Author Archives: Fred Yi

Steve Monsma: Good As Far As It Goes

Posted on by

Mitt Romney gave a powerful speech in which he forcefully defended religious liberty and related his own firm commitment to it. He insisted that no authorities of his church would exert influence on his decisions as president. For anyone acquainted with Romney and the Mormon Church this was not surprising, but nonetheless reassuring. He also made clear that he does not believe that religious freedom requires a public square stripped of all references to religion, and that doing so could be seen as establishing secularism as a new, state-supported religion. All this was to the good. Anyone who might have felt that being a Mormon in and by itself disqualified one from serving as president of all of the American people should be reassured by what Romney had to say.

But there is one promise Romney made at the beginning of his speech on which I thought he later did not adequately deliver. This is where he said that he “will offer perspectives on how my own faith would inform my presidency, if I were elected.” He later explained how his faith has instilled in him certain moral values that he shares with all persons of faith, “the great moral inheritance we hold in common,” as he put it. This is good as far as it goes. But is there not something more and deeper? Surely, each faith has more specific beliefs and values that shape how its adherents view the world, including the world of public policy issues and debates.

The Mormon tradition is well known for its emphasis on strong, traditional families and hard work, and on its opposition to abortion and same sex marriages, as well as other distinctive beliefs and values. How do such beliefs work to mold the development of his positions on public policy issues? This Romney did not seek to explain. He at one point referred to “the Creator,” but did not explain how his seeing God as the Creator shapes his understanding of environmental issues, or creation care issues as some of us like to put it.

All of us have been shaped by our deepest beliefs, by our faith. I believe Mitt Romney — as do all of the candidates for president — have an obligation to explain how their various religious faiths have worked in their lives to inform their understanding of the world and shape the public policy positions they take. Romney did some of that today, but I am still looking for a fuller discussion of how his own faith would inform his presidency, if he were elected.

Steve Monsma as a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College and professor emeritus of political science at Pepperdine University. His book HEALING FOR A BROKEN WORLD: CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES ON PUBLIC POLICY will be published in March 2008 by Crossway Books.

James K.A. Smith: The God of Americanism

Posted on by

A lot can hang on a preposition. Mitt Romney first promised a speech about his faith, then backed off to offer a broader take on America’s religious landscape and its heritage of religious freedom. So rather than offering an apologetic for his own faith, Romney instead offered an account of “Faith in America.” But the speech has me wondering whether there’s a difference; more specifically, I wonder what’s at stake in that “in.” From where I sit, it looks like Romney’s “own” faith is faith in America. Americans needn’t worry about Romney’s Mormonism because, at the end of the day, the faith that trumps all others is “Americanism.”

Don’t get me wrong: this religion has a long and illustrious history (documented in David Gelertner’s recent book, AMERICANISM: THE FOURTH GREAT WESTERN RELIGION). It is a noble faith that feeds off the blood of its martyrs – in particular “the greatest generation” to which Romney first appeals — who made the greatest sacrifice for the sake of the religion’s highest value: freedom (understood, I should note, in largely negative terms as freedom of choice). Indeed, “freedom” and “liberty” are the mantras of this faith, and Romney’s speech invokes these shibboleths no less than thirty times (God or “the Creator” or “divine author” comes in at a close second with 21 references). And Romney doesn’t fail to allude to the great artifacts of this religion. Americanism has its own sacred documents (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), its own saints (the Founding Fathers), and has even birthed its own cathedrals and grottos (just stroll the National Mall).

So if Mitt Romney was looking to quell concerns about his religion, I think he’s performed admirably! He has indicated, in no uncertain terms, that he is an “Americanist” like almost every other presidential candidate (from I don’t care which side of the aisle). He is an American before he is a Mormon. He is primarily interested in conserving America’s role as a hegemon (“preserving American leadership” is the guise under which he segues to talk about religion). And he enthusiastically adopts Sam Adams’s axiom that it’s not the specifics of piety that matters, but rather whether one is a “patriot.”

If conservatives were worried about his Mormonism, I think Romney has laid his cards on the table and said to them: “Look, don’t worry. Mormonism doesn’t prevent me from being an Americanist.  We’re brothers in that cause.”

