Article VI Blog

This morning at First Things‘ “On The Square” blog, editor Joe Carter attempted to use his recent reading of William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” to excoriate the current state of the conservative movement.  Before I launch into my critique, I must first plead guilty to Carter’s initial charge that few have read the book – I have not.  I will work very hard here to limit my critique to Carter’s post and not the underlying book.  I have today ordered the book and you can rest assured it will move to the top of the reading list when it arrives.

I want to address Carter’s comment on three levels:

There is a big difference between the university and the conservative political movement.

Carter seems to think that arguments Buckley applied to Yale University somehow apply with equal force and reason to a political movement:

God and Man is a polemic with a simple, inflammatory proposal: Because Yale actively undermines the students’ faith in Christianity and the free market, the alumni should withhold financial support from the university. The corollary was obvious: Yale should do something about these professors.

[...]

How remarkable that the thesis of a book that helped launch the conservative movement could, less than half a century later, be completely repudiated by people who claim to be the author’s intellectual heirs. But that is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say that they repudiated only part of it. They’ve foolishly discarded Buckley’s emphasis on Christianity but retained, as they should, his love of free enterprise.

A university is intended to be both an educational and an ideological institution.  One reason universities are founded is to preserve and expand an ideology, and in some cases a religion.  Our government is designed to be without inherent ideology, and it certainly is not purposed to preserve any particular ideology or faith.   It is intended instead to be the battlefield on which ideologies compete and to preserve the rules of that battle so that it does not result in the abuses and failings that the Founders had seen in the colonial era.  Our nation is an experiment to find out if those of differing ideologies can exist as a nation and have that nation continue to function well.

One cannot simply assume the same roles and purposes for a university and our government.  That our government did, for a lengthy period of time, serve to preserve and promote a specific Christian ideology is a function not of the government itself, but of the citizenry it serves.  The fact of the matter is that the specific Christian ideology that the government did preserve for all those years won, over and over, the battle the government was designed to host.  Simply put, most Americans subscribed to the Christian ideology that the government preserved and promoted.  They also managed to apply pressure by many means – some of which Carter rightly names – to their ideological opponents not to fight back

That simply is no longer the case.  Polling shows that most people still claim an adherence to Christianity in one form or another, but what it means to be Christian has grown expansive and those that do not claim to be have become increasingly adept at fighting on the governmental battlefield.  Which brings me to the second level I want to address.

The failures of faith that Carter rightly points out are better laid at the feet of the church than at a political movement.

Carter seemingly makes this point himself:

Buckley understood that Truth not only does not always trump falsehood, but it can never win unless it is promulgated.

Indeed, Christianity must be promulgated, over and over and over again – but that is not, nor was it ever, the job of government.  Such promulgation is, however, the job of the church and the university that Buckley was battling for in his book.  The fact that Christianity’s authority in public debate has waned so lays at the feet of the church failing to maintain it as the prevailing ideology of the land.

The church has done so in many ways, and this blog is not the appropriate place for me to air my many criticisms of how the Christian church generally has abandoned its duties in this age.  However, among those abandonments is the large scale abandonment of responsibility for education.  My own alma mater gave up its church foundations many decades before I attended – Why did the church let that happen?

Politics, the necessary first step of governance in our nation, demands the building of a coalition sufficiently large to prevail at the polls.  If that coalition is to be exclusively, or even predominantly, of the Christian ideology then it is up to the church and its many arms like the university to see to it that there are enough people holding that ideology to constitute a majority.  The fact that such a majority cannot be pulled together now means the church has fallen down on that job.

The question becomes what to do in light of the current political realities.  You see, the fact is that as our ideological opponents continue to get better at the battle, they are using their increasing political power to remove our opportunities to even enter into the debate.  Whereas we historically applied pressure in many social and educational ways to suppress opposition, they appear unafraid to use the power of law to completely eliminate opposition.  If those in politics and governance that adhere to our Christian ideology must remain meek about that ideology in order to build the necessary coalitions, then so they must to even have the opportunity to preserve our ability to fight back.

But those in politics and governance should not be fighting alone.  As they fight to preserve our access to the battleground, we should be working to promulgate our Christian ideology – different fronts and varied battle plans, but the same war.  They can only do their job if we do ours.

Veiling personal attacks makes them no less personal.

