerant right-wing people who are vicious in their attacks on people who disagree with them on anything even closely associated with a religious belief.”

Ouch.  There is much to say in response to that statement, of course, and I am not endorsing it.  But I can see what my friend is saying; there is a grain of truth to it.

At bottom, I find that very, very sad.
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The political news is rife, since Karl Rove suggested is last week, with talk of Mitt Romney as the Vice Presidential choice for the Republicans. Not a single article has appeared questioning whether his faith would hurt the ticket. What is the difference between the top spot and number two? Why so much ink when Romney was a presidential candidate and so little when he is discussed for Veep? Is the Evangelical vote already written off for McCain? If not, why would they vote for a Mormon Veep anymore than a Mormon POTUS?

Lowell adds some provocative (he hopes) thoughts:  Some months ago I wrote here about Thomas Griffith, who had been general counsel to BYU and is now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which is the second-most important federal appellate court after the Supreme Court.  Judge Griffith happens to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and had written a long article about the Church’s beliefs about Jesus Christ.   I asked readers to imagine that they were U.S. Senators an conservative Evangelical Christians who were considering Judge Griffith’s nomination, and then I asked these questions: 

1.  Would you you take the [judge’s] religious views . . . into account in deciding whether or not to support his nomination?  Presumably no, because the views are purely theological, and to take Griffith’s religion into account is flatly prohibited under Article VI to the Constitution.

2.  Would your answer to Question 1 change if Griffith were before you as a nominee not to the D.C. Circuit, but as a sitting D.C. Circuit judge now proposed for elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court?

3.  If your answer to Questions 1 or 2 is “no,” do you see any difference between excluding Griffith’s Mormonism from your consideration of him as a judicial nominee, on one hand, and excluding Romney’s religion from your consideration of him as a presidential candidate, on the other?

I’m just wondering if this is a matter of psychology.  To some, it may just seem to be “too much” to put a Mormon on the Supreme Court, even though he or she might be acceptable on the Court of Appeals.  In the same manner, it seems tolerable to some that a Mormon be a U.S. Senator, but certainly not President of the United States. 

Similary, is it acceptable to some (Al Mohler comes to mind) for a Mormon to be Vice President, but not President? The notion is illogical, of course, because the veep is “only a heartbeat away” from being President.  But Mohler is concered that the election of a Mormon president might “mainstream” Mormonism.  Presumably the election of a Mormon U.S. Senator, or the confirmation of a Mormon federal appeals court judge (but maybe not a Supreme Court justice) would not worry the Rev. Mohler quite so much.

Food for thought, no?  Is the country ready for a Mormon veep, but not a Mormon president?

Please use the comments to discuss, we have turned off comment moderation for the day.
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I Do Wish He Would Go Away…

Huck, I am talking about, of course, but not likely. Jonathon Martin reports on an email from the Huck campaign. Quote the email:

One thing I’m convinced of — you have worked too hard and made too many sacrifices for us to just “quit.” That’s not an option for any of us. The reason we all worked so hard is to make a better future for coming generations — as I often said, this isn’t about just the next election, but the next generation. That battle is far from over.

The guy, if nothing else, is a true believer - in himself. However, the presidency is about service to the nation, not oneself. The last president that used the office for self-satisfaction had to stand for a Senate impeachment trial. Come to think of it, he was a former Arkansas governor too. Are we looking at a Huey Long sort of thing all over again? Ugh.

Byron York takes what is for my book, a bit too of an admiring look at the Huck phenomena.

Certainly Huckabee managed to irritate two legs of the Republican three-legged stool, alienating economic and national-security conservatives while relying disproportionately on the support of social conservatives.

[…]

If there is a contested GOP race in 2012, Huckabee will almost certainly be there. He’ll be a stronger candidate if he spends the next few years studying up and filling the gaps in his knowledge. But the bottom line is that he’s a dazzlingly talented politician in a party that is not exactly full of dazzlingly talented politicians. You’ll see him again.

His political talent is undeniable, but a tiger just flat out does not change its stripes. Huck does not need to “fill in his knowledge gaps,” he doesn’t care about anything else (there is a quote from Huck in the York piece where he talks about not understanding why Iraq figured so big in the debates) - THAT is the problem. Sadly, it appears, neither do the social conservatives that did back him. What Huckabee failed to show was the ability to form a coalition.

Now, Clinton forged the Democratic coalition by the power of his personality, his charisma; and given his political talent, Huckabee has the potential to do the same thing. But I contend that such is bad for the nation. As the age old phrase goes, “We are a nation of laws, not men.” A personality driven presidency will lead us down a path to unimportance. Does anybody study classics anymore? When Roman Emperors started worrying more about being Emperor than what to do with the job, it all sort of fell apart.

Apparently, This Blog Wields More Power Than We Thought…

I was quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune over the weekend saying that John McCain needed to specifically repudiate the anti-Catholic rantings of televangelist John Hagee who endorsed him last week. Jonathon Martin reports on an AP interview with McCain which quotes McCain:

“We’ve had a dignified campaign, and I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee’s, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics,” McCain said.

Could there be an advisory job in the offing?

Elsewhere…

Nicholas Kristof of the NYTimes is a left-wing hack, but some things go beyond the pale. He writes:

Yet the most monstrous bigotry in this election isn’t about either race or sex. It’s about religion.

Yet the piece NEVER mentions Mitt Romney or Mormonism. He rightly decries the Obama-Muslim pseudo-connection and the McCain-Hagee thing, but completely ignores the most blatant religious bigotry in the entire primary season. I wonder, does the selective opposition to some bigotry, while ignoring other bigotry, not of itself constitute bigotry?

Over at EFM, Charles Mitchell looks at E.J. Dionne’s analysis of the Religious Right. I, like Charles, do not think the Religious Right needs to move left to correct itself, but it has a lot of thinking and work to do, or Dionne will be absolutely correct about its demise.

Interesting Tidbits…

What Romney’s campaign meant to Mormonism. This thing is going to send Al Mohler’s head spinning. My view is very different that Mohler’s - Mormons already are a legitimate part of the American religious landscape. We need to start competing on genuine religious ground, not through attempts to “delegitimize” them.

R&E Newsweekly analyzes religion and the race for the past week. (Yawn - but hey! It’s PBS)

Reuters wonders if Evangelicals are “in play.” Not like they think they are.

Tony Blair to teach at Yale on “Faith and globalization.” I wonder if they would let me audit just to argue?
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