Article VI Blog

Some guy in Utah thinks Evangelicals will still be a problem for Romney in 2012.  It is not exactly a penetrating analysis and up until this week I would have been dismissive – but now I begin to wonder.  We alluded to the issue on Friday, but further discussion makes it worthy of deeper examination.

A little background – Romney’s religion will not overtly be a problem from the right side of the aisle in 2012.  Huckabee was too harshly chastised after he tried in Iowa last time for that to ever happen again.  As an overt issue on the right it was abandoned by New Hampshire.  Of course, on the left, all religion is an overt issue, but we are here concentrating on the primaries and specifically on Evangelicals.

However, chastising a prejudice does not necessarily eliminate it – it just forces it underground and into diferent guises.  Last time the “Mormons lie” meme fed the “flip-flop” charge which made Romney “inauthentic.”  We see the inauthenticity thing discussed a lot even now.  In the last week, a new discussion has arisen that could also develop as a guise for anti-Mormon sentiment amongst Evangelicals.

It starts with the a piece by Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in NRO last week on American Exceptionalism.

What do we, as American conservatives, want to conserve? The answer is simple: the pillars of American exceptionalism. Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth. These qualities are the bequest of our Founding and of our cultural heritage. They have always marked America as special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary.

[...]

To find the roots of American exceptionalism, you have to start at the beginning — or even before the beginning. They go back to our mother country. Historian Alan Macfarlane argues that England never had a peasantry in the way that other European countries did, or as extensive an established church, or as powerful a monarchy. English society thus had a more individualistic cast than the rest of Europe, which was centralized, hierarchical, and feudal by comparison.

It was, to simplify, the most individualistic elements of En­glish society — basically, dissenting low-church Protestants — who came to the eastern seaboard of North America. And the most liberal fringe of English political thought, the anti-court “country” Whigs and republican theorists such as James Harrington, came to predominate here. All of this made Amer­ica an outlier compared with England, which was an outlier compared with Europe. The U.S. was the spawn of English liberalism, fated to carry it out to its logical conclusion and become the most liberal polity ever known to man.

America was blessedly unencumbered by an ancien régime. Compared with Europe, it had no church hierarchy, no aristocracy, no entrenched economic interests, no ingrained distaste for commercial activity. It almost entirely lacked the hallmarks of a traditional post-feudal agrarian society. It was as close as you could get to John Locke’s state of nature. It was ruled from England, but lightly; Edmund Burke famously described English rule here as “salutary neglect.” Even before the Rev­olution, America was the freest country on earth.

These endowments made it possible for the Americans to have a revolution with an extraordinary element of continuity. Tocqueville may have been exaggerating when he said that Americans were able to enjoy the benefits of a revolution without really having one, but he wasn’t far off the mark. The remnants of old Europe that did exist here — state-supported churches, primogeniture, etc. — were quickly wiped out. Amer­icans took inherited English liberties, extended them, and made them into a creed open to all.

Exact renderings of the creed differ, but the basic outlines are clear enough. The late Seymour Martin Lipset defined it as liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics. The creed combines with other aspects of the American character — especially our religiousness and our willingness to defend ourselves by force — to form the core of American exceptionalism.

Good stuff this, so why is it problematic?  Well, first of all, I have to guess (we do not have pre-publication copies) that Mitt Romney’s soon to be released book, No Apology: The Case For American Greatness, is going to – with a title like that – in some way address similar ideas.  Secondly, our nation holds a very special place in Mormon thought, philosophy, and even theology.  Finally, since Lowry and Ponnuru’s piece, a number of leading Evangelical bloggers have been pointing out that American Exceptionalism is not a “Christian” ideal.

Matt Anderson objects to them “borrowing” religious language:

I am occasionally asked by folks how to help young evangelicals understand and sympathize with conservative political ideology.

Here’s a hint:

Don’t steal religious language to make the case for American exceptionalism, as Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru unfortunately do.