Finally, Carter’s previously quoted sentence:

How remarkable that the thesis of a book that helped launch the conservative movement could, less than half a century later, be completely repudiated by people who claim to be the author’s intellectual heirs.

cannot be interpreted as anything else than a direct swipe at the good people of National Review – the magazine started by Buckley.  The magazine is known for its fiscal conservatism, but its faith is equally apparent.  It is ironic that Carter’s post appeared on the same day as NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez’s “God and Women at Harvard” appeared at that site.  K-Lo’s interview with a female Harvard grad entering a convent is quite spiritually uplifting and does not in any way shy from being a bold pronouncement of faith.

Carter comes dangerously close to calling into the question the genuineness of the faith of those at NRO and those that agree with them.   What political issues one considers most important and the political strategies one employs to carry the day simply is a not a measure  of one’s commitment to his or her religion – any more than it would be reasonable to say that the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl under Tony Dungy because of his very vocal commitment to his faith while they lost under Jim Caldwell because he was not so loud about his.

Posted in Doctrinal Obedience, Political Strategy, Understanding Religion | Comment on this post » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

…Is Spin Passing For News!

And yes, that is most definitely a “failure to communicate,” he said completing the famous and almost trite movie quotation.

Breaking from his vacation, as I am from mine, my friend Hugh Hewitt points out, in this week of way too much race-based news:

Did any of the JournoList participants rebuke Spencer Ackerman’s suggestion that Fred Barnes or Karl Rove be made a target of a manufactured “racist” charge?

Ackerman will be carrying the burden of that despicable suggestion for the rest of his “career” such as it is, but it may even be worse to have been a participant in the list and to have said nothing when such an assault was proposed.  Even if the “journalists” on the list hated Karl Rove as an extension of Bush and thus talked themselves into this repulsive group-think, many of them know for a fact that Fred is among the most decent and large-hearted of journalists.  To have said nothing when a colleague or far worse, a friend, was nominated for the worst sort of slander is an extraordinary personal failure.  Whether any of those who were party to it step forward to apologize will be interesting to watch.

[...]

When Andrew Breitbart posted the NAACP video, he did not know it had been edited. Journalists who commented on the story did not know of the editing either.

But everyone on JournoList knew that Ackerman was proposing a Big Lie in the service of a political agenda –Ackerman admitted that himself– so they all stood by and said nothing. The only defense that any of them have is that Ackerman was an insignificant loon or that they missed his post, even though it appeared in the middle of the biggest story of the time period.

Just this morning, over my hotel breakfast, FoxNews was discussing newly leaked JournoList postings from campaign ‘08 trying to paint the Palin VP nomination as “sexist.”

There are two terribly important lessons for this blog that can be taken away from this scandal and the USDA atrocities of the week.

The first is that the press, at least a significant portion of it, is all too willing to discuss the use of label/identity based spin to aid the Democratic side of the aisle.  It confirms something that people have known all along.  The lack of discrimination is born not in monitoring the use of identity labels, but in being blind to them.  When considered, whether in base discrimination, such as Jim Crow, or in the type of “reverse discrimination” we are seeing from the JournoList crowd they are political weapons, and they are poltical weapons that our common understanding, and in some cases our constitution place off limits.

Religion is one of those identity labels that our constitution places strictly off limits.  The reason for that is very straightforward – all it can do is serve to create conflict when what we need is the finding of common ground to move the nation forward.  The USDA events of the past week show that the opportunity for mischief with identity factors is just too great to use them AT ALL.

Which brings me to this very interesting piece by Kenneth Anderson on the Volokh Conspiracy (HT: a reader that sent it forward.)  Anderson argues that there are some things about religion that should be a part of the public discourse:

But of course, the problem is how to parse the difference between that which is acceptable for inquiry concerning someone who proposes to lead the polis and what is genuinely personal and irrelevant.  My one regret is that the nasty fireworks at the beginning of that long essay tend to obscure the quite serious argument about how to draw those lines that occupies the second half.  (It is not, by the way, a regret for having ridiculed the two principals — I think that it is important, actually, for people to understand the affective side of this and not pretend that it is purely mild cognition, and that was one way to do it.)  But this issue is going to resurface, certainly with Romney, and with others.  The problem, at its most general, is that religion bears certain characteristics of immutable characteristics, like race or ethnicity — marks of identity that one could not change about oneself, but which — again, like skin color — are morally irrelevant, and so cannot, by themselves, be cause for either accepting or rejecting a person as a political leader in a liberal society.

