Archive for the 'Reading List' Category

July 11th 2008

The Calm Before The Storm?


Our sources tell us that Romney for Veep is getting really, really serious - which may account for the fact that in terms of stuff to read, we got nothing for you today. (How’s that for good grammar?) Funny how when stuff is actually happening, the “news” slows down. But this paucity of news on our topic may not be a bad thing, because . . .

On A Personal Note From John . . .

I am departing on a two-week, plus jet-lag time, vacation! I am going to leave you solely in Lowell’s very capable hands while I (and my lovely wife!) jet to Rome to begin a cruise around the boot of Italy, with stops not only in that nation but Greece and some former Yugoslavian republics. I will be on-board with, among others, our blogfather Hugh Hewitt. Somehow I think we are going to, for the most part, have better things to do and talk about than Romney, religion, and the presidential race. Although, if something serious happens . . .

Lowell:  I am feeling the pressure . . . .  I’ll be on vacation too, but with laptop and ready, willing and able to keep putting stuff up here.
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July 10th 2008

Interesting Stuff To Read . . .

. . . But Not A Lot To Talk About

On Faith asks:

What do you think about Sally Quinn, a non-Catholic, going to Communion at Tim Russert’s Catholic funeral? What are some do’s and don’ts for observing the religious rituals of others?

That is one of the first decent questions they have asked on that forum in a long time - designed around “how do we get along” rather than “how do we fight.”

The guy that runs Beliefnet takes a stab at defining “Evangelical.” It’s theologically based, which is where it should be, and so not subject to political definition, but I think he is spitting in the wind.

The Dems and religion. Fancy that, a black minister high in the party ranks. There’s no surprise.

Finally, Novak touts the Veep contenders and manages NOT to mention The Question. Could that be because we chastised his little dark soul on Monday?

Lowell:  I don’t know, but let’s take the credit.  ;-)
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July 9th 2008

“ABH”…

“Anybody But Huckabee” for Veep . . .

Hey!  I did not say it, K-Lo did.  In a nutshell:

In Texas just before Independence Day, former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee co-sponsored a “Rediscovering God in America” pastors’ conference. The event, Huckabee said, was “to remind and encourage us that the proper position for America when facing evil and confronting enemies is not to find excuses for defeat but to find the resources, the courage and the strength from God necessary to win.” But if John McCain thinks Huckabee as veep will give divine strength to the GOP ticket in November — he’s wrong.

[…]

In substance and style, Huckabee is bad news. Having run ads calling himself a “Christian leader,” Huckabee ran on identity politics — usually a mainstay of liberal Democrats. Although he had the third-highest number of votes in the Republican race this year, polls also showed him a tough sell with nonevangelical Republicans, who felt they had little in common with his mixed record as a conservative.  [Emphasis added.]

Which, sadly, does not speak very well of evangelical Republicans, particularly when you look at the other arguments K-Lo makes against the Huckster.  I would hope that Evangelicals were smarter than to engage in identity politics - I mean look how much it has helped blacks!?

One of the great things about this nation is that it is designed to bring the different together while respecting the differences.  Identity politics plays on the differences, exaggerates them, and uses them as a wedge - precisely the opposite of how the nation was designed to operate.  I preached about that a little bit on my Godblog when I was on a jury back in ‘05.   It’s worth thinking about again.

Meanwhile . . .

If this Gallup poll (HT: The New Nixon)  resembles reality, and I think it does, McCain does not need the Huckster.

Americans who say religion is an important part of their daily lives support John McCain over Barack Obama for president, 50% to 40%, while their less religious counterparts support Obama over McCain, 55% to 36%.

Boy, does that speak a mouthful.   The demographic breakdown is not much to talk about - Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and then ethnicity is thrown in.  Wouldn’t it be fascinating to break that down to Protestant Evangelical, Catholic Evangelical, Independent Evangelical, and so forth.  What I’d really like to know are how many self-identified Evangelicals claim religion as “important, very important, not very important,” etc., and how that breaks down with voting patterns.
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July 8th 2008

“The Question” is back!