In a way, this is refreshingly honest theology. In fact, if one pays close attention to the actual theology at work here — that is, if one starts asking just which God is being invoked — one finds that it is a particular deity: “the divine ‘author of liberty.'” The god of the culture warriors has always been a generic god of theism (precisely like the god of the Founding Fathers): a “God who gave us liberty” (to do what we want). The “Creator” is a granter of inalienable rights and unregulated freedoms, a god who shares and ordains “American values.” If evangelical culture warriors had worries about Romney’s faith, his jeremiad today should confirm that he pledges allegiance to the same “God of liberty” that they do. We’re all Americanists now.

But I hope Mr. Romney and his culture warrior friends (whether on the right or left) won’t be surprised if some of us find it hard to believe in Americanism and its God of liberty. Some of us just can’t muster faith in the generic theism that is preached on the campaign trail, whether from the right or left. Some of us Christians have a hard time reconciling the Almighty, all-powerful, law-giving God of liberty with the crucified suffering servant born in a barn and executed at the hands of the elite. Some of us are trying to figure out what it means to be a people who follow one who relinquished his rights rather than asserted them, who considered submission a higher value than freedom. We serve a God-man who wasn’t concerned with “preserving leadership” and the hegemony of the empire’s gospel of freedom, but rather was crushed by its machinations for proclaiming and embodying another gospel.

We’re not out to win a culture war; we’re just trying to be witnesses. We’re not out to “transform” culture by marshaling the engine of the state; we’re trying to carve out little foretastes of a coming kingdom. And so we can’t share Mr. Romney’s evangelistic zeal for the god of Americanism.

James K.A. Smith is an associate professor of philosophy at Calvin College and a fellow at Calvin’s Center for Social Research. His books include INTRODUCING RADICAL ORTHODOXY (Baker, 2004).

David P. Gushee: God and Country with a Mormon Twist

Posted on by

Governor Romney and his staff clearly knew they were dealing with the major issue that stands between him and the Republican nomination. This speech shows all the signs of careful craftsmanship. As written, it is a powerful address.

It must be remembered that Romney’s current task is to win the Republican nomination, not the general election. He knows the electorate that awaits him in the primaries, with its disproportionately powerful bloc of conservative evangelical Christians. He needed to appeal to this group, many of whom believe that Mormonism is a kind of cult.

Read in this way, most of the speech offers material that could have been delivered by any socially conservative Christian preacher, activist, or politician. These standard themes include the following:

– Religion was central to the founders of our nation.

– Religious and moral values impose limits on the behavior of sinful people and thus protect our civilization and preserve liberty.

– The American way of life requires a robustly religious people.

–While we must institutionally separate church and state, we must not remove religious symbols from the public square or deny our religious heritage.

– God is the Creator and Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior of humanity.

– Religious beliefs motivate movements of conscience in America.

– Religion is not merely a private affair.

But Governor Romney struck other notes that reflect his particular experiences as a member of a minority religious community in America:

– Linking himself to John F. Kennedy, Romney argued that no person should be elected or denied election to the presidency due to his faith.

– In another allusion to Kennedy, Romney flatly ruled out any influence of church authorities on presidential decisions if he is elected.

– In a creative move that attempted to draw a connection to Abraham Lincoln, Romney argued that America’s “political religion” requires a president to place his obligations to the rule of the law and the Constitution above any other moral or religious duty.

– Romney refused to disavow or distance himself from his Mormon (a word he used only once) faith and indicated that to do so would be to deny his own beliefs and the “faith of my fathers” — an allusion to the old hymn, perhaps?

– The governor emphasized religious liberty and toleration in a stronger way than one often finds on the conservative evangelical right; he lamented that our ancestors too often forgot the value of religious liberty once they had gained their own freedoms; and in naming exiled victims of religious intolerance he included Brigham Young.

– Romney refused to be drawn into a point-by-point defense of Mormon doctrine on the basis that this would enable violation of the “religious test” clause of the Constitution.

How shall we hear and interpret this speech?

If I were an atheist or secularist, I would not find that this speech included me in its circle of who counts as a constructive American citizen. If, as Governor Romney said, “Freedom requires religion and religion requires freedom,” then atheists or secularists by definition undermine freedom, the most cherished American value.

If I were Hindu, Buddhist, or Confucian, or a member of any other non-western religious tradition, I would feel invisible, because such faiths were invisible in the speech.

If I were Muslim, I would appreciate mildly the weak affirmation of our tradition’s “frequent prayer,” but would probably be not at all happy about the various attacks on “radical Islamists,” a staple of so many speeches on the right these days.

If I were Jewish, I would take little comfort in the brief mention of our “ancient traditions…unchanged through the ages,” because Judaism is an evolving contemporary religion and not just an ancient tradition.