But religion also has a cognitive content — including doctrines — that are and should be subject to reasoned discussion.  The believer who partakes of them as doctrines of faith might not do that, and might not be able to do that, almost by definition.  Yet it would also be a mistake to draw too sharp a line between things subject to human reason and things not of this world and so not subject to human reason; particularly law-based religions partake of both.  Mormonism, for that matter, incorporates this directly into its prophetic traditions  And despite being a thoroughly lapsed Mormon, and so not in the sense that I would presume instruct Mormons on the doctrines of their faith, but rather as a descriptive statement that I do not believe that the elders of the Church would regard it as an accurate statement of the faith, though of course I might well be corrected on that — I would say that Romney’s statement on this matter is not particularly an accurate reflection of Mormon doctrine.  Mormon doctrine regarding human reason is not, so far as I have been able to comprehend, “relativistic” in the sense used in contemporary ethical argument, even if it is more elastic some (including me) would accept.

But irrespective of whether believers are able to participate in the discussion of human reason and prophetic traditions, when adherents go out to offer leadership in the broader political community, then the unbelievers are perfectly warranted to ask that they be discussed in terms that are accessible to public discussion.

Yes, indeed, religion does have a cognitive element, but unless a candidate or elected official insists on making policy based on their religious conviction, why is it necessary to discuss?  All that is really necessary to discuss is the proposed policy, and the stated reasons for bringing it forward.  The attachment of a religious labels, as with race or gender, to either the proposer or the policy itself serves only to turn the reasoned discussion into the kind of vitriolic posturing that we have seen based on race in the last week.  We have seen some very bad decision making based on such labels and we are seeing the public manipulated based on similar labels – they simply do not aid our public discourse.  If reasoned discussion is the goal and the labels serve to override reason rather than aid it – why inject them into the conversation at all?

I am reminded of a Sunday school class I was in a couple of decades ago – it was being taught at the highest levels by a seminary professor of excellent repute.  We were discussing theories of the atonement and at one point a student rose and asserted that the professor’s view of the atonement was “too masculine.”  I objected in the most strenuous of terms and set forth the proposition that I am emphasizing here today.   The theory of the atonement is neither masculine nor feminine, it simply is truth.  Yes, men and women my arrive at that truth by different paths, but that matters not, what matters is that we arrive at the truth – together.  Inserting the labels serves only to make the truth relativistic.

When it comes to public policy, what matters is that we arrive at the best possible policy.  People will come to their policy choices by a variety of methods and thought processes.  By definition, there cannot be different policy for one group or another – that is the definition of discrimination.  Therefore, group identity entering the discussion serves no purpose other than to prevent arriving at a policy at all, or to arrive at a policy that, rather than providing maximum benefit for the most people, benefits mostly the group that can best claim victimization – again, the very definition of discrimination.

In a week of claim and counterclaim based on race, I am deeply saddened that in many ways our nation is no different than it was when I was a child spending summers with extended family in Jim Crow Mississippi.  But we have clung to our labels too hard.  We have to let go of them.

Lowell adds . . .

Professor Anderson’s Volokh post is remarkable on more than one level.  I do not think it will move the discussion much, because it is mostly impenetrable.  Consider these two statements:

The problem, at its most general, is that religion bears certain characteristics of immutable characteristics, like race or ethnicity — marks of identity that one could not change about oneself, but which — again, like skin color — are morally irrelevant, and so cannot, by themselves, be cause for either accepting or rejecting a person as a political leader in a liberal society. . . .

And despite being a thoroughly lapsed Mormon, and so not in the sense that I would presume instruct [sic] Mormons on the doctrines of their faith, but rather as a descriptive statement that I do not believe that the elders of the Church would regard it as an accurate statement of the faith, though of course I might well be corrected on that — I would say that Romney’s statement on this matter is not particularly an accurate reflection of Mormon doctrine.

Each one of those is a single sentence.  I teach young lawyers that if a sentence must be read more than once by an educated reader to be understood, the writer is in trouble; more than twice, and the sentence should be rewritten.

But enough about style.  Anderson’s post is a dogged argument that it is desirable – nay, necessary and proper - to make a candidate’s most private religious beliefs matters of public discussion and inquiry.  We have rejected that argument on this blog dozens of times, so I won’t rehash those posts.  I’ll simply refer our readers to John Mark Reynolds’ analysis, which John and I think is the perfect approach. Here’s a summary:

Freedom of religion does not mean I have to think every religion or irreligion is great! In fact it is demeaning to religion to behave this way. My Catholic friends know that I think the Pope is not the sole head of the Church and my Baptist friends know I think their view of the Eucharist inadequate. They honor me by strongly disagreeing with me. If I thought these ideas had public policies implications that would lead to bad social policy by the state, I would want to examine the views of any Catholic of Baptist politician.

