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.
Sphere: Related Content

1 Comment »

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.
Sphere: Related Content

1 Comment »

APOLOGY

A formal justification or defense.

Now that it is all over in terms of Romney’s presidential candidacy, I want to take a little time and explain myself. We have endeavored on this blog to be factual and reasonable, and struggled as best as possible to keep personal feeling, and religious expression, out of the argument. We did so because that is the way we thought this issue should be approached.

I have, however, been involved in enough “conversations” over the last couple of years that were anything but reasonable, so what I am going to offer here is is a more personal and heartfelt discussion than is typical for this blog. I ask our audience’s indulgence. I want to make three essential arguments.

The “Christian” Question

If any one thing has landed me in hot water with my orthodox Christian brethren more than any other, it is my willingness to call Mormons “Christian” - albeit with adjectives attached. As someone formally trained for Christian ministry, that is to say having attended seminary, I seem to attract special criticism since “I should know better.”

Indeed I do, were I in seminary class, I would certainly know not to refer to Mormons as “Christian;” it would be a fast road to a low grade. But such definitional insistence is a small part of what is the largest lesson I learned in seminary. We are not nearly as smart as we think we are.

Now don’t get me wrong, every capable Christian needs to put as much energy as possible into a rational, thoughtful and deep understanding of their faith. But after spending many years pursuing that, and being very confident in my personal deeply Calvinistic leanings, I have found that they are, in terms of what I expect from my religion, incomplete. There simply is a whole heck of a lot more to this thing than just the intellectual formulations of what I believe.

To put it slightly differently, we are finite created beings of limited capability. God is infinite, creative, and ultimately beyond my capability to understand. Therefore, while I am to study and be confident, that must be tempered with the limitations of my capabilities. God can decide to let someone into heaven whether they meet the criteria I have established or not - in the end it is His decision, not mine. Humility is the order of the day.

The term “Christian” is, obviously derived from the term “Christ.” Technically, “Christ” is an office or title, not the name of a historical figure. In strictest terms, to be a “Christian” one must simply believe that the messianic prophecies of Jewish tradition have been fulfilled. Again, in the strictest of terms, you do not even have to think Jesus of Nazareth is “the Christ,” you just have to think someone was. Well, Mormons not only believe that the messiah has come, they, like me, believe he was Jesus of Nazareth.

This is where it starts to get a little trickier. Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure. He was a real person that walked on the planet, and there was only one. Therefore, all the discussion about “they worship a different Jesus than we do,” just does not make any sense. That is a statement rooted in our intellectual understanding of who Jesus is, NOT any historical fact. In fact, such an assertion places the theology ahead of the history - and yet, the historical fact of Jesus is the only thing that gives the gospel narrative any actual meaning - otherwise it is just a story.

Now it is true, Mormons have a very different understanding about the historical figure of Jesus than we do. But they believe the same historical figure was the messiah that I do. That is sufficient to qualify for the term “Christian.” Any other assertion lacks the humility that my seminary education mandated of me.

I strongly believe that adjectives are a necessary addition to the term “Christian” because of our radically different assertions about Jesus. To put it metaphorically, Mormons are in the family, but they are cousins, not brothers and sisters. But this also means they are to be accorded the respect, affection, and welcome of family. We may not be intimate, but we are related.

When it comes to this argument, I cannot help but note that Jesus spent His time with publicans and sinners, and generally avoided the company of the religious officialdom of the day. You see the officials were busy arguing about whether it was a sin to heal the lame on Sunday. Perhaps an interesting question, but Jesus found it a bit silly when confronted with a lame person that needed healing. He just did the job.

Bigotry Hurts The Bigot Far More Than The Object Of The Bigotry

I am not one of those “Love everybody equally, we are all God’s children types.” There is such a thing as evil and it is to be despised, hated, and destroyed. There is such a thing as just anger. “Anger is unChristian” is just liberal claptrap. But it is an idea rooted in truth, but carried to an extreme.

Negative emotion - anger, hatred, fear - are destructive when they are not based in reality. Those emotions were created in us and they are reflective of God’s image in us. But if we are afraid when there is nothing truly to fear, the fear rots our souls. If we are angry when we have not truly been wronged, the anger is a destructive force on our own minds. If we hate that which is not truly evil, then the hatred eats us from the inside out.

“Bigotry” is a term used when negative emotions such as hatred or loathing are aimed at people that are not truly deserving. The classic example, of course, is the historical treatment of people of dark skin color. Their only “crime” was to be black. We aimed our negative emotion at them for the silliest of reasons, skin color.