It’s Official…

As the Veepstakes heats up - pretty much beginning with Politico’s Allen declaring last week that Romney topped the McCain short list - we have been treated to numerous pro/con pieces of the various possibilities. And they all have asked The Question. It always comes in one of two forms, but the latest entry in this growing list of pointless prognostication, manages to hit both notes in one article! First there is the indirect swipe:

In addition, he was born in Michigan where his father was governor, and beat McCain by nine percentage points in the state’s primary this year. Romney also has strong support in Western states such as Nevada, where his fellow Mormons made up a quarter of the voters in the state’s January Republican primary, according to exit polls.

Then there is the direct shot:

Romney also brings negatives, including his Mormon religion, which some of the evangelicals who form a core Republican constituency describe as a cult and a disqualifier for their support. They also have condemned what they regard as his shifting positions on issues such as gay rights and abortion.

So, is it a negative or a positive? Well, if we buy the premise that people vote identity, not issue, the point for a MSM that always wants the Dem is to talk about it as much as possible. Saying that Romney is a Mormon either as a positive or a negative is not the point. What gets out there is “not like us,” “not like us,” “not like us.”

Yet another reason to just not talk about religion when it comes to candidates.

Speaking of Stuff We Keep Hearing About…

Seems McCain is “reaching out” to Evangelicals. Who knew? Forgive the sarcasm, but in the Internet age, every newspaper cannot rewrite every story, it just gets old. But this latest one from the Dallas Morning News (Dallas, along with Colorado Springs, is pretty much the center of the Evangelical universe) is fascinating because of its juxtaposition to a Weekly Standard piece on what’s happening with the Catholic vote.

The DMN piece is headlined about “religious” voters and yet do not mention Catholics at all! They remain a pretty significant group in this country, and they are religious, so what’s up? Evangelical myopia would be my initial diagnosis. as we looked at yesterday, they don’t seem to get along with anybody, really - leastwise independent Evangelicals. Which raises an interesting question.

What would happen if the Mormons and Catholics got together for a candidate, not just an issue?

Lowell:  John and I were chatting about the great irony here:  In purely doctrinal terms, Mormons and Catholics are in a more direct and uncompromising conflict that any other two Christian faiths.  (Maybe that is why Fr. Neuhaus seems so viscerally and fiercely negative about Mormon theology and doctrine.)  Both Catholics and Mormons claim divine authority direct from Jesus Christ, through the Apostle Peter.  Simply put, if Catholics are right about their claim, Mormons are wrong, and vice versa. 

And yet, of all faith group demographics, Romney did the best among  . . . Catholics.  Whenever there has been a moral issue in which the Mormons have become involved - same-sex marriage, for example - their strongest allies have been Catholics.

It’s really kind of funny when you think about it. 
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July 7th 2008

Cooperation…


California Catholic Daily writes:

Other religious groups have taken an active stand against same-sex marriage and for the November ballot initiative. The Mormon Church has issued a statement (read on Sunday, June 29), urging members to donate “your means and time” to the initiative. “The church’s teachings and position on this moral issue are unequivocal. Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God,” says the letter.

At a meeting of Catholic and Muslim scholars at Rancho Palos Verdes, May 27-28, the Muslim participants asked their Catholic counterparts to join the Muslim Shura Council in opposing the state Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision. The Catholics – the Rev. Francis Tiso, Dr. June O’Connor, the Rev. Alexei Smith, Msgr. Dennis Mikulanis, the Rev. Dennis McManus, and the Rev. Rafael Luévano – said they would make available U.S. bishops’ conference documents on same-sex unions and would “network with the the California Council of Bishops’ offices for social justice,” said a June 16 SperoNews story.

Note that there is widespread agreement, inter-religiously, on this issue. This shows enormous public will to oppose the CA Supreme Court ruling and to pass the amendment to the California constitution. Now of the three groups mentioned, Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Muslims, each brings to this table unique religious perspectives, doctrines, and even scriptures.