As a centrist evangelical, I accept some but not all of the basic Christian right boilerplate that Romney articulated in his speech. I appreciate the religious liberty notes that his own experience as a religious minority caused him to emphasize. I agree that no president should be elected or rejected because of his faith and that no official church body can be allowed to dictate a policy position to a president.

On the other hand, as one who believes that Jesus Christ is Lord of my life and of the whole world, I cannot accept that election to the highest office in the land somehow creates a religious transition in which one’s faith commitments get trumped by the demands of the office. Surely it cannot be as simple as that. “You shall have no other gods before me” is a pretty non-negotiable religious command.

Instead, I want to know how any presidential candidate who claims to be a religious believer translates that faith commitment into moral convictions and then, by extension, brings such convictions to bear on policy positions.

Romney essentially granted this point when he claimed that Americans have a common core of moral convictions that flow from our various faiths and even from our founding documents. He summarized this core as “the conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life.”

For me, personally, this conviction is exactly right. I want to hear how Governor Romney squares that conviction with every policy position he takes, including, for example, his stance on waterboarding, on taxes, on health care, on climate, and on immigration. As an evangelical who cares about such issues, I want a president who is able to see the connections between his policies and the tenderhearted compassion embodied in a human dignity ethic.

We don’t need a “political religion” that trumps religious faith. We need a religious faith that humanely informs our laws and our policies.

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights. His most recent book, THE FUTURE OF FAITH IN AMERICAN POLITICS: THE PUBLIC WITNESS OF THE EVANGELICAL CENTER, will be published in January by Baylor University Press.

Kimberly H. Conger: Not a Recipe for a Romney Win

Posted on by

Mitt Romney’s speech today focused ostensibly on religious liberty and tolerance, with the direct implication that his Mormon faith should not be an issue for voters. But it is not clear that the political goal for the speech — to woo evangelical Republicans in early primary states — was achieved.

There was, apparently, quite a bit of controversy within the Romney campaign about whether this speech should be given at this point or at all. Most observers believe that it was the recent success of the Huckabee campaign in Iowa that prompted the speech at this time. I think pundits will be debating the wisdom of Romney’s choice for quite a while. Romney had very little to gain and much to lose with this speech. Most general polls suggest that the average voter cares little about Romney’s Mormon faith, but that a significant portion of likely Republican primary voters (and caucus attendees) are evangelicals who don’t fully support the idea that a Mormon should be president. Endorsements of Romney’s candidacy by Christian Right leaders aside, most evangelicals believe that Mormonism is a cult and not a Christian denomination. Some evangelicals were willing to vote for Romney because he was a better alternative than the pro-choice, twice divorced Rudy Guliani. But the advent of Mike Huckabee as a legitimate candidate, with his social conservative and evangelical faith credentials, makes Romney second choice for many evangelicals. This could be disastrous for the Romney campaign, particularly in Iowa and South Carolina.

So Romney’s challenge was to convince evangelicals that it doesn’t matter that he’s Mormon, that he’ll support the right policies when the time comes. In a race where there were no viable evangelical candidates, this would have been a winning strategy. But a focus on civil religion and the importance of faith in American’s lives is not enough for most evangelicals to choose a Mormon over a former Baptist preacher. Romney’s strongest argument to evangelicals is not his faith tradition or the need for Americans to be religiously tolerant; it is that he is the only conservative candidate that can win the Republican nomination. But Huckabee’s recent surge calls even that argument into question. So while the goal of the speech was to reassure evangelicals that being a Mormon is OK and that he is still a good candidate for them, all it likely did was more starkly draw the lines between his Mormon faith and the evangelical faith of his newly strong competitor. That is not a recipe for a Romney win in Iowa or South Carolina.

Kimberly H. Conger is an assistant professor in the political science department at Iowa State University.

Richard Wightman Fox: “A Memorable American Political Oration”

Posted on by

Whatever one thinks of his politics, one has to admit that Governor Romney’s Texas speech on “Faith in America,” like Senator Kennedy’s remarks to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, was expertly written and beautifully delivered. Both men rose to the occasion by reminding us of the hard-won American commitment to religious liberty. Both of them pulled off the delicate feat of downplaying their specific religious beliefs while declaring their loyalty to their church. Both said they would rather lose than give up their faith. (Kennedy brilliantly added that if he got beat because of being Catholic, the real loser would be the nation; Romney should have made the same point with the same understated passion.)

