Article VI Blog

Everybody has an opinion about what went down at the Glenn Beck promoted rally in Washington last weekend.  Was it political?  Or was it religious?  Rally or revival?

Well, frankly, it was all of the above.

The United States of America has always been a religious nation without a specific religion.   We have always had something variously called the “civic” or “civil” or “public” religion that was pious, moral, believed in a supernatural and an objective good, but was insufficiently defined ever to rise to the level of an actual, organized religion.  It was a banner under which many religions united to work together as a nation.  This compromise has served us well because religion has flourished in our nation like no other place in history.

The civic religion has served as “battleground” that defined the rules of conflict between competing specific religions, and by keeping that conflict civil, forces that have ripped apart virtually every nation in history have been held at bay.  But some aspects of the civil religion are beginning to fray.  The belief in a supernatural and objective good seems no longer to be part of the common understanding of our nation.  One would think that in such a circumstance those of us that still hold such would unite under a banner to restore it – if we do not, the consequences would be disastrous.  NO religion will survive.

Ross Douthat’s analysis of the Beck rally is both insightful and problematic.  Insightful in this:

Latter Day Saints and evangelical Christians arguably share enough affinities to belong in the same “cultural family,” as Weigel puts it. But you’re more likely to find them in competition, from the streets of American suburbia to the mission fields of the developing world to the 2008 election’s great Mike Huckabee-Mitt Romney throwdown. It’s a case of theological differences trumping cultural commonalities: The two faiths occupy opposite sides of a theological chasm that makes the gulf between Catholics and Protestants look narrow by comparison, and many evangelicals bristle with hostility for what they regard as Mormonism’s cultish pseudo-Christianity.

The problems arise when he then goes on to seemingly fan the flames of the conflict rather than try to quell them.  Yes, we do compete in the mission field, but if our nation cannot maintain its civil religion and accompanying religious truce in governance, there will be no mission field on which to compete – all religion will find itself banned, or an “official” religion will squeeze the rest of us out.

Some, worried that capitalism and politics will become a god, sound warnings that lead others to send for the wrong message at the wrong time. The forces that deeply oppose, those that do not believe in the supernatural and objective good, will – when they get the story straight – use our religious differences to split a coalition that could otherwise preserve the civic religion.  They will try to make us look foolish.  They will look calm and cool and collected while we will look like religious thugs.

The analogy is old and tired, perhaps to the point of triteness, but that does not rob it of its essential truth – It was necessary to ally with Stalin to defeat Hitler.  There was an imminent and violent threat that had to be dealt with before the subtle and quiet threat of communism.

There is an imminent and violent threat to religion in America right now – and it must be dealt with before the religious “cold war” between the faiths can be fought.  The Beck rally in Washington this weekend past was about that pressing threat.  I’ll take any ally I can get.

Posted in News Media Bias, Reading List, Religious Freedom, Understanding Religion | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

A Volatile Mix…

What mix?  Well for starters, Mitt Romney (God forbid anyone would be allowed to forget he’s a Mormon!) is polling very well and came out with an awesome op-ed in the Boston Globe.  Secondly, the religious angle to the Nevada Senate race is getting really ugly. (Pun intended – and for the record, while Sharon Angle did pathetically open this can of worms, it’s Reid that has gone all “attack dog” over it.)  There are religion angles in other mid-term races as well.  And finally, the Ground Zero Mosque controversy just keeps rolling along, despite some enormously silly comparisons. (I don’t get the comparison at all, frankly.)  So, what do we get out of all of this?  (I am not going to go near the “Obama’s a Muslim” meme – it’s just silly.  See some reasonable commentary from Slublog and a CSM blog points out that the man’s lack of convictions creates a vacuum that needs to be filled – but give me a break, some vacuums need to remain empty.)

There are a lot of cries that Romney should be be “out front” of the GZM issue.  After all, he’d be a “hypocrite” otherwise.  Funny how all these calls have come from the left, like Newsweek and CNN.  Allahpundit looks wisely at the political wisdom of Romney’s play here.  Ramesh Ponnuru used the controversy to point out that Evangelicals are not really biased against Mormons so much as they are identity voters.  (Not sure that’s true in Iowa, Ramesh, but you are probably right about the rest of the country.)