If each of these groups were to begin to argue their case from those perspectives, doctrines and scriptures, what would happen? Well, one good guess is they would break down into fighting over who had “the truth” and lost in the fray, completely, would the the shared goal of reversing the California’s Supreme Courts autocratic ruling concerning same-sex marriage.

This is yet another, in the increasingly long list, of reasons that when our religion informs our politics, we have to find other means of arguing our points than religious ones. Note sadly, there is no mention of Evangelicals. Which brings us to the question…

Does Dialogue Help?

Peggy Fletcher Stack writes in the Salt Lake Tribune on Dick Mouw’s recent Beliefnet article. We did not previously link to the Mouw piece because he does not say much that he has not said repeatedly. He is a proponent of Evangelical/Mormon dialogue and cooperation. Stack; however, points up a truly interesting dilemma with the whole idea:

Not all Mormons think Mouw’s proposal is feasible.

The differences between Evangelicals and Mormons is more than theological, says Kathleen Flake, who teaches American religious history at Vanderbilt University. It’s also organizational and systematic.

Evangelicals are only loosely organized around a set of principles; not least emphasizing the primacy of the Bible over theology, Flake says. Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, “are tightly organized around an enlarged canon of Bible-based narratives. These are loosely employed to express personal conviction of God’s contemporary and revelatory immediacy.”

Mouw’s invitation for official, Vatican II-like negotiation makes sense, she says, “only if you think that Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints have a theology sufficiently systematized to speak definitively. It seems to me that neither does.”

We have also examined Flake’s work on this blog extensively. What Flake is driving at here is incredibly important; let me phrase it a bit differently. Evangelicals and Mormons, and Roman Catholics, and mainstream Protestants, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and . . . have fundamentally different views of what religion actually is. Let’s narrow the field a tad for purposes of this conversation.

Evangelicalism is nothing but a set of ideas. There are loose associations built around those ideas, but in the end the only thing that defines Evangelicalism is ideas. Many would argue that it therefore does not rise to the level of religion, certainly Christian religion - it lacks elements that are typical of most other expressions of Christianity - among those elements being the ecclesiastical and the mystical. It could be argued that Evangelicalism is more philosophy than religion. And yet, in America, Evangelicalism is held and practiced, and most importantly people take their identity from it, as religion.

Roman Catholicism most notably, and mainstream Protestantism to a lesser but nonetheless significant extent, and the LDS have strong ecclesiastical components to them. They are defined not just by doctrine, but by entities, the church. Mormonism shares with eastern mystical religions and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity, a strong mystical component.

This incredibly brief outline explains, I think, why Evangelicals have such a hard time getting along with anybody. All they have is to be “right.” So dialogue, such as that proposed by Mouw, tends to always break down into arguments about who is right when Evangelicals are involved - because such argument is the only thing that defines Evangelicals.

(Aside to our Mormon audience: I am a bit unique, although there are quite a few of us, as a mainstream Protestant holding Evangelical views, that affords me the best of both, unlike many of my purely Evangelical brethren.)

In the end, I need to disagree with Dick Mouw here. Dialogue would be a purely academic exercise - I think action is called for. If Evangelicals are really serious about changing the culture/country, they need to set aside the question of who is right and just get busy. The efforts on a marriage amendment in California would be a great place to start!

The Veepstakes Continues

Lowell starts off:

Dick Polman, in the Philadelphia Enquirer, goes through every potential GOP veep nominee named so far, and rejects them all as not feasible. Then Polman comes up with this:

Unless McCain goes below the radar - and chooses somebody such as South Dakota Sen. John Thune, whose claim to fame is that he defeated Tom Daschle - it appears that the best choice is . . . Mitt Romney.