That is not bigotry, just common sense.

So if we assume religious traditions are, at least in part, knowledge traditions, then being wrong about religion does matter. How wrong does one have to be before losing credibility in the public square?

Let me propose a few tests and suggest that Mormonism easily passes all of them.

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.

If you want to know why Prof. Reynolds thinks Mormonism passes all three tests, read his post.

Posted in Candidate Qualifications, Doctrinal Obedience, Religious Bigotry, Religious Freedom, Understanding Religion | 9 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

Maggie Gallagher is one of the best columnists out there on religion and politics, and this week she wrote one of the most important columns that has ever been written on the subject:

Hunter is right: Religious conservatives who make “reclaiming the culture” their political goal are doomed to fail; more modesty and a tighter mission focus are essential. For politics to be an effective tool, values must be transformed into a political objective, i.e., something a politician can vote for or against (partial-birth abortion, conscience protection in health care legislation, waiting periods for abortions, parental notification).

You go to culture war with the army you have — and then you figure out what you really need, or you lose.

She, via James Davison Hunter, comes at this argument a little differently than I would – but then, it is essentially the same argument.  There are a couple of salient points that bear emphasis.  The first from from Hunter:

One cannot “engage the culture” by converting individual hearts and minds or accumulating majority votes. Culture simply does not work like that. Culture is the power to “name reality,” and that power is in itself inevitably intertwined with high cultural status. Culture is a product of elites, not of moral majorities.

The second point, which Gallagher makes:

You go to culture war with the army you have. The reason people with traditional religious and sexual moralities gravitated into politics is that structures of the political elites are among the most open and easy to penetrate. To put it another way, politics is one field of culture-making that secular elites do not control. Political power thus operates in a partial and limited fashion as a break on elites’ cultural power, since it raises the potential costs of attempting to de-legitimize those who disagree with them in the public square. The risk of backlash tempers Harvard’s dreams for America.

[...]

Politics is only one tool of cultural power, and not the best. But it is a potentially useful tool.

Gallagher concludes:

My own complaint about the religious right is not that it is too much in politics, but that it is not enough. In too many cases, religious conservatives talk like they are in politics, make demands like they are in politics, issue threats like they are in politics — but they do not create the institutions that are at the heart of politics: organizations that raise money and spend it electing politicians who will vote for their cause.

Now, I look at this and conclude that there are two essential lessons for religious people.  Firstly, we do not do politics very well.  That is Gallagher’s conclusion about organizations, etc.  I would add to her list of complaints in this department theological based bias when political action is the goal.  Winning the culture war does not mean winning converts.

Note Hunter’s comment about “naming reality.”  In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis called this “pre-evangelism.”  The book C.S. Lewis in a Time of War by Justin Phillips, cites some correspondence Lewis wrote while preparing the radio lectures that became “Mere Christianity:”

At this time, he had begun to correspond regularly with an Anglican nun called Sister Penelope. She was a prolific writer herself and was preparing some talks. C.S. Lewis explained to here what he hoped to achieve in his broadcast work for the BBC. The purpose was pre-evangelistic rather than direct appeal. Writing to her on 15 May 1941, Lewis was keen to discuss his scripts with her.

Mine are praeparatio evangelica rather than evangelium, an attempt to convince people that there is a moral law, that we disobey it, and that the existence of a Lawgiver is at least very probable and also (unless you add the Christian doctrine of the Atonement) imparts despair rather than comfort.

In Lewis’ view, and implied in Gallagher’s argument here, there is something a society must agree to before evangelism to a specific religion can occur.  In our battles in the culture war, it is these things we seek to establish.  We seek, through cultural influence to prepare the battlefield for the religious battles – which are fought with different tools and different armies, which leads us to the second point I draw from this.

Gallagher’s point that politics is not the best tool of cultural power is extremely important.  Religious people generally, and Evangelicals especially have chosen to withdraw virtually completely from the other tools of cultural engagement.  We form our own universities rather than teach in the existing ones.  Such segregation places us in a ghetto, outside of culture rather than in a position to influence and change it.  Christian media is largely distinct from other media – again ghettoized.

