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.

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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.

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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.

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Peggy Noonan pens an insightful piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning at the end of a week when our government has crammed enormous amounts of nonsense down our throats against our will:

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.

[...]

When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns—even from the essential nature—of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination.

Th whole piece is fascinating, you should read the whole thing.  It set me wondering if the huge increase in people staying with their parents well past the age where my generation did is not evidence of same.  Frankly, I don’t blame the kids, but I have always wondered why the parents make it so easy on them.  But this piece I think explains it – parents no longer think they are releasing their kids into something good.  The parents no longer have faith that if they let the kids go, the failure will be small and the success big.  Hence the kids stay in the basement and play video games well into their 20’s and even their 30’s.

But here is the real insight that I had while reading this – government has never been the source of hope in this nation – the lack of it has.  More specifically the freedom of religion that we have enjoyed has provided hope unlike any other place on earth or time in history.  There is nothing I know of that can provide hope in people save a sense that there is an Almighty in control.  Part of the great American civic religion is that while we disagree on the specifics of the Almighty, we know there is one and that He has our destiny well in hand.

And yet, we live in an age when our courts tell us that religion causes harm.  We live in an age where expressions of that hope when rooted in the Almighty are forbidden from public view.  And worst of all, those of us that share a sense of a benevolent and hope-inducing Almighty turn on each other in our civil debates because in the pessimism and powerlessness that we feel, we feel that we must fight someone – and in doing so we only make the situation worse.

Moreover, in the pessimism and powerlessness we feel, religious people turn to government for hope rather than realizing that we hold the solution in our own hands.  Rather than build a soup kitchen, we lobby for more food stamps.   Rather than build a shelter, we lobby for “affordable housing” laws.  Rather than spread the hope that our faith should give us, we wallow in our hopelessness.

But I am not yet ready to abandon my hope, for I cling tightly to the Almighty as I understand Him – and I hope you do to.  The road back to a hope filled nation is not straight, short nor simple.  It involves reforming both government and religion.  I know it starts by uniting in our hopefulness despite our differences in understanding that hope’s source.  I know that someday we will have to resolve those differences, but today is not that day.  Today we fight together for a nation where we can resolve those differences rather than have them resolved for us.

What say you?  Comment moderation is off for the weekend.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for his link and comments on the same article.

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…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

The Boston Globe has an almost pathological distaste for Mitt Romney.  So when I ran across this piece, headlined:

Faith still sticky issue as Romney mulls run

I expected the worst.  While there is little doubt in my mind that the Globe intended to stir up trouble on an issue that has been largely laying dormant of late, the piece itself is not pure hit piece, which is surprising.  There are a couple of good take-aways from it:

Posted in Candidate Qualifications, Reading List, Religious Bigotry, Understanding Religion | 3 Comments » |  Print this post |  Email This Post