Some “Light” Holiday Reading
The holidays are in fullest swing as far as we are concerned, but the “pile of stuff” is getting deep so we are going to pass it on to you – much with minimal comment. Keep enjoying your holidays!
About Idaho . . .
Wednesday, we called to task some guy that is running for Governor in Idaho for invoking his Mormonism in the race. Looks like the LDS church has joined us. That’s the end of that issue.
Spotlight on Evangelicals . . .
Sometimes I think we are our own worst enemies. Just when we start to get some press, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, about the burgeoning intellectualism in Evangelicalism, we do things that seem to defy that. Our media produces fear mongering pieces about very real problems instead of helping people to get their heads around the depths of the problem and how to combat it – or at least producing something a bit more sober. We reduce a faith system to a media image thing.
Some things to remember – As Ryan Anderson points out at The Corner, writing about a NYTimes Magazine article in the same vein as the WSJ piece, and Matt Anderson considers about the WSJ piece, there is nothing really new about intellectualism in Evangelical circles. Not to mention that much of the intellectual work from the left is, well, bunk.
We seem to be at war with ourselves. Even leftie Garrison Keillor is in on the act. Although some wonder if he is kidding.
In the first centuries, the church found itself with a rich array of religious writing. Gnosticism was a heresy produced a great deal of writing. The popular conception is that the early church repressed gnostic writings. While they early church wrote much against these heresies … the repression charge is somewhat hard to sustain given that the extant surviving gnostic literature is found in monastic libraries. The Early church theologians and monastics did not discard these writings because while much in them was heretical and wrong … you could find in them valuable alternative ways of writing about or thinking about the Gospel and God. To put it crudely, they panned and filtered these for the gold they contained discarding the dross. This might be a better analogy when approaching another tradition. Let, “Look for the gold” be your motto.
We’ve thought for a long time that the usefulness of the term and category “Evangelical” was about over. This seems to be proof. Everybody wants to appropriate it for their own, which means it means or stands for nothing other than what the current speaker wants it to. That’s a pretty useless word.
The Political/Religious Landscape . . .
Some sins continue to haunt, and should.
Meaningless at this juncture, but fun to consider.
Somehow a feature story in Newsweek disqualifies one as “unknown.”
Interesting, but possibly problematic in the future.
You know, I was born in Mississippi, I wonder what this says about me? (Pure aside involving the University of Mississippi [Ole Miss] where I was born: go see The Blind Side before the holidays are over – please. You’ll thank me.)
What’s going on with some once great political sites? Red State and Free Republic have gone over some conservative edge. Red State has gone Tea Party “purgist” and Free Republic? Well, their hatred of Romney is religious in its intensity, if not at its root.
This’ll never happen – but I will bet you even money that places like the aforementioned Red State and Free Republic will start seeing conspiracy theories in it. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Lowell adds . . .
The LDS Church’s statement, which is clearly directed at Rex Rammell, deserves a couple of comments:
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is politically neutral and does not endorse or promote any candidate, party or platform. Accordingly, we hope that the campaign practices of political candidates would not suggest that their candidacy is supported by or connected to the church.
“The so-called ‘White Horse Prophecy’ is based on accounts that have not been substantiated by historical research and is not embraced as Church doctrine.”
(Emphasis added.) First, although I haven’t done any research, I think an official statement of this nature is unprecedented. It seems to me that the Church is actively protecting its image from those who would use it to their own ends. According to the article Rammell plans to go ahead with his meeting. I predict that the attendance of LDS members, which might not have been all that high anyway, will be down. The percentage of politically very extreme members – not representative of the overall U.S, membership at all – will still be quite high.
Second, the statement asks candidates to refrain from claiming not only that their campaigns are “supported by” the Church, but also that they are “connected to” the Church. That is quite significant. I take it to mean that the Church doesn’t want candidates running around emphasizing their LDS membership and implying that their candidacy is consistent with or supported by Church principles or doctrine. That’s exactly what Rammell tried to do, and I am one Mormon who is glad he did not get away with it. More about all this, and additional links, here.
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coltakashi on 28 Dec 2009 at 2:01 pm #
I concur with Lowell: I have never before seen the CJCLDS Church specifically repudiate a political candidate who was trying to use his Church membership to advance his political campaign, and that goes all the way back to when I was a college student interning with the Utah Republican Party chairman in 1972.
Not that the reaction is new. One of my law professors, Edwin Brown Firmage, featured a picture of Hugh B. Brown, his grandfather, in his campaign brochure, as one of his heroes, alongside Roy Wilkins, former head of the NAACP. Brown was actually a Democrat, and might have personally endorsed his graqndson’s run for Congress if he had still been alive. But Brown was also a Mormon apostle and former member of the First Presidency of the church, and Firmage was criticized by many Mormons for capitalizing on his relationship to Brown and the Church.
Firmage was also known in Utah for being a leader in the local opposition to the construction of enormous bases for the MX ICBM that would have covered half of Utah and Nevada. His most successful action was in persuading LDS President Spencer W. Kimball to issue a public statement opposing the deployment, that was a major factor in the newly elected Ronald Reagan’s decision to cancel the program. (During my five years at Strategic Air Command, one of the major preoccupations was figuring out alternative ways to use the MX ICBMs.) Despite prevailing on that crucial issue, which involved a lot of potential revenue for Utah’s economy, and getting explicit Church endorsement for his most well known political position, he lost his own election, even though Democrats have won that seat before and since.
Firmage actually wrote a short biography of his grandfather a few years later. He also coauthored with an LDS law professor at Creighton University in Omaha (a former student) a very fine book on the early legal history of the LDS Church, Zion in the Courts.
Association with the Church and a politician trumpeting that association are two different things. One of the earlier successful Democrats was K. Gunn McKay, a relative of long-time Mormon president David O. McKay, who didn’t have to point out his obvious relationship to a Church leader. Another was Wayne Owens, who after serving a term but losing reelection was called by the Church to serve as an LDS mission president in Canada, a sort of endorsement of him as a person but after the election. After Owens completed his three year term as mission president, he returned to Utah and was elected to Congress again.
Being LDS does not mean one cannot win statewide office in Idaho. Senator Crapo and Attorney General Wasden and even Larry Echohawk are examples. But running as a “Mormon candidate” is not a path to election.
Running as the Mormon « Federal Way Conservative on 28 Dec 2009 at 2:44 pm #
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