Many Evangelicals think this withdrawal is necessary to maintain some sort of “Christian purity,” but it is also a form of monasticism.  Monks indeed live very “pure” Christian lives, but how much do they affect culture?  During his lifetime, St. Francis of Assisi fought very hard to prevent his movement from becoming an order – it was in his vision to be simply a community.  His reasoning was because in monasticism the impulse to “Spread the Word.” in generally lost.

I would argue one further point to Gallagher’s that politics is not the best tool in the culture war, and that is that politics alone cannot win it.  In a republican democracy such as ours, politics resides in a strange space between leading and following.  It tends to follow the cultural mores rather than define them, generally at best it codifies that which is already culturally established.  That is why it is so vitally important for religious people of every stripe to engage culture not only politically, but in all the other areas where the “elite” define it.

It also seems reasonable that making politics our sole tool of cultural engagement leads to the sort of inter-religious battles that we have seen in conservative politics.  We seem to think politics is the war when it is but a single battle.

Posted in Doctrinal Obedience, Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry, Religious Freedom, Understanding Religion | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

Last week, there was quite the discussion around these parts, levered off of the now infamous Joel Belz “Mormons lie” contention from last cycle.  We have not covered it extensively, but Belz was buried with bigotry charges after he published it.  But like a trouper he came back for more the next month in his magazine, defending his analysis and contending that it was not bigotry.  We had thought his argument so weak that refutation was not required, but given the discussion of last week, we figure that a refutation is now in order.

The first part of Belz’ argument:

Or suppose that Christopher Hitchens, the popular and often appealing atheist who has taken some quarters of the nation by storm, decided he wanted to seek the presidency. It’s pretty clear that his candidacy, if he had been born in the United States, could not (and should not) be opposed on legal grounds. But to say that individuals and groups of individuals would be guilty of bigotry if they argued openly against an atheist as president is wrongheaded on the face of the matter.

So if it’s legitimate to oppose (but not legally preclude) a candidate because he or she is a committed Muslim or atheist, I conclude we may do the same with someone because he or she is a Mormon, a Roman Catholic, a Baptist, or goodness—even a Presbyterian! And in none of these cases are we automatically guilty of bigotry.

First of all, that’s not an argument – it’s an assertion.  Would I oppose a Hitchens candidacy?  Yes, I would – but not on the basis of his atheism.  More on that in a moment.  Why is it “wrongheaded on the face of the matter?”  If Belz had a real argument here, he would have made some attempt to answer that question as he asserted his point. Instead, he just waved his hands and said, “Voila.”  (Back in my days of studying science and math we called this the “it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer” argument – it typically warranted the loss of a letter grade if the assertion was correct and an automatic ‘F’ if it was used out of laziness, or wrong.)

As to the legality/legitimacy argument, well, that sounds remarkably like Jim Crow.  From the Civil War well until into the 1970’s blacks using their franchise was widely and openly opposed, and claims of legitimacy were attached to such activities.  Of course, people can claim that religion and race are very different things – but it seems to me that in a very real sense both are shapers and maintainers of culture, or at least sub-culture.  And in the end that is what we are discriminating against – sub-culture – and in the melting pot that is America such is not legitimate along any lines.

But let’s look at Belz’ “argument” a bit deeper.  He argues

Indeed, his very thoughtfulness makes me want to be very careful when I raise the question: How does a person’s Mormonism affect his or her possible role as president of the United States?

But just because I’m obliged to ask the question carefully doesn’t mean I’m out of bounds in asking the question. I applauded when Romney stressed: “[Some] would prefer it if I would simply distance myself from my religion, say that it is more a tradition than my personal conviction, or disavow one or another of its precepts. That I will not do.” Nor should he; that is part of his personal character.

But this integral and holistic nature of the person is also exactly what makes it not just right, but necessary, to ask—even in detail—just how what this man believes “religiously” affects all the rest of his behavior.

When we linked to this piece in our review of 2008, we said this about it:

I am going to sound very much like a civil rights attorney here, but this justification for bigotry is bigoted on its face.  It presumes a view of religion and its effects on a person and their character that is distinctly evangelical, and one that another religion may not, and many do not, share.  I will not speak for Mormons on this matter, that is for them to do, but what I will say is that we cannot measure another religion by our religion’s yardstick.  Needless to say, no religion other than our own will “measure up” under such circumstance.

Further “fisking,” there are two key words in Belz’ argument – and we highlighted them for you, “person” and “behavior.”

