This past weekend has seen two stories evolve that illustrate to me that the American people may be willful, sometimes bigoted, often prejudiced; they can be narrow minded and sometimes thoughtless, but they are not dumb.

The first story concerns Obama’s “small town” comments of last week. I was offended by the reflection of Karl Marx and the denigration of religion inherent in the comments. As the outrage has evolved through the weekend, it is more about the insult offered small town America than it is intellectual vapidity, but outrage has emerged nonetheless. America gets it when they are being played for dumb, and they do not like it.

The other story that reflects the general intelligence of the American public is the raiding of the Warren Jeff’s polygamous compound in Texas of several days ago and the ensuing coverage. That story is better than 10 days old now and this post from a very small blog is the first one I have seen that even attempted to make any Mitt Romney related political comment out of it. Of course it is in the negative, and wrongly so.

The press coverage of the Texas events has been uneven in terms of its identification of the compound as “Mormon,” “breakaway,” or simply labeling it “polygamous sect,” but it seems clear to me that most Americans have gotten the message that this bust has little to do with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and certainly that is has nothing to do with Mitt Romney.

Interestingly, anti-Mormon sentiment was an undeniable factor in the primary campaign. I have always thought the root of that sentiment was ignorance about what the modern CJCLDS looks like. There does appear to be more at play than that.
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This blog often defies characterization.  We seem liberal to the extent that we want to lessen religio-speak in campaigns, at least from their current levels, but we are rock solid conservative when it comes to our values.  To meet our mission we have even defended the right of Obama’s pastor to make his abysmal statements , even though he makes many purely political statements under the guise of religion.  But there are limits.

Those of us that remember the dark days of potential world-wide communist domination remember one of Marx’s fundamental maxims: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  Marx is long dead, as is communism in large part, but that idea survives today and defines the hard left.  Which means that Barak Obama defined himself yesterday when he said:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

If that is not a restatement of the Marxist ideal, I do not know what is!  Worse yet, it is the antithesis of the America ideal for religion and politics.  In this statement Obama, literally sees government as the true savior and religion as the false substitute.  I need to take a deep breath here.

It is hard to know where to begin with something like this.  This statement is so charged, and so wrong on so many levels (philosophically, historically, theologically, constitutionally. . .) that I could go on for hours.   It is the weekend and I do not want to get that deep.  Fortunately, this mode of thought has been so analyzed over the last century precisely because of Marx that if you google around a bit, you will read everything you need and even more you don’t.

I will limit my brief comments to political.  We shall here discover whether Obama really is the press’ golden boy.  If this statement stays under-reported and does not reach the general public in overdoses, we can conclude that the media is in the bag for him.  You know all that stuff we have been looking at here over the last couple of years about liberal Evangelicals and Democrats wooing the religious vote, and so forth.  Well, that all should, at this point, be swirling the bowl.

Even the religious left believe their faith is real and valuable, not merely a substitute for government, not some construct designed to mollify an otherwise dissatisfied citizenry.

This statement is also fascinating on a social/cultural level and it ties in deeply with whole Oprah phenomena, but I don’t want to get into that right now.  Think about it though.

Spread the word on this one, dear reader.  A McCain presidency looks more likely every time you do.  And frankly, while Mr. McCain was not my personal choice in nominees, he is looking better and better by the minute with opposition like this.

Lowell adds:  The problem is, the majority of the legacy news media sees “the heartland” the same way Obama does.  It will be interesting to see how the story is played.
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The “Christian” press and McCain…

The American Baptist Press interview John McCain’s pastor:

Asked if Christians should be pleased if McCain is the next president, Yeary said: “I will be pleased. I trust him. He will seek wise counsel, spiritual counsel. This man is devoted to his country — there’s no maybe about it.”

But don’t expect McCain to talk as easily about his faith as the current President Bush. In that regard, the candidate is more like Bush’s father, who is also an Episcopalian.