When it comes to Mormons the essential question is, “Are they worthy of our negative emotions?” If they are not, then the animus we see so often against them from orthodox Christian circles is a destructive force inside of those circles. As I see it, the negative emotion from traditional Christians towards Mormons is rooted in three basic areas. The first is the belief that Mormon doctrine is a “perversion.” The second is fear of the historical artifact of Mormon polygamous practice. The third is territorial.

The perversion argument is just silly. They are, in my belief and understanding, wrong, but that is very different from perverse. If one were to devise some sort of scale of wrongness Mormons would be a lot more wrong about their beliefs than say Pentecostals who I also believe get quite a bit wrong, but it is still just wrong. The term perversion is usually justified by the claim that Mormons lead people down a “false path.” Well, so do a lot of other sects that I think are wrong, it is always a “false path” unless it is my path. Nope, this argument is trotted out as intellectual cover for the deeper emotional responses.

Polygamous practice WAS a justification for prosecution, not persecution which is what happened, but prosecution against Mormons. I think polygamy is a destructive practice to the foundations of our society. But they don’t do it any more. It is artifact, not fact, history, not current. We can no more hold it against them now than the Muslims can hold the Crusades against us.

Sadly, because the persecution of polygamous Mormons resulted in their migration west (Who knows how they would have reacted had they simply been prosecuted under the laws of the land, which is what would have been the proper response) and the Mormon migration is such a hugely significant factor in the development of our nation, the Mormon polygamous past will always remain a front and center historical lesson taught Americans. We just need to learn to tell the difference between history and now.

But it is fear of competition that I think really underlies the negative emotion that is aimed at Mormons. We are in a battle for converts, it is as simple as that. How does one win such a battle? Well, when you have factors like historical polygamy at play, delegitimizing your competition can be a pretty effective means.

There is only one problem, such delegitimization involves stirring up all those negative emotions and when they are unfounded, as they are in this case, they are a rot, not a tool. Therefore, I see this as no way to win this argument.

This is a more philosophical and emotional form of the same argument I have made from the beginning of this blog. If Evangelicals did not vote for Romney solely on the basis of his religious affiliation, they were serving only to squelch their own political voice.

Competition In One Field - Cooperation In Another

The other problem with the whole delegitimization thing is that it requires one demonize one’s competition - one eliminates the possibility of making an ally of them in situations where such an alliance might be useful.

Consulting, the business I am in, is a funny business. Your product is your knowledge. Sharing that knowledge is, in essence, giving your product away. In my career I am often asked to participate, voluntarily, in industry associations, something that gives an entire industry the benefit of my knowledge without compensation. But here is what I have learned. In working in those association, I build alliances that would call on me for compensated work a other times. What appears to be a little short term business loss, has resulted in some extraordinary long term gains.

Also, consider that the members of such associations are business competitors. They are all trying to sell the same widgets to the same customer base. What is in it for them to help their competition? The answer is straightforward - there are many areas where cooperation makes better business for both of them. For example. working with your competition to defeat a tariff bill results in lower cost raw materials for both of you, increasing both companies profitability. Moreover, if only one of you worked the tariff bill, what is to prevent them from making tariffs apply when you import, but not them? Now cooperation looks even more necessary, doesn’t it?

And that, in the end, is the bottom line when it comes to my actions in this election cycle. I am in religious competition with Mormons. To all my Mormon friends and readers, I pray for you daily and hope you will convert - as I am sure you do for me. But there is much mutual benefit that we can recognize from political cooperation.

This blog has never been, and never will be as long as I am associated with it, about justifying Mormonism, or traditional Christianity for that matter. It is about political cooperation between the two religions - for that I do not need to apologize.
Sphere: Related Content

6 Comments »

Just assume, for a moment, that lightning strikes and John McCain selects Mitt Romney as his running mate. Would The Question rise up to bite them both?

We’re not seeing much lately among the punditry suggesting a lot of concern about that. Joe Gandelman, at The Moderate Voice, says McCain has been making interesting noises about Romney as a veep nominee:

The Republican party’s Presidential nominee to be, Senator John McCain, is now dropping hints that, yes, he would indeed seriously consider his former nomination rival former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as his running mate. . . . it would make sense. It would be perhaps the first Republican ticket in many years containing two media savvy politicos who know how to talk to the TV camera but also come across well on the TV camera.

Gandelman’s source is this Boston Herald Story, in which McCain is quoted as saying that

the former Bay State governor ran an effective primary campaign and is a rising star in national politics.

“Millions of Republicans voted for him,” McCain said during a swing through New Hampshire. “He’s earned himself a place in the future of the Republican Party.”

Notably, Gandelman lists the “downsides” to such a ticket, and . . . none of them includes Romney’s Mormonism!