The point Ramesh makes is applicable here as well, there is no bias at play in the GZM controversy – it’s not a First Amendment issue at all, it’s a land use/zoning issue.  No one is saying that Muslims cannot worship freely and openly in Manhattan, just not on that spot in Manhattan.  In the ‘08 cycle, so many were quick to point out that despite Article VI of the constitution they were free to exercise their privilege in the voting booth as they saw fit.  That’s something we never contested.  We, like Ramesh, wondered about the wisdom of voting by identity, but never abouit the right to do so.

There is little Romney can do to help himself here.  Should he step out on GZM on a Constitutional level he will elevate the issue to a place that it clearly does not belong and blow his excellent conservative credentials on matters legal and constitutional.  Should he attack it on a zoning/land use level he will fuel those that did exercise anti-Mormon bigotry last time to do so again.

Besides, it’s really a local matter, not a federal one.

Also-rans…

People run for POTUS for a lot of reasons – they want to inject a specific issue into the campaign; they want to accumulate personal power for other political purposes; they want to accumulate public recognition for a career in media in some fashion – the list could go on for a while.  The point is that the simple descriptive “former candidate for president of the United States” buys a person quite a bit.  Right now, the media-discussed Republican “field” is full of such people.

This can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing.  It is a good thing when they bring something to the campaign that might otherwise not be picked up. That’s probably why a Rick Santorum run continues to become a higher probability.   Santorum will never get elected, but a credible run on his part will keep social issues somewhere in the mix in an election where they could be off the table altogether.  With the economy in the state it is in, they certainly should not be front and center, but they are important.

The presence of Haley Barbour in the mix may be good or bad.  He is a formidable fund raiser and his presence in the race, at least for a time, can increase that ability – which can certainly aid other more viable candidates.  He also, as Santorum, can serve as a target for some of the more cartoonish attacks from the left leaving the serious players a more open playing field.  However, problems can arise if in his desire to use his fund raising prowess to serve as “kingmaker” he ends up being more self-serving rather than party-serving. (Lowell interjects:  Barbour is a former RNC Chairman who has a history as a party man.  So I like to think – hope? – he would not be self-serving.)

Need an example of the whole self-serving model?  Look no further than our old “friend” Mike Huckabee.  He is polling well in Iowa, but that is about as surprising as ice in Antarctica.  We will not review here (we’ve done it already) how Huckabee, by hanging around like he did without an iceberg’s chance, mucked up ‘08.  Huckabee is currently billing himself as “a preacher who accepts all, a politician that never plays politics and a host unlike any other.”  Do I think he’ll run?  At this point, yeah – I do.  Which means the serious players will have to make Iowa unimportant which will neutralize him for the rest of the campaign.  Huckabee will be aided by a press that desperately wants Iowa to matter – which will be fine for Huckabee since media is really what he is after.  But we cannot let him serve the party another mediocre candidate.

Inside Evangelical Politics…

Last week we pointed out that it seems like it is always the left that gets truly rhetorically nasty.  That rule seems to hold true inside Evangelicalism as well as out of it.  Last week Jim Wallis did an interview and he turned absolutely uncharitable on Marvin Olasky.   At the Corner, Jay Richards said:

What to say at this point? At the very least, Wallis has abandoned even the pretense of civil discourse here. Olasky has evidence of Soros grants to Sojourners, so the most that Wallis would be justified in saying is that Olasky is mistaken and that the evidence is misleading or fraudulent (which seems unlikely). Instead, he says that Olasky is lying for a living.

Hugh Hewitt said:

So Marvin Olasky was slandered by Jim Wallis, as was Glenn Beck.  Wouldn’t a man seeking to represent Christians be quick to apologize to both?  If Wallis has done so, I haven’t seen it.

Wallis has corrected his incorrect factual assertions, but his tone and demeanor have remained unchanged.  Is it any wonder people do not like us so much?

And while we are on the subject – R.R. Reno had some interesting thoughts on civility.