Speaking as committed men of faith, they could then claim, if they should become president, to represent all citizens of faith. Neither man worried about alienating the minority of non-religious voters. Kennedy, like Martin Luther King three years later in the “I Have a Dream” speech, spoke of America as a nation of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews; Romney bravely brought Muslims into the fold, explaining that as a Mormon he had something to learn from people of other religious traditions. He appreciated the “frequent prayer” practiced by Muslims, just as he liked the evangelical Christians’ sense of the “approachability” of God, the Lutherans’ “confident independence,” the Pentecostals’ “tenderness of spirit,” the “ceremony” of the Catholic Mass, and the “ancient traditions” of the Jews.

In that litany he very noticeably said nothing about what the rest of America could learn from his own Latter-day Saints. He came close to claiming devotion to family as a distinctive LDS virtue, but backed off, stressing that even his own family fell short of the “perfection” to which they aspired. But throughout the speech he argued implicitly that the Mormons’ commitment to religious freedom stood as a model for all. Has any presidential candidate ever before stated that as a man of faith he wished his church would learn from the traditions of others?  (Non-candidate Mario Cuomo has said so many times, adding that encountering other religions permits one to rediscover forgotten features of one’s own tradition, as encountering Judaism led him to new appreciation of his Catholic faith.)

If anything, Romney surpassed Kennedy in the passion he conveyed while tracing the history of the battle for religious liberty, likening Brigham Young’s trek West in the 19th century to Anne Hutchinson’s and Roger Williams’s struggles in the 17th. Romney said nothing about his specifically Mormon beliefs, but everything he said about faith in America — his own and everyone else’s — was subtly and potently informed by his memory of the persecution experienced by his Mormon ancestors. The power of the speech reminds me of the power of Barack Obama’s at the Democratic convention in 2004: Obama’s vision of a multicultural America was rooted in his own biracial, binational past. I sense Romney’s speech will go down as a memorable American political oration regardless of his success as a candidate. He spoke eloquently of what it means to be an American whose ancestors fought for the freedom of religion guaranteed to them by the Bill of Rights, and to practice one’s faith in a religiously pluralistic society where everyone can gain by opening up to the spiritual insights of others.

Romney’s speech was twice as long as Kennedy’s (20 minutes to 10 minutes), but Kennedy stayed at the podium for 30 more minutes of questions from seven Protestant ministers, who were permitted to grill him with unlimited follow-ups. Kennedy shined in that format of quick-witted repartee, treating his questioners respectfully, almost deferentially, while still expressing himself forcefully. Romney took no questions. In the weeks and months to come, he will face some of the grilling to which Kennedy submitted right after his speech. Kennedy, by gaining the support of prominent Protestants in 1960 (Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett among them) probably saved Romney the trouble of having to reconcile the hierarchical structure of the LDS Church with American democratic values. And it should be easy enough for Romney to handle the narrow “Jesus” issue. He can keep repeating what he said in the speech: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind,” then claim that he would rather leave the fine points to the theologians. It may be harder for him to explain what Latter-day Saints mean when they say that the 19th-century Book of Mormon counts as a revelation like the Old and New Testaments, or that all believers can aspire to being “gods.”

Finally, Romney’s speech shrewdly combined reaching out to Protestant evangelicals with an overture to the general religious population, liberals included, whom he will want to win over if he gets the Republican nomination. He went out of his way to distance himself from many Protestant Republicans by stating that “reason and religion are friends and allies.” In a general election campaign he would try to position himself right on that boundary line: welcoming religion into public life (as many Democrats nowadays, unlike Kennedy, are also eager to do) while asserting that rational judgment and scientific expertise are fully compatible with faith. But some questioner may complicate matters for him by asking, for example, how, given his dual embrace of reason and religion, he interprets his prophet Joseph Smith’s claim to have himself translated, from the hieroglyphics on gold plates he discovered on September 22, 1827, the Book of Mormon.

Richard Wightman Fox is the author of JESUS IN AMERICA: PERSONAL SAVIOR, CULTURAL HERO, NATIONAL OBSESSION (HarperCollins, 2004).

Ronald C. White Jr: Get Right with Religion

Posted on by

A half century ago, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois said “the first task of every politician is to get right with Lincoln.” If he were speaking today, he might say the first task of every politician is to get right with religion.

Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts understood that he had a special burden to get right with religion today (December 6). Many commentators have likened Romney’s challenge to the address by candidate John F. Kennedy 47 years ago to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, but the challenge was quite different. Despite the presence of an anti-Catholic spirit coming forward from the 1950s, Kennedy was a member of an ancient, large church whose membership comprised 33 percent of the population, whereas Romney is a member of a newer religious tradition whose membership comprises 3 percent of the American population.

