Friday, December 07, 2007

Romney's Religion Speech: Well Done, Not Enough, Amusing on One Point

Yesterday Mitt Romney finally delivered his much-needed speech on his Mormon religion, read with interest by our SWNIDish self. We believe that the speech was superbly conceived and well crafted, contained all that it should have contained, sounded themes crucial to the American pluralistic republic, and will not prove sufficient to overcome people's reluctance about Romney's religion.

What's right about the speech was this: it clearly articulated the notion that voters should consider a candidate on the basis of the values that the candidate shares with the voter. And Romney can make a very strong case that as a Mormon, he shares values that other religious Americans share.

What's to us interesting about the speech is this: Romney did what in our experience LDS folk generally do. He tried to articulate common ground with Christians by making what is ostensibly an orthodox Christological confession. Of course, the problem with that is that many Christians know that Mormons don't mean what other Christians have historically meant when they say "son of God" or "savior of the world." Someone in his camp should have warned that people are very aware that he doesn't mean what they mean by these words. And indeed, Romney did acknowledge as much. But it seems to be part of the LDS DNA to say this nevertheless.

What's politically true about the speech, from our SWNIDish POV, is this: Romney probably took some gas out of Mike Huckabee's tank by shaming some evangelical voters into reconsidering Romney despite his Mormonism. However, we expect that the general reluctance to vote for a Mormon will nevertheless fatally handicap Romney in the end. And we think that for two reasons.

One is particular. As a Campbellite whose ecclesiastical experience has always been avowedly apolitical, we are amazed that many evangelical pastors consider it their responsibility to tell their congregations which candidate to vote for.* And quite naturally, those pastors who undertaken this responsibility and who have spent their time telling folks that the LDS church is a cult are highly reluctant to endorse Romney. We have heard such folk say as much, and we are once again prompted to thankfulness not to be saddled with such a problem for ourselves. But we expect that a significant minority of evangelicals will never consider Romney, forgetting that they are voting for a chief executive and not a theologian, thereby depleting his potential base of support.

The other is a bigger issue, we believe. In Papa George Romney's time, Americans thought that religion was what a person did at church and on holidays, that it has little influence on their decision making. That notion was reflective of the era and articulated in John Kennedy's justly famous speech in which he declared that the bishops wouldn't tell him what to do as President (and indeed, Kennedy's personal life demonstrated just how true that declaration was). However, today people have returned to the idea that what a person believes about God has a lot to do with the decisions that person makes on a daily basis. And most people, not just evangelicals, think that Mormonism is goofy. They can't bring themselves to take seriously the ideas that Jesus came to North America, that Joseph Smith got temporary loan of golden tablets and special spectacles, that when the right people die they start populating their own universes, and other distinctive Mormon notions. And they have trouble trusting a man who believes such things, despite his impressive record as an executive in business and government.

What is amusing to us is this: Romney equates the early persecution of the followers of Joseph Smith with the religious intolerance early in the history of the New England colonies. While there's probably much to dislike about the treatment of proto-Mormons, our take is that people thought that a polygamous religious group overtly trying to set up a theocracy was, well, socially threatening. In other words, it was precisely because they had rejected the theocratic intolerance of New England that they were hostile toward the Smith, Young & Co. This speech surely was not the place to admit that, but neither was it the place to raise the issue in a way that invited someone to point it out.

Finally, we declare again that we think Mitt Romney would make a fine President. With Our Man Rudy, he shares a characteristic not found among any of the other candidates of either party: significant and highly successful executive experience.

But Rudy remains Our Man. And here's why: we think that Romney might prove to be the Republicans' Michael Dukakis, that is, a demonstrably capable governor who proves too wonkish to woo a national electorate.

So we'll trade Romney's religious baggage for Rudy's personal baggage, admittedly an uneven trade, to get Rudy's passionate engagement.

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*Explanation of the obvious: yes, we know that we endorse candidates all the time here. But we do it not because it is some kind of pastoral responsibility but because we enjoy sharing our brilliant, Seldom-Wrong opinions. Further, we expect to persuade not because of our official status, whatever that is, but because of the impeccable reasoning that supports our views.

Editor's note: This posting exhausts our quota of colons for the 2007 blogging year. We will be forced to rely on other marks of punctuation until January.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not a Romney supporter, but as a Catholic I find the evangelical response to his Mormonism interesting given the religious views of prior American presidents. I found these two paragraphs by the esteemed Fr. Richard John Neuhaus over at First Things hit the nail on the head.

"Few Catholics believe that a candidate is disqualified by being a Mormon. The reason is obvious: Catholics are accustomed to having heretics in the White House. Jews likewise are not offended that the president is not one of their own. This is and always has been a dominantly Protestant country. With the exception of JFK, who, sad to say, was not much of a Catholic, Catholics are accustomed to having presidents who are, in their view, religiously wrongheaded. Evangelicals, by way of contrast, are accustomed to thinking of America as a Christian nation, meaning a Protestant nation. For many who lack a fully developed ecclesiology, America is something very much like their church. You don’t want a heretic as the head of your church.

In this evangelical perspective, a Jewish president is less threatening than a Mormon. Jews are not poaching on their religious territory. Sociologists speak of the propinquity factor in social animosity. Someone who falsely claims kinship is a greater threat than a stranger. Mr. Romney said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” The threatened evangelical responds that that is precisely the problem: He claims to believe what we believe, but, as a Mormon, he is using our language to say something very different."

steve-o said...

I've always found it interesting that a Campbellite minister had influence in the founding of Mormonism.

Sidney Rigdon was a student of Alexander Campbell and preached in Campbellite churches until a person in his congregation handed him a Book of Mormon. Rigdon bought it hook, line and sinker. Joseph Smith's early followers left NY to merge with Rigdon's church and built their temple in Kirtland, Ohio.