On paper, Romney’s got the assets: telegenic, scandal-free, vetted by the press, and a cash cow. He can raise big money through his Mormon and business networks, at least until McCain presumably takes public financing. He can talk economics far better than McCain. He has roots in Michigan, a state McCain covets. He has fans in the conservative base. He’d do no harm in the vice presidential debate, having demonstrated his unflappability in such forums. He’s panting after the job like a dog circling the dinner table for scraps.

There’s only one problem: A lot of Christian conservatives in the South are hostile toward his Mormon faith. And wait, there’s another problem: Romney, in his rightward political journey, has flip-flopped on more issues than even McCain.

(Emphasis added.) Well, I’m glad Polman came along and shared all these fresh and penetrating insights with us! ;-)

Seriously, it would be nice to see some actual data, instead of referring simply to “a lot of Christian conservatives in the South.” Will those voters vote the same way they voted in a three-way primary when the choice is between a McCain-Romney ticket and Obama-Whoever? We can all guess, but without data that’s all we’re doing.

Perhaps not incidentally, Jonathan Martin thinks it’s important to report that McCain went to church today “for the second time in three weekends:”

McCain, who either didn’t attend worship services during the primary or didn’t make his visits known, was in the same pews two weeks ago and visited Franklin and Billy Graham last Sunday at their home in North Carolina.

I think I know what Martin is trying to say, but still . . . . Reporters are keeping close track of a candidate’s church attendance, and that alone speaks volumes about this year’s race.

Back to John:

Speaking of Evangelicals that don’t fully get it, RCP comments on an AP piece. Just remember, some took away from the meeting things other than Huck for Veep - Thankfully.

The “Prince of Darkness” (NRO’s increasingly apropos nickname for Robert Novak) continues his one-note on Romney. Discussing Veep choices, Novak said on “Political Capital with Al Hunt”:

Robert NOVAK: “For Obama, my first choice is Joe Biden. They’re gonna put a gag on him, and he’ll be a good candidate. And the governor of Virginia, Governor Kaine …. On the Republican side, number one isRomney , I think is a very dangerous choice, I think the Mormon question is difficult, he’s got a lot of negatives. And the other one is Rob Portman — a lot of people are saying he’s a Bush person, I think he’s still the best candidate they can get.

I hereby officially conclude that NOVAK IS THE ONE WITH THE PROBLEM WITH MORMONS!

Elsewhere . . .

Yet another look at the history of religion and politics in America.

Obama keeps talking about his faithHugh Hewitt notes the lack of mention of Jeremiah Wright in the latest telling. What I find fascinating is how quickly the discussion descends into a laundry list of typical left-leaning causes.

Lowell:  Such lists always seem to show up as politicians cynically use religion as a way to get votes.
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July 3rd 2008

Point and Counterpoint


Apologies for the lack of a post yesterday - blame AT&T who, in an effort to “upgrade” my Internet connection, simply took it away. Four hours, some of the very wee small ones, out of 24 without such service were devoted to being on the telephone with “tech support.” The last hour of this marathon of a support call(s), was a conference call with 4 individuals inside different AT&T departments - removing forever the impression that the United States federal government is the most convoluted bureaucracy in existence. But in the end connectivity was restored and here we are.

Obama, McCain and The Faith Vote . . .

OnTuesday Obama gave his own faith-based pitch. Tom Bevan has about the best reaction summary in a general political sense. There are some reactions worthy of special note.

Pat Buchanan, really responding to the Dobson/Obama dust-up of last week, comes dangerously close to saying “Obama is not Christian.” More on Buchanan in a minute. But Cal Thomas does not mince words:

Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement.

This is turning into familiar territory, is it not? Clearly Obama’s view of the Christian faith is quite different than mine, or Thomas’, but that is simply something inappropriate to utter about anyone in a presidential campaign - it simply is not material, and it is (Lowell? You’re the lawyer, tell me if I use this word wrong) “prejudicial.” I would not vote for Obama under threat of physical harm, but I am not going to publicly declare the validity of his claimed faith - I think God can figure that out just fine without me.