Whether it be Mormonism, or any other religion, how that religion would affect an individual person’s role as POTUS, or anything else, is going to be individually unique.  I am very different from any other Presbyterian I know.  My Presbyterianism affects me very differently than it does my pastor, or the other elders in my congregation.  One cannot draw a conclusion about how being a Presbyterian will affect another persons role as say, blogger, based on how it affects mine.  In the blogroll section of my religious blog there is a ‘ring’ of Presbyterian bloggers.  Anyone who doubts my contention here needs but to read through that ring.  You would be hard pressed to find a more diverse group.

Thus, how religion affects behavior is highly individualized.  So while we might, in the case of a single individual, be able to analyze how their faith affects there behavior, the real question becomes why do so?  What do we gain out of such analysis that we did not already know?  We cannot conclude, based on that analysis, anything about the behavior or belief of any other adherent to that religion.  To do so would, in fact, be religious discrimination and bigotry.

The issue boils down to simply, behavior.  Fortunately, behavior is something we can judge based on physical, real evidence, not simply beliefs.  Beliefs are the means by which people who behave badly justify that behavior to themselves, but there are many many people of the same belief, even the same evil belief, that never can actually bring themselves to behave badly.

My father is dead, and I hate to speak ill of the dead and I loved the man more than virtually anyone but my wife; but my father had an amazing streak of bizarre thought in him.  There were times, around the dinner table, when you would have thought my father was a Nazi.  He certainly implied more than once that many of the Jews that died in the concentration camps of WWII deserved their fate.  And yet, when it came to his behavior, my father was a kitten.  He routinely did business with Jewish people – some of whom showed up at his funeral.  I never saw my father speak an ill word to anyone to their face, and frankly never behind their back about someone specific – it was always just awful, ugly generalities.

My father’s beliefs about Jewish people never translated into behavior.  My father was an “anti-Semite” in speech only and then only to people with whom he felt safe somehow.   So much so that most of the Jewish people he actually encountered considered him a friend (none of the them considered him an enemy) – even the legitimate “jury” could not bring itself to find my father guilty.  In the end, those of us closest to my dad, most importantly my mother and I, concluded that dad was not anti-Semitic at all, but rather someone that just liked to say outrageous things in certain social settings when he thought they were boring or he wanted attention.

The point is that we can infer nothing about a persons behavior based on their proclaimed belief, we can only infer about their behavior based on their behavior – real, physical evidence.  That is to say we infer character from action, not declaration.

Thus, if Belz wants to argue that Mitt Romney is a liar, all he need do is bring forth evidence of Romney lying.  He does not need to bring up Romney’s faith for we can conclude nothing reliable from it.  In bringing up Romney’s faith, Belz can accomplish only two things.  For one, he can play upon the prejudices of his readers.  If his readers are suspicious of Mormons, by bringing up that Romney is one, he plays on those suspicions and they will tend to view evidence insufficient to prove his contention as if it does actually prove it.  That is, I believe, called “false witness.”  Secondly, he tarnishes all Mormons, which in a religiously competitive environment he may want to do.  But that first of all is simply wrong, because as we have seen, not all Mormons are the same regardless of the characteristic under discussion – so even his competitive argument is not true (again “false witness”).  But further he affects the candidacy of an individual for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the election at hand.  This has the potential affect of robbing the nation of the best choice in that election when judged on the things that do matter.  The same could be said by liberal efforts to disqualify Huckabee based on his tenure as a Baptist preacher.

In the end, there just really is little need to bring up the religion of a candidate.  Their behavior and character is in actual evidence – and that evidence is what matters.

What We’re Reading . . .

Last week was the lightest week we’ve seen in a while, so we’ll just pass it on as bullets.

• Belz does have some people that agree with him, although they are a bit kinder about it.
• There are also some very ugly people that try to play on the same prejudices that Belz does.  Frankly, this is a third effect from Belz’ invocation of Romney’s faith – it divides those of us on the one side of an issue therefore aiding the opposition.  (BTW, can any of our Mormon readers explain why a phone call from Romney to the CJCLDS leadership would matter any more than any other Mormon’s call on matters of doctrine?)
• You have to love this – someone gets into the latest Beck business and never mentions that he is Mormon, in fact lumps him with “regular” Christians.
• This is a difficult political puzzle – especially when religion gets into the mix.
• The rumors, turned whispers is now pretty much out loud talk.
• In re: Romney – CNN tries to make a mountain out of a molehill — he still has good friends — and allies.

Posted in Candidate Qualifications, Doctrinal Obedience, Reading List, Religious Bigotry, Understanding Religion | 2 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

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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