Ponnuru and Lowry’s piece is a tremendous example of the sort of one-eyed shut conservatism that has disenchanted many of my peers.  Their’s is a defense of the American creed, which they describe as a blend of “liberty, equality (of opportunity and respect), individualism, populism, and laissez-faire economics.”

Samuel Goldman finds them imprecise:

But the most serious problem is conceptual. Lowry and Ponnuru don’t distinguish between two ideas, one of which can be called American exceptionalism, the other American exclusivism.

Doug Wilson finds the idea idolatrous:

American exceptionalism is objectionable because it is a false religion, a false faith. It is a smooth and attractive idol, and probably the idol most likely to ensnare conservative evangelicals.

Boy there is a lot of semantics going on here – and a lot of semantic territoriality.  That is troubling, we are so busy arguing words and their meanings, and who gets to decide their meanings, that we are losing the central idea.  This is very reflective of the common debate, theologically, between Evangelicals and Mormons.  Given that, one has to wonder if this debate will not continue in force when Romney’s book is in general release in a couple of weeks.

It is important in these types of situations to focus on the central ideas on which we can all agree, so that is what I am going to do here.  First of all, everyone understands that we can hold our nation in front of our God and that such is idolatrous.  The Mormons I know, even with their deep faith in the special place America has in history as ordained by God, know that America is NOT God.  Any person of faith must guard against idolatry of all sorts, and this sort is no exception.

So what are the essential ideas that we can focus on and can agree upon?  Well, first of all, it cannot be denied that the Unites States of America is the most successful nation-state in history.  We have grown faster and larger than any other.  It cannot be denied that while imperfect, we have done more good for our citizenry and the world than any prior nation-state.  It is also inarguable that the varied religious nature of our citizenry is, to some extent, responsible for that latter fact.

It also cannot be denied that religion, and especially Christianity, has flourished in American like no place else on earth – and like no other religion in history – as matter of choice and free practice.

For Evangelicals, and those like us, who believe that God acts in history, we must conclude that God, to some extent, has ordained this special place in history that America has obtained.  This is a matter of reason.  It is fair for Evangelicals to say that American Exceptionalism is not biblical (and here the different canons of Orthodox and Mormon Christians is very important), but to say it is ungodly is to deny history and that God acts in it.  We can no more deny the exceptional nature of this nation than we can deny that the earth rotates around the sun (but then we did try to do that for a while as well.)

So argue the precise formulations of the statements if you will, but let us not lose focus on what really matters.  America is unique in history.  It will not last forever, but it is destined to have influence far beyond its existence.  Only Israel and the Roman Empire can claim the kind of historical significance that the United States is likely to claim when it is all said and done.  That uniqueness is worthy of our defense, and it is defending it that should unite us.

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I am currently reading a book entitled “Religion and American Politics from the Colonial Period to the Present,” edited by Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow.  It is an update of an academic level book written in the 1990’s.  Chapters on various topics, or more likely historical periods, are written by experts in the specifics.  It is a fascinating, if effortful read.  I am currently reading the chapter “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Min-Nineteenth Century” by Robert P. Swierenga who is a professor of history emeritus at Kent State and the A.C. Van Raalte Research Professor at the Van Raalte Institute of Hope College.  The chapter contained this fascinating paragraph:

Not only for the Dutch Calvinists but for all ethnoreligious groups, revivalism was the “engine” of political agitation. Evangelist Charles G. Finney began preaching revival in the mid-1820s throughout New England and its Yankee colonies in western New York. By 1831, religious enthusiasm had reached a fever pitch in the area, and mass conversions swept town after town. Church membership doubled and tripled, and large portions of the populace were reclaimed for Protestantism. Finney challenged his followers to pursue “entire sanctification” or perfectionism and to become Christian social activists. The converts first entered politics in the anti-Masonic movement in New York in 1826-1827. By the mid-1830s, the evangelicals entered national politics by opposing slavery, alcohol, and other social ills that they believed the Jackson administration condoned. Converts such as Theodore Dwight Weld became leaders in the antislavery movement. And in the 1840s and 1850s, revivalist regions of the country developed strong antislavery societies and voted Liberty, Whig, and later Republican. Ultimately, the allegiance of pietists (ed. note: “evangalicals”) to the Whig party led to its demise because the pietists put ethical goals, such as abolition of slavery, above party loyalty. The idea of a party system built on patronage and discipline was much stronger in Democrat than in Whig ranks. Evangelicals had a disproportionate share of antiparty men. In their estimation, popery, Masonry, and party were all threats to freedom of conscience and Christian principles. [emphasis added]