But one of the more interesting response showed up on Time’s Swampland blog:

At a meeting Tuesday in Denver, about 100 conservative Christian leaders from around the country agreed to unite behind the candidacy of John McCain, a politician they have long distrusted, marking the latest in a string of movement that bodes well for McCain’s general election prospects among the Republican base.

[…]

A second person who attended the event, but asked not to be named, said that the group was motivated principally by a desire to defeat Barack Obama. “None of these people want to meet their maker knowing that they didn’t do everything they could to keep Barack Obama from being president,” the participant said. “You’ve got these two people running for president. One of them is going to become president. That’s the perspective. That that’s the whole discussion.”

That is, in my opinion the right perspective. I am no McCain lover, but he makes a lot of sense compared to the alternative, and I do not even need to comment on the alternative’s salvation status to come to that conclusion. But, the left has no governor when it comes to religion bashing.

Speaking of Buchanan…

He concludes the same piece linked above this way:

The unbridgeable divide between the two portends a troubled future. Can Americans ever come together if we are divided in our deepest beliefs about morality and truth, where one side believes gay marriage is moral progress, the other holds it a moral outrage; where one side views abortion to be a mighty advance for women’s freedom, the other sees it as legalization of mass slaughter of unborn babies?

There can be no peaceful coexistence in a cultural war because it is at root a religious war. Far into the future, Americans seem fated to face each other again and again “at some disputed barricade.” [Emphasis added.]

Fascinating analysis, also a bit nerve-wracking - religious wars tear nations apart. But I think Buchanan is right in this case. When noted and typically wise pundits like Thomas are declaring the validity of a candidate’s faith we have descended into a war of religious rhetoric and those almost always end ugly. Religion, while usually reasonable, is in the end beyond reason, and there is no rhetoric that can resolve a conflict between such things.

Thus, once again, we see there is no place for religious discussion in a presidential race. You can be motivated by your faith, but your rhetoric needs to be based somewhere else.

And Speaking of Left-Wing Religious Bigotry . . .

We have a new one for the pantheon - joining Jacob Weisberg, Ken Woodward, et. al. as purely bigoted hate screed against Mormons. This one by Chris Kelly at HuffPo discussing Romney as a Veep prospect:

Another comforting thing for McCain? There hasn’t been a really serious Mormon assassination plot since Porter Rockwell shot Governor Lilburn Boggs, and that was ages ago.

That is a small example of a piece that is completely, utterly scandalous. This thing is so odious as to be beyond refute. He actually uses the example of a story from the Book of Mormon where a killing was committed and uses it as an argument that Romney would do the same.

So has George W. Bush done something like that? I mean there was that whole King David/Bathsheba’s husband thing.

I should stop, there is an old phrase that applies here, “When arguing with a fool, make sure he is not similarly occupied.”

Quick addition from Lowell: I don’t know who Chris Kelly is, or whether he has ever engaged in responsible journalism, blogging, or thinking; but he did none of those in his malicious little post. He writes like a hack. (At least Jacob Weisberg and Ken Woodward can write bigoted content well.) For example, Orrin Porter Rockwell was arrested, tried, and acquitted of the crime involving the infamous and odious Governor Boggs. Some “assassination plot.”

As for Cal Thomas, his comments remind me of the tendency left-wingers have to call conservatives with whom they disagree “fascists.” When we apply words like that to people who do not deserve them, we gut the word of meaning: When a real fascist comes along, we don’t have credibility in using the word. Thomas is doing something similar here. He claims that Obama - a man whom millions of Americans have no trouble considering a Christian - is not a real Christian. Doesn’t that weaken the meaning of the word? Obama’s version of Christianity is not mine, but I do not want to declare him outside of Christianity — perhaps because so many have tried to do that same thing to my fellow Mormons and me. Besides, as John notes, it’s irrelevant.
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WELL DONE GOVERNOR ROMNEY


Thank you for an incredible journey!