Those Mormon Ads…

Are still being discussed a bit – mostly by bitter, unhappy people.  The CJCLDS continues to make the “Romney denials.“  I do want to comment that it takes a very narrow view of a church, any church, to think that advertisements for the church are about presidential candidates from within the church – or even about Prop 8.  Jan Shipps has argued again and again that while the Mormons were historically more ethnicity than church, they have transformed since WWII with the geographical diaspora it created among them,  into pretty much a standard American “come on in on Sunday” church with some rather idiosyncratic theology.

Religion Generally…

…is under attack. (Hey! – we told you so.)  “On Faith” is recycling the same old question in new circumstances.  It’ll be interesting to see how different the answers are with a different person and religion.  The fact that there is a difference is the actual heart of the problem.

Patheos, the new religion site that has been getting much buzz lately with collections of essays on the future of Catholicism and Evangelicalism has now done such a collection on Mormonism.  This one seemed particularly interesting.  Patheos may prove to be a great resource, but so far they are resisting our technical attempts to monitor their content remotely – this is not good when you try to track as much info as we do.

The line between sports humor and religious/political attack is a fine one.  Is Keith Olberman a trailblazer?  Far as I know, he has never been near Portland.

Some are saying American Protestantism is the most destructive religion in history.  Call me when a Presbyterian flies an airplane into a skyscraper.

Some say the Shakers are “sinister.“  Wrong on some things – perhaps, but “sinister?!”  Nah, no bone to pick with religion here.

The courts are at it again.  I wonder if soon we are going to have to disguise churches that can be seen from highways?  And what about this puppy? – I saw it a few weeks ago – it is big!

And in Australia, the church/state line is getting way too blurry for my taste.

Lowell adds . . .

For those who missed it, Hot Air offered an interesting twist last week on the news media’s apparent double standard on presidential religion.  The whole post is worth reading.  A key paragraph:

As I’ve said, I don’t really care what Obama believes. What bothers me is that the press only seems to think a president’s religion is important when his faith can be used to question his policy priorities. If those priorities go against the views of those in the media, then Christianity is a scary fringe faith that needs examining. If the president is progressive, then his faith is pure and he’s only trying to do what’s best for the country. No reason to ask uncomfortable questions.

The writer’s  point is that the news media expressed great discomfort, concern, and curiosity about G.W. Bush’s faith and its impact on his actions as president, but seem to think Obama’s Christianity is simply admirable, normal,  and pretty much beyond inquiry.

I think we see a variation in the same phenomenon with Romney and even Huckabee.  Long-time readers of this blog will remember a news reporter’s confession that while on a visit to Romney’s home she actually snooped around his bathroom, hoping to find a sample of his uniquely Mormon underwear.  (I can tell you it would have been hard for her to tell it from anyone else’s Fruit of the Loom.)   Huck, despite being my least-favorite Republican in the 2008 cycle, drew my sympathy because his Baptist faith was constantly under the microscope and treated as a real curiosity and a matter of serious public interest.

Which is my way of saying that in the presidential arena, religion has become a reporters’ tool that is too often used to shape the narrative – but mainly by the MSM and the liberal punditocracy, and only when it suits their favored candidates’ purposes.  As we’ve often said here, a presidential candidate’s religion is important only about 10% as often as the news media seems to think it is – and even that may be an exaggeration.

Posted in Candidate Qualifications, Reading List, Religious Freedom, Understanding Religion | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post

The Left’s First Mormon Strike of 2012?

…Could very well be this Salon piece.

If you’re a resident of one of nine seemingly randomly selected mid-sized (mostly) non-coastal American cities, you’re the lucky audience for a new series of commercials advertising… Mormons. They are not quite explicitly ads for the Church of Latter-day Saints, they are just ads for Mormons, themselves. They are about how Mormons are regular people who enjoy things like surfing and riding motorcycles.

[...]

Mormons, obviously, want to prove that they are regular people, just like us, and some of them are even cool, young, attractive people who ride skateboards.

But… are Mormons just trying to convince Americans that Mormons are “normal,” so that in 2012 they’ll consider voting for Mormon King Mitt Romney? (These ads are running in four or five potential swing states, after all.)