Did we see a similar phenomena in the last election?  Are things getting worse or better along these lines for Republicans?  Moderation is off until the next post – have at it.

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Our old friend Al Mohler is at it again.  This time he is discussing the recent papal visit to Jordan and comments the pope made regarding his respect for Islam.  What Mohler writes barely disguises the typical SBC antipathy towards Roman Catholicism, and when it comes to the pope’s comments the hair is split on a microscopic level.  It’s Mohler’s closing paragraphs where we see the real issues:

In this light, any belief system that pulls persons away from the Gospel of Christ, denies and subverts Christian truth, and blinds sinners from seeing Christ as the only hope of salvation is, by biblical definition, a way that leads to destruction.  Islam, like every other rival to the Christian gospel, takes persons captive and is devoid of genuine hope for salvation.

Thus, evangelical Christians may respect the sincerity with which Muslims hold their beliefs, but we cannot respect the beliefs themselves.  We can respect Muslim people for their contributions to human welfare, scholarship, and culture.  We can respect the brilliance of Muslim scholarship in the medieval era and the wonders of Islamic art and architecture.  But we cannot respect a belief system that denies the truth of the gospel, insists that Jesus was not God’s Son, and takes millions of souls captive.

This does not make for good diplomacy, but we are called to witness, not public relations.  We must aim to be gracious and winsome in our witness to Christ, but the bottom line is that the gospel will necessarily come into open conflict with its rivals.

The papal visit to Jordan points directly to the problem of the papacy itself and to the confusion of Roman Catholic theology on this very point.  To understand Islam is to know that we cannot identify Muslims as those who “along with us adore the one and merciful God.”  To deny the Trinity is to worship another God. 

Respect is a problematic category.  In the end, Christians must show respect for Muslims by sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the spirit of love and truth.  We are called to love and respect Muslims, not Islam.

On a theoretical level, I cannot disagree with any of that, but let’s consider for a moment the practical applications of some of those statements.  This one is my favorite, “…we are called to witness, not public relations.  We must aim to be gracious and winsome in our witness to Christ, but the bottom line is that the gospel will necessarily come into open conflict with its rivals.“  “Gracious and winsome” is a little hard when you are declaring war.  Even [insert name of current "hottie" gracing the covers of the check-out gossip mags here] is going to look pretty ugly when pointing a gun at me.

This also ignores another rather important fact.  If our goal is to indeed “spread the gospel,” how can that be done with an “enemy?”  How do you speak to an enemy enough to convince them of your point of view?  In purely theological terms the essential question is, “How does the gospel destroy its rivals?” The answer (and we are going to get incredibly religious here) lies in the love and humility of Christ on cross, set in these New Testament times, in direct juxtaposition to Joshua conquering of the Holy Land.

The mindset that Mohler speaks from here is one of complete intolerance.  It leaves no room for disagreement.  One must conform or be subject to subjugation or destruction.  I believe with all my heart in the truth of my religion and faith.  I deeply resent the implications in Mohler’s comments that I am less than fully faithful to my God (and he will even admit I share faith with him – unlike Roman Catholics, Muslims, or Mormons) because I seek to find a way to live with those that believe differently.

You see, I would argue that I am the one of stronger faith.  I believe that if I engage with those that believe differently, my faith will prevail, and that if it does not, I have faith in God to deal with the situation.  Mohler would have the Christian either retreat into monasticism or come forth to holy war – I see little deep faith in that, ony a desparate clutching to speck of belief.