While Southern Baptists have a reputation of speaking easily about their evangelical beliefs, Episcopalians are, by reputation, more reserved. McCain’s style may be more a reflection of his Episcopal upbringing than his recent church affiliation.

“His personal history means he’s not going to use ‘the language of Zion’” to talk about his faith, Yeary said, referring to the biblical terminology typical of evangelicals. But, he noted, “a great understanding” of McCain’s religious beliefs can come from reading the candidate’s autobiography, Faith of My Fathers.

Frankly, I find the reporting a little creepy. The story seems to be saying, “It’s OK, he is one of us, even if he doesn’t really act like it.” In other words, it affirms religious identity politics.

What I would rather hear about is how John McCain, like the elder Bush, and frankly the current Bush (I grow weary of people portraying our current president as some sort of Evangelical fanatic, he has admitted to his faith, said things like “I pray,” and “I read the Bible,” but come on, that is hardly the kind of religio-speak everyone seems to want to say he has engaged in) follow in the great tradition on American of faith in political office. That, of course, being to hold their faith dearly, but quietly, and when it comes to their job, without the exclusion of others with other faiths and beliefs.

When it comes to evaluating our office-seekers we simply cannot afford to judge them based on religious “imprimaturs. “Just for fun (well to check the spelling actually) I looked up that word and it carried the meaning I was looking for:

sanction or approval; support

But interestingly before that definition came this one:

an official license to print or publish a book, pamphlet, etc., esp. a license issued by a censor of the Roman Catholic Church.

In other words, quite by accident, I invoked a term that calls forth the image of days when the government required actual sanction of the church. You know, the very thing that both the Reformation and the American Revolution opposed.

Have we come full circle in America, and if so are we still America?

And While We are Talking About The Press . . .

The story that did not need to be written. Anybody that would want to read a story that is headlined that way would already know everything in the story. I am betting some reporter simply owed some words to some editor.

If You Want to Spend Some Money…

. . . and are still interested in Jeremiah Wright, you might want to check this out. I didn’t, there is no excuse.

Have A Great Weekend!
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There isn’t any real news today. That’s kind of a relief, since news about The Question tends to be discouraging.

But we do have some wonderful thoughts expressed by Andrew Ferguson in First Things. The entire piece is a must read, but here’s the conclusion:

“I don’t know anything about Lincoln’s religion,” a longtime friend, David Davis, remarked after Lincoln’s death, “and I don’t believe anybody knows anything about it.” Though Davis’ skepticism should give pause to more historians than it has, he overstated the case. We will never know for sure whether Lincoln held orthodox Christian beliefs, whether he believed in the Trinity, the divinity of Christ or his resurrection, the life everlasting, the forgiveness of sins, the inerrant word of God as revealed in the Old Testament or the New.

But perhaps the country has benefited from not knowing. The uncertainty has made Lincoln our common property, whoever we are, from Robert Ingersoll to Cardinal Mundelein to Nettie Maynard. It may be indeed that Lincoln’s is the only kind of religious expression that will travel in a free country like ours. His religion has lasted a century and a half and has appealed to believers of all kinds, and to skeptics too, exactly because of its generality. Yet it still means something definable and concrete: The country, Lincoln believed, is the carrier of a precious cargo, a proposition that is the timeless human truth, and the survival of this principle will always be of providential importance. We assent to Lincoln’s creed, wide open as it is, when we think of ourselves as Americans.

(HT: Hugh Hewitt.) This seems like such an obvious point. It is both astonishing and disheartening that so many smart people who should know better either reject or ignore it.

Consider: Today, Lincoln would very likely not even get the Republican nomination. Is it so hard to imagine certain Evangelical leaders telling the world that they are deeply disturbed over Lincoln’s failure to profess publicly that he has accepted Jesus Christ?  That they do not feel comfortable supporting him?  Not just any acceptance of Christ would do for candidate Lincoln, of course — he would need to adopt only the Evangelical version of what Jesus was and is like.

Why, such folks might decide to vote for a smooth-talking former Baptist preacher instead, primarily because they simply feel more comfortable about that candidate.