The way each candidate framed his speech is revealing. Kennedy, a master speaker, built his tightly focused, briefer speech around a steady litany of “I believe in an America where…,” with few specifics about the American religious landscape. He even said at the outset, “we have far more critical issues to face in the 1960 election,” a comment that reflected accurately the very different America to which he spoke. Romney, by contrast, acknowledged that religion was a critical issue, and the architecture of his address contained far more building blocks, because his burden was both to reach out to an American public expecting to hear candidates speak their faith, but at the same time not turn away other Americans concerned that there is a recent conspiracy to construct a certain kind of religion in American society.

Romney chose not to place the focus on his personal faith but to make a plea for the role of faith in the public square. For me, his thesis sentence was: “It is important to recognize that while differences in theology exist between the churches in America, we share a common creed of moral convictions.” He illustrated this conviction by listing as examples “abolition, or civil rights, or the right to life itself,” thereby including causes from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries embraced by religious people from left to right on the religious spectrum. Romney was making a plea for a common ethic or morality as the ultimate basis for the role of religion in America.

This was a speech in which Governor Romney sought to earn the right to be heard. He did so by affirming his faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, but admitting that others may have differing beliefs about Christ. He affirmed the separation of church and state, but stated that the intention of the founders was not the elimination of religion from the public square. He recalled that the first Americans came to find religious liberty, but acknowledged that once here ended up denying religious liberty to those with whom they disagreed, citing Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Brigham Young as examples. Romney celebrated the religious vitality in America by contrasting it with the empty cathedrals of a Europe “too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer.” A strength of Romney’s speech, and a contrast with Kennedy’s speech, were his affirmations of the specific beliefs, ceremonies, prayers, and traditions of Catholics, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Lutherans, and Jews.

Romney’s speech also contained a warning about “the creed of conversion by conquest.” Although Romney mentioned the murder of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, his focus was on the danger of “theocratic tyranny” by “radical Islamists.”

In the end, Romney offered an assurance that sounded very much like Kennedy in 1960: “Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church, for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions.”

Did Romney get right with religion in 2007/8? He is in a box, and he knows it. On the one hand, he will never be able to get right with the religion of those who will never vote for a Mormon. On the other hand, in a brief address, Romney made a thoughtful argument for the role of religion in the public square that he hopes can reach across denominational divisions.

The question Governor Romney did not address was what was the content of that religion?  He had to say, even as Kennedy had to say, that he would not be influenced by his church in forming the moral guidelines for his political leadership. But why not? What are the foundations of morality?  In a religiously diverse society some have argued that we can simply separate ethics from theology. George Washington declared long ago that morality severed from religion will not long remain moral. Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address, combined an indicative, what God has done — “The Almighty has his own purposes” — with an imperative, what we are to do — “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” Governor Romney affirmed today that religion needs to be part of the public square. He, and other candidates, have yet to tell us in any specificity what the indicatives are that will allow us to act on what imperatives to make this a more loving and just society.

Ronald C. White, Jr. is the author of LINCOLN’S GREATEST SPEECH: THE SECOND INAUGURAL and THE ELOQUENT PRESIDENT: A PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN THROUGH HIS WORDS. He is writing a biography of Lincoln that will be published by Random House in January 2009.

Leo Ribuffo: God and the Presidency from Jack to Mitt

Posted on by

In 1960 John F. Kennedy gave two major speeches on what he described as the “so-called religious issue” in the presidential campaign. The second, presented to the greater Houston Baptist Ministerial Association in September, after he received the Democratic nomination, has passed into political folklore. It has been cited incessantly in this week’s run up to Governor Mitt Romney’s address today. The first, given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 1960, when Kennedy’s nomination remained very much in doubt, lingers in obscurity. Both speeches were impressive political performances, filled with signature JFK themes like his wartime record and the imminent threat of international Communism. Both stressed the central point that, as Kennedy told the Baptists, a president’s “views on religion are his own private affair.”  But his more candid and annoyed address to the editors went further. “The President is not elected to be protector of the faith — or guardian of the public morals. His attendance at church on Sunday should be his business alone, not a showcase for the nation.”