The bottom line is this – if you cannot live with someone you cannot convert them.   That is the beauty of America.  We have tried to create a place where we can live together to have the opportunity to convert the other.  What Mohler fails to understand with his gospel first, nations second approach is that if we take that away we are no better than the Islamic extremists that would see us dead.

I am tempted to get more deeply theological here, but I must resist – that is not the purpose of this blog.  Rather, I will say this.  I am sure Mohler would stop short of violence in his efforts not to offer “respect” to those that believe differently, but I think that may be the only place he will draw the line. If in this nation we marginalize all people that believe differently we are going to find ourselves very alone.  I think that is where Al Mohler and those that think like he does are headed.

It’s a crying shame.

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I found this piece from Michael Paulson in the Boston Globe fascinating.  He is reflecting on attending the “Mormonism in the Public Mind” conference in Utah this week, and lamenting how difficult it is to be Mormon and liberal.  This meme has been all over the ‘net for the last year or so.  Just thought I’d let you all know, it’s the same for us creedals.  Becasue we are more diverse, it expresses differently, but the division between “Evangelicals” and “Mainlines” (Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, virtually all the denominations save Baptist) can largely be drawn on political left and right lines.  Some even view someone like myself being an “Evangelical Presbyterian” as code for “conservative Presbyterian,” which most view as oxymoronic.

Anyway, one of the speakers at the conference was Kirk Jowers, Director of the Hinkley Institute for Politics at University of Utah.  I got to meet Kirk about a year ago – great guy.  Anyway Paulson did a good job of reporting on Jowers presentation on the role religion played in the primaries:

Taking a look at a different political issue, and from a different perspective, Kirk Jowers, the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, examined the question of whether Romney’s religion cost him the presidency — an issue other scholars are also trying to evaluate. Jowers did not offer a conclusion, and did not discuss other problems with the Romney campaign, but made it clear that he believes anti-Mormonism was a key factor in Romney’s disappointing performance in Iowa, which led rapidly to his withdrawal from the race. Jowers reviewed an array of anti-Mormon comments made during Romney’s candidacy, and said, “religion was a critical part of his campaign…it was very difficult for him to just get a clear run.” Jowers also said “that soft bigotry was put down with the hammer in Iowa” and “there’s a great argument to be made that he lost Iowa due to his religion.”

I think that is about right.

Religion, your or mine, and political views, ours or theirs tend to become more deeply entwined when they become dogmatic.  It is fascinating to see that we share this particular trend.

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From The Christian Post:

“During these down times, the demands and needs are great for families and ministries alike,” Huckabee said. “In many cases, families are turning to churches for assistance with food, clothing and other basics. Yet churches have to deal with less resources to meet those needs.”

The former Southern Baptist preacher and denominational leader warned that the troubled economy might have a detrimental effect on the work of churches and ministries if funds cannot be generated in new and creative ways.

Huckabee, an official spokesperson for Christian Values Network, will introduce the organization as a new way to help generate funds for churches and faith-based charities worldwide.

Christian Values Network is a free service that allows members to shop online at nearly 900 popular internet retailers who in turn pay a referral fee for every purchase made by a CVN member. A portion of the referral fee is given to the ministry of choice indicated by the CVN member.

“I believe God has established Christian Values Network for this unique time and place to help ministries in lean times,” said Huckabee, who serves as an advisor to Christian Values Network. “They are providing a very simple and practical solution: using people’s everyday Internet purchases to support their chosen organization.”

This strikes me as the old Huckster taking advantage of the current economic downturn to turn a paycheck, and trying to dress it up as “the Christian thing to do.”  Many questions arise from something like this.  Does this help or hurt his 2012 aspirations? (Does he really have them?)  Actions like this are highly controversial in the creedal Christian community for theological reasons I will not go into here.  How about the Mormon community?

Can I set aside my now natural and ingrained cynicism about all things Huckster and comment on this without expletive or vomit?  Probably without vomit, but maybe not expletive, which is why we seek reader reaction.  Have at it.