You must admit, dear readers, it is something to think about.
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We reported on Monday about the anti-Mitt for Veep effort. Well, one of the organizers of that effort took to the internet to attack, quite directly, Mormons. (Thanks to many readers that have pointed us to this.) He starts with the old “some of my best friends are Mormons” shtick then says:

This background is furnished to establish the degree of shock I experienced from the hatred directed toward me by the Mormon community as a result of the NO MITT advertisement our PAC placed in an Arizona newspaper stating the reasons we believe Mitt Romney is unfit to be picked by Senator John McCain as his running mate. Our ad simply pointed out that Mitt Romney, for convenience or other reasons, has changed his position on central issues such as abortion. The ad never mentioned his association with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and this was not an issue to our PAC or the signers of the full page ad.

Methinks he doth protest too much, but then, this thing as gotten so psychologically twisted that it is quite feasible that these people no longer admit even to themselves that religion plays a role. In the first place, in his preamble, none of what he cites is a presidential contest and we long ago have seen that the game gets VERY different in a presidential race. Secondly, we have demonstrated over and over on this blog that the “flip-flop” charge, particularly when combined with claims of deceit, is code for “Mormon.” We even have a Huckabee campaign staffer on record as overtly admitting (note to self: we still need to publish that interview) that code, and the Joel Belz’ World Magazine piece which attempts to establish a connection between Mormon thought an a predilection to deceit.  (Speaking of World - despite their role, via the Belz piece, of creating cover for a lot of the religious dust up in the Republican campaign - they now seem to sound downright reasonable.  Of course, much hinges on how the Evangelical unity they seem to want would form.)

Then there is the extraordinary nature of this opposition when Romney is one of numerous people being considered by McCain, with no evidence from McCain that Romney has a better chance than anyone else, though Romney seems more active than most in seeking the slot. As we demonstrated on Monday this is an opposition born of something other than political sensibility. There is little I know of that can account for this level of animus that something akin to religious levels of devotion.

Now, having said that, William Murray also says this:

Our NO MITT petition site on the Internet gave those who signed the petition an opportunity to give a short personal message to Senator McCain as to why they did not want Mitt Romney as Vice President. Individuals used this opportunity to post hateful and bigoted anti-evangelical messages at the site that I cannot reprint here. At one point a volunteer had to work full time to cull out those messages that were too offensive to leave up. We blocked the server at BYU in Utah and the number of offensive messages declined. In the culling process some messages that were not offensive were removed as well, our volunteers did the best they could with the volume.

Shame on any Mormon (perhaps I am overstepping my bounds here, but I think I have earned it) that has engaged in such activity. You help yourselves not at all by such actions. You undermine the efforts of reasonable people to solve this problem with such efforts.

Lowell: I agree that if any Mormons did post “hateful and bigoted anti-evangelical messages,” they should be ashamed.

But I’m from Missouri on this one. I’d like to see some evidence. So far in this religio-political presidential campaign cycle the evidence we have seen does not support such bile coming from the Mormon side of the question. In my mind there is a lot of reason to doubt William Murray’s version of events.

At least some Evangelicals have the common sense to back away from this mess, although they should have had the sense to not get into it to begin with.

Some Interesting Stuff To Read…

You just have to love a book review that starts this way:

The naked public square has been hung with paraments, and those who preferred it unadorned have not quite known what to make of it. Even before controversy erupted over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s jeremiads, 2008’s presidential candidates had kicked up the level of God-talk notches previously unknown. For the most part, secular commentators in the press and academy have shown themselves to be well out of their depth even when addressing their own religious traditions, and the political naivete displayed by religious commentators has only reinforced Burke’s famous dictum that “politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.”

The review is of a book that looks at citations of scripture in political speech. Sounds very interesting.

An on-line magazine devotes an issue to the question: “Is there a religious test in politics?” I have not had time to get through all of this, and I find it fascinating that it comes out pf the Jeremiah Wright controversy, not the Romney controversy, but what I have seen of it, particularly the historical background stuff, is worthy information.