They do go on to report that the CJCLDS refutes the claim but as they say, the bell has rung.  There was reaction in The Washington Independent, a Pittsburgh TV station and the Mormon Times.  EFM passed it on, and seemed to get in some hot water – please people do not be so sensitive – EFM are the good guys.

I think we are beginning to see the Mormon meme developing as the left will likely deploy it.  Straight religious attack (”the founding whoppers of Mormonism”) is not going to play this time – it’s been delegitimized on both sides of the aisle.  However, with the passage of Prop 8 and the ensuing “blame the Mormons” cries that arose from the left, they have come to think of the CJCLDS as some sort of conspiratorial organization and the hidden hand of right wing forces.

We have seen the “Mormon Mafia” pieces in the business pubs recently.  Dan Brown’s completely fictitious novels (The DaVinci Code) have produced images of religious institutions as conspiratorial organizations bent on promulgating deceit and cover ups.   Watch this space, “Mormons as bilderbergers” may be the meme of choice for 2012.

And while we are on the subject, this letter to the SLTrib concerning moves in talk radio in the local market is not at all helpful:

At a time when stellar and faithful Mormon Mitt Romney needs every ear, now is not the time to cancel his strong supporter, Sean Hannity.

If you are Mormon, do not vote for Romney because he is Mormon, any more than an Evangelical should vote against him because he is a Mormon.  And if you do support him for the right reasons, saying that in a public forum is just not helpful.

Prop 8 Ruling Continues to Roil…

An emailer poses a hypothetical:

…imagine this scenario: Judge Vaughn Walker is the proud father of seven children, grandfather of eight, happily married for 42 years and a former LDS stake president. He hears and carefully evaluates the same evidence presented in the trial and writes a 12 page opinion validating the will of the people. Do you think the media would dismiss his LDS and family views as inconsequential to the result, much as they have discounted Judge Vaughn’s homosexuality? I am convinced, given the well known impartiality of the media, that they would ignore his background.

The emailer is, of course, being sarcastic.  And of course, it need not be a Mormon – if it were little ‘ol Presbyterian me, the point would hold just as well.  If the “shoe were on the other foot,” as it were, the media would have been all over the ruling like white on rice.  And the media is bad enough, but I am concerned legally about this.  Any right leaning judge with as much personally at stake in a case as Walker had in this one would have recused him (or her) self.  Walker’s ruling is, as best as I can tell, two things unprecedented in American national history:

• a blatant attack on religion as a moral force in our nation by the power of government, and
• an attempt to rule by straightforward fiat on a level easily comparable to our days as a colony.

As reaction, I thought this piece by William McGurn was on point.

The effect this will have on the forthcoming elections is difficult to measure.  Dan Balz seems to think the focus will remain on the economy.  Looks like Glenn Beck does too.  (So much for Mormon conspiracies!)

Here’s my analysis – As an issue, same sex marriage is likely to stay on the back-burner.  However, the effect of this ruling will be highly significant in an indirect fashion.  There is enormous resentment building in this nation against the currently empowered left as they are moving too far, too fast, and doing so by force without the overwhelming consent of the governed.  Walker’s ruling is indeed the most strident, direct and effrontive of those moves.  People flat out will not stand for it.

The next couple of election cycles are likely to transcend issues, they are going to be about tone, attitudes and the very definition of democracy.  Successful candidates are going to figure that out and ride that wave.  People that get too focused on issues are gong to miss the boat electorally.  The First Thoughts post I linked to above on Beck is trying to hammer Beck because they see abortion and marriage as the preeminent issues.  On the other end of the spectrum is our old pal Fred Karger who has finally attracted some big time political press.

If Karger makes it on stage in those debates, he’ll join a line of single-issue candidates that have had some degree of success over the years.

There will be no room for “single issue candidates” this time around.  There is too much at stake.  The very heart of what it is the be the United States of America is in play.

Which brings me to…

…2012 News

I thought this MSNBC break down of the field was interesting:

You can look at the emerging GOP 2012 field this way: the establishment (Romney, Barbour), the new faces (Pawlenty, Daniels, Thune), the evangelicals (Huckabee and Santorum), and the cable TV personas (Palin and Gingrich).