Lowell chimes in:  In Mormonism the type of referral scheme in which Huckabee has gotten involved does not necessarily raise doctrinal issues; it is just not the way we do things.  Our church’s financial and welfare system is large and complex, but based on simple principles:  personal sacrifice (through tithing); reliance on family first, then the church; volunteer labor to produce goods and services for the needy; no dole, but a “hand up, instead of a hand out;” and no overhead costs for assistance to the poor.  Huckabee’s plan looks more like mutual back-scratching among members of a faith community.  I am not sure that is a good idea, especially on an organized basis, but it doesn’t bother me theologically.  Economically it looks a little like a scam because nothing of value is being created, simply referral fees.  What it doesn’t look like is something “God has established.”

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Why was this written?  Jeremy Lott, writing at the very conservative American Spectator, compares Dr. Manhattan of the newly released Watchmen fame to the Mormon idea of elevated humanity?!  If you know me you had to know this one was going to catch my eye. I’m an owner of an original set of comic books comprising the now classic Watchmen graphic novel (along with a large collection of other comics) and a purveyor of all things Mormon in the public eye – I cannot let this lie.

This piece came out yesterday – a week after the movie’s opening.  The movie had a good opening weekend and will do well over time (DVD sales will be killer), but it is not the blockbuster the advertising build-up tried to create.  Big talk about what Mormons believe died when Romney withdrew.  So again, why this now?

Well, if you are really watching there is little doubt there are a bunch of people jockeying for position in the GOP – Romney among them.  Could Lott be trying to subtly influence that jostle by sawing on what should be a dead horse?  Comparing a religion to a comic hero is hardly complementary; it reduces the faith the the purview of fan-boy geekdom (guilty of fan-boy geekdom though I may be).   You would think with Mitt Romney being THE preeminent economy candidate Republicans would be lookng to shove him front and center – or at a minimum let those far more salient factors decide things rather than this nonsense.

Or is Lott trying to “mainstream” Mormonism by the comparison?  I vividly recall the absolute wave of literature in the wake of the original Star Wars movie (yes, I’m that old)  in which primarily Evangelicals, but really the religious of many stripes, tried to show how “the force” was indicative of their faith.  My opinion, it was a bad idea for Evangelicals then and, if that is the game Lott is up to, bad idea for Mormons now.

Or another theory – if you hang around in comic book shops (guilty!), they are festooned with all things Obama.  Missed me, during the election my hobby was on a bit of hiatus,  but apparently Obama had a whole “new media” outreach to the comic book community – a burgeoning demographic.  Apparently we are supposed to think we have a true comic geek in the white house.  (Call me when he has original Jack Kirby art hanging in the Oval Office, until then, I am going with marketing ploy here.)  Could Lott be trying to do the same thing for Romney?  If so, this is not the way to do it.  Marketing Romney based on his faith is a proven loser.

Chances are good this is just a writer having a dry spell and a deadline, but there is the law of unintended consequences.

Lowell adds:  I vote for the “dry spell and a deadline” explanation.  Lott describes himself as a protestant convert to Catholicism, and he has written about Romney’s religion before as in this piece about Romney’s big speech in December 2007.  His prior work seems fair to Mormons, and he seems to have a fairly decent grasp of Mormonism.  Even so, in the Spectator piece John links to Lott gets Mormon doctrine wrong in a few places and the whole thing seems a little silly.   I think Lott was just musing about things.

UPDATE:  Our reader Lee Allred comments:

I read the Jeremy Lott aricle and thought it a bit off the mark, but otherwise quite benign.

Having said that, Lott does miss the big picture in his comparison.  The salient fact about Dr. Mahattan is that his ascendency to ‘godhood’ has had the effect of removoing him from the affairs of humanity entirely.  He neither cares for, of, or about humankind.  Or even spares us much thought at all.

Nothing could be further from the Mormon concept of God.  If anything, Mormons take flack for believing that God is too involved with, too caring of modern mortal men on a continual and day-to-day basis.

Lott didn’t mean ill, he just missed the big picture.

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