Similarly, the CBS News blog (to which Gandelman links) says Romney’s attacks on McCain during the primary races could come back to haunt Romney. I don’t really think so, but again, like Gandelman, CBS does not mention Romney’s faith as a reason he’d be a bad choice.

What is going on here? Several possibilities come to mind.

First, these pundits could simply be clueless. Maybe the elephant in the room suddenly disappeared, but I don’t think so - not after 20 months of the news media talking about him incessantly.

Next, maybe the pundits are right - or a little bit right. Psychologically, maybe it doesn’t bother hard-core Evangelicals as much for the veep nominee to belong to a faith that upsets them so. That’s illogical, but I’m talking about psychology. Even though the vice president really is a heartbeat from the presidency, most of us don’t really believe the unthinkable will happen.

And yet . . . and yet . . . McCain needs to do what he must to win. If he really thinks he needs all the conservative votes he can get, then why would he risk alienating hard-core Evangelicals by choosing Romney?

Then again, those people are already about as alienated as can be. A “M & M” ticket would presumably not make anything worse.

As you may be able to tell, I am frankly undecided as to whether The Question would haunt a McCain-Romney ticket. What do you think?

John Takes A Stab: My off-the-cuff answer is “depends on Huckabee.” I am speaking metaphorically here. Let me break that down a bit. Most Evangelicals would have voted for Romney if there was not something they perceived as a more viable alternative in the race. There is a level of unease concerning Mormonism at the highest levels of government (no logic here, it does not seem to exist at the lower levels - it is a symbolism over substance thing) that can be overcome, relatively easily, unless someone specifically manipulates that unease, in the primaries that someone was Mike Huckabee.

That would be troubling for a Romney veep slot save for one fact - no one on the Democratic side comes with sufficient Evangelical credentials to pull off that manipulation. We are watching Obama’s religious credibility evaporate before our very eyes, and Clinton’s went away about a decade ago. No Evangelical leader worth the title is going to say a word at this point, they know the damage this whole thing has wrought.

If Romney is the veep choice, there will be rumblings - something like aftershocks from a major earthquake. There might be some that cause a little damage, but nothing fatal. The worst is over, the significant damage done. My guess is the only people that will pay attention at this point are political junkies.
Sphere: Related Content

7 Comments »

Well, as things have turned out, Barack Obama seems to have brewed the perfect politico-religious storm. Our email and comments, and even leftie commentators, albeit in an entirely different fashion, seem to want to draw great distinctions between the religious perils that have fallen on Obama and those that fell on Mitt Romney.

There are distinctions to be very sure, but do those distinctions truly make a difference?  With the very notable exception of what we mentioned on Friday, the storm that currently surrounds Obama is about what his pastor, not he, said. Now, his pastor was an official part of his campaign, but name a campaign yet where someone has not been booted for saying something egregiously stupid. You fire them, you move on (think John McCain and the John Hagee endorsement), but that does not seem to be happening here. Yes, it’s true that Obama, contrary to Romney, invited religion into his campaign instead of simply campaigned as a religious man, but most candidates invoke religion in the course of the campaign. Circumstances forced Romney to be hyper-sensitive; Obama’s statements are standard fare  (save those we cited Friday, which amazingly do not seem to be at the center of this storm); Romney was the exception - and what is happening to Obama proves Romney’s wisdom on that account.

I have a real problem with the guilt-by-religious-association aspects of what is happening to Obama right now.  Now, understand something, Obama is the last man I want to be president of the United States, but this blog is about the proper role of religion in politics, and that is a bi-partisan thing.  The presumption is that because Obama’s long-time pastor said these things, Obama must be like that.  Now, I have no idea what Obama is like in these fields, I am not paying that much attention, but I do want evidence of what Obama thinks - not his pastor.  Heck, I disagree with my pastor about 65% of the time; my denomination, taken as a whole, is on the almost opposite end of the political spectrum from me - that is one of the great things about religion in American.

We cannot condemn a candidate for something one of his associates said, or on the basis of religious affiliation - it is about the candidate, simple as that.  If there were statements of Obama agreeing, we would be in a different situation, but so far, I have not seen that evidence.

The second point I want to make is this:  Remember in the old days when everybody thought this was going to some down to Mitt v. Hillary?  We spent a lot of time wondering what the general was going to look like on the religious front.  Lowell and I both felt that it was going to be very, very ugly in comparison to the primary.   I think this incident is proving our point for us.  This whole thing stinks to me of the Clinton smear machine.  Obama’s pastor’s beliefs have been out there in public since this whole thing started.  We mentioned the radically near-racist nature of the church more than a year ago.  The timing, the way the story is staying alive after the pastors resignation from the campaign, all of it, smells of manipulation of the press, and nobody does that better than the Clintons.