Politics…

Hmmmm…. While I tend to agree with the thesis, I find the stridency a bit off-putting. (HT: Evangelical Ecologist)

Pure Politics…

Barone does the numbers as only Barone can. Romney was not beaten as badly as perhaps you think.
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We have only one observation for today. It comes from Newsweek’s On Faith, where Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary , notes:

“A member of Trinity United Church of Christ, the church once led by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright and where Senator Obama is a member, told me there are “spies” among them in the pews, strangers who take notes during the service and try to record the message.”

She decries the practice, asking, “Is nothing sacred?”

A very provocative question in an election season when the sacred and the political have been confused, combined, and profaned like never before.

There is nothing wrong with taking notes of sermons. John tells me that doing so is very common in the Evangelical world, and if you had attended last weekend’s General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints you would have seen a whole lot of note-taking going on.

But note-taking is not spying, and if that is what is going on in Obama’s Chicago church, I don’t like it. I don’t like people going into churches and monitoring what is said, either.  I don’t like anything that chills or intimidates free religious expression in its purest form — and what is a sermon, if not that?

Even so, Thistlewaite’s complaint raises a more troubling issue. Arguably, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright invited close scrutiny by mixing politics and religion. Yes, I understand that political-social preaching is traditional in African-American churches. But Wright took such preaching to an entirely different level, it seems to me.

In other words, it is generally fair to expect others (including reporters and opposition researchers from opposing campaigns) to keep their noses out of the candidate’s church.

But it’s not fair for a candidate to talk about that church’s profound influence on his politics, as Obama did with his membership at Trinity, and then expect no one to pay close attention to the church. If you’ve read Dreams from My Father you know that Obama devotes an entire chapter to the Reverend Wright’s impact on him.

Nor is it fair for a preacher to sermonize the way Wright did and then expect no one to question his words.

And it is not fair for Mike Huckabee to run as the “Christian Candidate” and then complain that the news media improperly focuses on his faith. In fact, that complaint is utterly ridiculous.

So Ms. Thistlewaite’s complaint rings a bit hollow. It’s a tired old saying, but never was it more true than it is here: You can’t have it both ways.

John’s brief thought:  I am struck by the contrast between what we have the right to do and what common sense dictates that we do.  Long ago, we asked Hugh Hewitt, who is among other things a constitutional scholar, why there was no case law on Article VI.  He response was that it was so fundamental to our nation, and such an obvious notion that people simply did not ever challenge it.  If I recall correctly, “self-regulating” was his term of choice.

A pastor has the right to political statement in the pulpit.  A politician has the right to be profoundly shaped by his faith.   But the exercise of those rights invites precisely the kind of thing we are discussing here.

But, it is argued, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther exercised his right and look what good came of it.  Indeed, but Dr. King never sought office.  And, I would argue that Dr. King was a far more effective leader for his cause by virtue of his lack of governmental office, and the same lack on the part of his constituency, than he could possible have been otherwise.  Once one enters into the actual business of government, whether by seeking office personally, or by sending disciples to do the same, compromise and cooperation become the order of the day - not ideological purity.

That is why it makes so much sense to maintain the reasonable separation between church and state that we do and have.   What happens as a result of “spies?”  Well, eventually the pulpit will compromise to avoid controversy; ideological purity dies.  The church is an institution designed to preserve ideological purity; this reduces the church to just another arm of policy.

In a diverse America, wrong as I think Jeremiah Wright is, I want him in a pulpit preaching.  And if one of his congregants, in the case of Barak Obama, seeks office, and if Mr. Obama has taken the lessons of that pulpit to heart , then those lessons now have an opportunity to become part of American governance.  But if Mr. Obama claims those lessons as a part of his qualification for office, then those lessons become subject to the compromising forces of our government, and that which made that church unique and pure dies.

We may have the right to all of this, but exercising our rights can be a bad idea. 
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