There is a lot of sorting to do before this gets serious, but that is a taxonomy that might prove useful.  Some of those folks are going to the Iowa State fair, and some are not.  There is more strategy buried in who is and who is not than you might think.  Clearly Haley Barbour is making forays into Iowa, but is he dropping the forty pounds?  Romney and Palin are the clear leaders, but I still do not think Palin is going to run.

There are some unsmart things happening.  Politico wonders in “offbeat” candidates are going to hurt Republicans this time around.  I do think the very high levels of resentment out there are going to result in some unusual choices.  The party is going to have to tread very lightly as it works its way through this minefield of resentment.  Not all the candidates Politico is attempting to cast as “offbeat” are that bad, and they are preferable to the Democrat mainstream, but it is going to be interesting.

This is not offbeat, it’s stupid:

An influential group of religious conservatives said Monday it would sit out the fall gubernatorial election as promised after candidates it favored lost in last week’s Republican primary.

And thus the fallacies of “one issue” are revealed.  They don’t get what they want and so they don’t get anything at all.  In politics there are lots of battles, and as we have seen here, when we only fight a few, we lose the bigger picture.

And in closing, let’s consider what our illustrious president said Friday evening concerning the ground zero mosque:

This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.

Let’s see how much he reminds his supporters of that should his 2012 opponent be a Mormon.

Posted in Proposition 8, Reading List, Religious Freedom | 3 Comments » |  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

I am not a South Park viewer, but like many Americans I see South Park clips on YouTube and in other blogs.  I don’t watch Daily Show much either, but thanks to Instapundit I saw this Jon Stewart Daily Show segment about the recent controversy over a South Park episode that made fun of several religions, including Islam.  Reportedly, the South Park Episode known as “201“ satirized numerous religious figures, including Buddha and Jesus and . . . Muhammad.  After Comedy Central received the usual death threats, the network decided to “bleep” the episode’s references to Islam’s prophet.   The L.A. Times summarizes the story:

[T]his week, after an ominous threat from a radical Muslim website, the network that airs the program bleeped out all references to the prophet Muhammad in the second of two episodes set to feature the holy figure dressed in a bear costume. . . .

Comedy Central declined to comment on the latest incident. But “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone clearly disagreed with their bosses’ handling of the situation. A statement posted on their website said that executives “made a determination to alter the episode” without their approval and that the usual wrap-up speech from one character didn’t mention Muhammad “but it got bleeped too.”

The network may have thought it had no choice after revolutionmuslim.com, the website of a fringe group, delivered a grim warning about last week’s episode, which depicted Muhammad dressed as a bear.

“We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show,” the posting said. A photo of Van Gogh’s body lying in the street was included with the original posting, which has been unavailable to some Web users since news of the item broke earlier this week. “This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”

As you might imagine, controversy followed Comedy Central’s decision to bleep.  Jon Stewart, a Comedy Central star, devoted ten minutes of his April 22 show to the issue.  Warning: the following is not for the thin-skinned:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
South Park Death Threats
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Stewart made this remarkable statement, among others:

“I owe a lot of religious people an apology.  Not for making jokes at their expense, but for not appreciating, and thanking you, for how well you’ve handled it.”

He then shared a few clips from prior Daily Shows poking fun at Jews, Christians (all branches, including Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses), Hindus, voodoo, wiccans, Rastafarianism, Buddhists, Scientology, the Kwanzaa holiday, and even atheism.

Bravo to Stewart for standing up for free speech and at the same time acknowledging that his show frequently offends religious sensibilities.  We’ve certainly been critical here of religious bigotry, but never of free speech. If a candidate of a particular faith – Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, you name it – is singled out or attacked on the basis of his religion, you’ll see us on the housetops decrying that bigotry.   But death threats, however thinly veiled, are despicable and in this case are really only another form of bigotry.

South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, issued this statement:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We delivered our version of the show to Comedy Central and they made a determination to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Comedy Central added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s customary final speech was about intimidation and fear. It didn’t mention Muhammad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about something completely different and we’ll see what happens to it.

A sorry tale, all in all.  We hope America learns from it.

Posted in Religious Bigotry, Religious Freedom | 1 Comment » |  Print this post |  Email This Post