If this attack is allowed to stand, whether the Clintons are behind it or not, though I strongly suspect they are,  it will become a legitimate weapon in future political arsenals.  No one, Evangelical, Protestant, Mormon, Catholic, or otherwise, will want that to be the case.  There is not a single religion that cannot be dug into without unearthing something that can be used to smear a candidate.

The nation does not need this, and might become something else altogether if it goes unchallenged.

Lowell adds:  Very briefly, we have stated on this blog since Day 1 that we don’t think a candidate’s religion should matter, except in the most extreme circumstances.  I think the three-point test advanced by John Mark Reynolds in August 2006 can be useful here: 

First, the religious beliefs of the candidate should be held by a significant number of people and by a group willing to defend them (even if unsuccessfully) in a rational manner.

Second, the group in question should not have religious claims that will naturally lead to horrific, or at least far out, public policy.

Third, the group should have a long track record of generally playing by republican rules in areas where it is dominant. No group is perfect, but the Presidency is too powerful a prize to trust to a new group that might have secret authoritarian leanings.

We don’t know enough to know whether Obama’s church meets these tests, but I have a strong hunch it does.  The key is that Prof. Reynolds is talking about the religious beliefs of a candidate, not the statements of others who are members or leaders of the candidate’s church. 

On the first test, the Trinity United Church of Christ to which Obama belongs is “the largest congregation in the whole United Church of Christ.“  Yes, Obama’s particular congregation does appear to be very afro-centric, which is disturbing or off-putting to many (including me), but it is no small, whacky sect.

I think it passes the second test easily.  This is from the Trinity mission statement:

Trinity United Church of Christ has been called by God to be a congregation that is not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that does not apologize for its African roots! As a congregation of baptized believers, we are called to be agents of liberation not only for the oppressed, but for all of God’s family. We, as a church family, acknowledge, that we will, building on this affirmation of “who we are” and “whose we are,” call men, women, boys and girls to the liberating love of Jesus Christ, inviting them to become a part of the church universal, responding to Jesus’ command that we go into all the world and make disciples!

I don’t see any “horrific” or “far out” public policy coming from that.

As for the third test, I don’t see any “secret authoritarian leanings.”  People might not like the tone of the church’s mission statement, but that is unrelated to Obama’s fitness for the presidency.

Yes, we as voters can ask all the questions we want about Jeremiah Wright’s outrageous anti-American statements, and whether Obama agrees with those rantings — but who really thinks he does?  Absent any evidence to the contrary, once Obama repudiates Wright’s statements, I think the matter is over.  Similarly, once McCain repudiated Hagee, that question went away.  And , all Romney had to do about the LDS Church’s former policy on African-Americans was to make it clear he did not agree with the policy and was overjoyed when it ended.  End of questions.  As John says, we need to view religious guilt by association with a very jaundiced eye.
Sphere: Related Content

4 Comments »

It was not that long ago that we made a virtual sport of puncturing Huckabee’s claims to divine oversight, approval, and guidance of his campaign. We have, to date, largely ignored Obama’s religious issues because, to date, it was about the church he belonged to, not him. Well, that is rapidly changing:

Barack Obama has put his religion back into the headlines, trumpeting the power and salvation of faith and asking a church audience in South Carolina to help him become “an instrument of God” and join him in creating “a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

Obama has long been trying to capitalize on messianic-type energy to compel his campaign forward, but this is the first time I am aware that that he has claimed actual prophetic status. What was bad for Huck is bad for Obama. I am not sure I need to cover the ground too much here; we have been over it so much. But I do one observation and a hypothetical.

The first is to compare and contrast the news coverage of all this. Obama’s church is now getting a going over that is not that dissimilar, though much less intense, than what Romney’s church did. Now, much as it pains me to say anything nice about a Democrat, he does not deserve this anymore than Romney did. At least until he crossed the Huck line in these claims. What is extraordinary, though, is how much coverage this utterance from Obama has gotten compared to when Huck said the same things repeatedly. I guess if you claim divine intervention from the majority religion, its not news, but from something a little different like Obama’s church it is?

And now the hypothetical. Imagine Huck v Obama. Two men, running for president, both claiming to be God’s best representative. What is the net result of such an election battle? I can promise you it is not good, not good at all. Religious war comes to mind, at least rhetorical war. It would be bad for politics, bad for the churches involved, and bad for the nation in general. That’s why the common convention has been to avoid this kind of stuff.

I find myself shaking my head in amazement - and praying for some wisdom for our candidates.
Sphere: Related Content

2 Comments »