Without Rigdon's Campbellite influence, the Mormon Church might not have gained the stability it needed to survive.

Just another wonderful result of the Stone Campbell Movement.

Anonymous said...

I am not nearly as interested in the proclaimed religion of a candidate as how well I believe he or she will govern our country. Sometimes that even means I will not vote for the one whose values seem closest to mine (Huckabee for instance) because of a perceived flaw in their capablity to lead.

Huckabee would be Bush lite. He would be all the things I haven't liked about Bush and less of the things I have. He is pro big government and would increase the nanny-state. On this basis alone, I will not be voting for him in the primary. I'm not even sure he would be better than Hillary.

Romney, may have executive experience, but I'm not sure it's the right kind. What did he do as gov. of Mass. that I would want to see at the national level?

Rudy has some good points and some bad. I like Thompson the best so far, but my primary vote will not matter much since I live in Illinois. (Likewise my vote in the national election, but I will do my duty anyway.)

But I am not sure where you get the idea that evangelical pastors tend to tell their flock how to vote. Perhaps a few do, but never in my experience or that of my evangelical friends. And I have always been an evangelical. I even started out as a Baptist. (I was even in an SBC church for a couple years and yet never was told how I was supposed to vote.)

Jon A. Alfred E. Michael J. Wile E. SWNID said...

We got the idea that some evangelical pastors tell people how to vote from an NPR interview with an evangelical pastor in Iowa who said that he needed to decide who he would recommend to his congregation as a candidate to caucus for. Which is not to say that all do that, or even most. But as a Campbellite, we are shocked to hear such a thing from any pastor.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Swind,

NPR?! You took your information from NPR?! Obviously, they searched Iowa until they could find the one pastor that would go on record saying he would recommend a candidate to his parishoners. I'll bet they could drudge up a Catholic priest or Methodist pastor who would say the same thing if they tried.

I am not denying that there are evangelicals whom some consider leaders that do try to tell us how to vote. (Dobson for one) But they really don't have that much success. We are not as poor, uneducated and easy to command as the folks at NPR seem to believe.

You are right about Mormonism being seen as goofy. I have an Anglican friend who is much more liberal than I am politically, who will not vote for Romney primarily because he is a Mormon and she doesn't see how any intelligent person can believe that stuff.

Jon A. Alfred E. Michael J. Wile E. SWNID said...

Illinois Anonymous:

First, we figured someone would snark NPR. But we still find you amusing enough to respond to, despite the cliche.

Second, note well that many of us Campbellites consider ourselves evangelicals. Our SWNIDish self has contributed an article to a two-volume series that sets forth the connections. We have also let our membership in the Evangelical Theological Society lapse only because our schedule, including blogging, doesn't permit attendance at the annual gabfest, not because we cease to identify broadly with evangelicalism. Campbellites are renegades in the larger evangelical world who fancy that we are calling others to account.

And while many evangelical pastors and other leaders, not just Campbellites, avoid candidate endorsements, the habit of mixing partisan political endorsement with church leadership is of longer and deeper heritage than just Dobson or Falwell.

As to longer, we note a colleague of ours whose PhD dissertation on the Stone-Campbell churches at the turn of the 20th century was criticized by a member of his committee for omitting the political controversies at the time, all of which were a lively part of discussion in religious circles (Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan was a favorite of many religious leaders, for example). Our friend insisted that the Stone-Campbell movement was distinguished by its avoidance of such discussions in the church context. Politics in church was the norm in 1900. Its exclusion was the exception.

As to the matter being deeper, the pastor interviewed on NPR had been attending meetings of pastors, the purpose of which was to discuss whom to endorse. Iowa pastors are political in sufficient numbers that they caucus before the caucus it appears.

More particularly, we'll note the very obvious involvement of pastors like Rod Parsley and Russell Johnson (a renegade Campbellite) in the doomed 2004 Ohio gubernatorial campaign of Ken Blackwell. That sparked objections from Blackwell's opponents that Parsley and Johnson were violating the 501 (c) 3 status of their churches with their partisan activities. Conservatives shot back that Democrats have routinely received endorsements from African-American pastors for a generation or more. But no one denied that endorsements were going on and were deliberate, even common.

We wonder whether two Bush terms, in which Bush was more or less taken for granted as the evangelical candidate, have conditioned white evangelicals and pentecostals to take it for granted that they ought to have a singular candidate to support in every major race.

At any rate, some enterprising graduate student in political science ought to devise a research mechanism for tracking the trends in candidate endorsement from church leaders.

Anonymous said...

Obviously the people and pastors of Iowa have taken their influence in the nominations of either party too far. I must be wrong about the evangelical and other pastors there anyway.

Wasn't Carter the evangelical (born again) choice too?
(And look what that got us.)

Jon A. Alfred E. Michael J. Wile E. SWNID said...

Yes, in 1976 Carter was a Big Deal as a "born again" Christian. Given where he seems to be theologically these days, we wonder if he'd continue to claim that participal modifier for his Christianity.

And the mind wanders immediately to another Southerner, ex-governor and Baptist who is at present commanding the allegiance of a significant percentage of evangelicals who answer polls: Mike Huckabee. We find him the Republican Carter, and our SWNIDish blood runs cold.

Anonymous said...

You are right, he is the republican Carter. Unfortunately there are too many evangelicals out there that are taken in by him. Too me he seems slick and naive at the same time. (Slick because he hides his big government tendencies and says what people want to hear. Naive because he talks about doing unto others on the illegal immigration problem.) He is a pro amnesty socialist, and I for one don't want a president who would ask WWJD before making policy. (Jesus wouldn't run for president in the first place Huck.)