From the perspective of 2007 — indeed, from the perspective of presidential politics since 1976 — such views sound almost as archaic as Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that he cared not whether his neighbor believed in no god or twenty gods. This change in the political zeitgeist does not simply reflect growing religiosity in the electorate. On the contrary, depending on where and how we look, Americans in the aggregate are less religious now than in 1960. Rather, starting with the polarized high “sixties” that began a half decade later, social and cultural issues related to religion have become a larger part of the nation’s political divisions. As religion-related issues multiplied, so did rival groups dedicated to mobilizing the devout, the secular, and those in between. In 1960, despite rising Catholic and Protestant tensions during the previous decade, Kennedy could affirm the “absolute” separation of church and state, reject diplomatic relations with the Vatican, call federal aid to parochial schools unconstitutional, and be done with it. The chances of Congress passing a foreign aid bill funding birth control seemed “very remote,” he said. And of course Kennedy spoke thirteen years before Roe v. Wade legalized almost all abortions.

With varying degrees of piety, sincerity, and success, presidential candidates have adapted to and promoted the proliferation of religion-related issues and a zeitgeist that now seems to impose a de facto religiosity test for the major party nominations.

Jimmy Carter’s courtship of his fellow “born again” Protestants helped him win the 1976 election but many of them defected from his coalition when they discovered on closer inspection that Carter was theologically and politically more liberal than he had sounded. Ronald Reagan, an eclectic Protestant with a Catholic father, toyed with religious beliefs ranging from Baha’i to premillennial prophecies of Jesus’ imminent return. On the thinnest of evidence, he convinced most evangelicals and fundamentalists that he, too, was a born again Christian, and the briefly influential new Christian right accepted a very junior partnership in the Reagan coalition. As president, Reagan’s religious style recalled Eisenhower’s affirmations of religion in general; he began the contemporary practice of ending speeches with “God bless America.” On thinner evidence and with less success, George H. W. Bush claimed that he, too, was sort of born again. Bill Clinton, who combined spiritual searching and womanizing in the fashion of Lyndon Johnson, continued the speech-ending ritual of asking God to bless America. George W. Bush, a moderate evangelical himself, has given a larger governmental role to the Christian right than Reagan did because that interest group is now more firmly established in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the specific issues related to religion have waxed and waned. For instance, most Americans stopped noticing that numerous presidential contenders since 1960 have been Catholics. Even among pundits, who knew in 1988 that Alexander Haig’s brother was a Catholic clergyman? Throughout these three decades, however, religious liberals and militant secularists have continued to warn that the “wall of separation” between church and state has been breached and perhaps seems on the verge of collapse.

In short, the period since 1976, characterized by religion-related issues and an open mixture of religion and politics, looks like most eras in American history rather than the atypical “fifties.” Yet even in that stereotyped era, conflict, including substantial religious conflict, could be found just below the enforced consensus.

Viewed in this context, in which conflict relating to religion is viewed as the American historical norm rather than the exception, is there a major “Mormon issue” in contemporary presidential campaign? If so, is it comparable to the “Catholic issue” in 1960?

There is at the moment a Mormon issue in the Republican Party centered on the state of Iowa.  Specifically, there is a close race in the upcoming caucuses between former Massachusetts Governor George Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister and television evangelist before he entered politics. This competition has drawn attention to differences between Mormons on the one hand and evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants on the other.

In theological terms, the differences are substantial. Although the LDS Church developed out of the lively Protestant religious stew of the early nineteenth century, Mormons under the leadership of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young intended to improve upon Christianity, with significant departures even from the increasingly amorphous standards of the day. These included new scriptures, including most famously the Book of Mormon, new core beliefs, such as Jesus’ presence in the western hemisphere after the resurrection, and controversial practices, such as direct revelation and (until 1890 and most notoriously) plural marriage.

Until the early twentieth century, evangelical Protestants often paired popery and the LDS as comparable autocratic and lecherous evils. If anything, the Mormons looked worse. Catholicism could be viewed as a precursor, a legitimate defender of the pure faith until it went astray. The LDS Church claimed to be a successor, holding that all of the proliferating denominations growing out of Reformation Protestantism needed to be replaced. To reformed Protestants this upstart faith looked like an un-Christian cult. Indeed, Joseph Smith had called himself the second Muhammad.

Our lives are often more flexible than our doctrines, and the religious rank-and-file in America have always mixed incongruous beliefs in ways that distressed their clergy. By the 1950s most animosity to Mormonism had dissolved in the solvent of religion in general. By the late 1970s, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Mormons often united in defense of “traditional” values. Jerry Falwell might have suspected that Mormons were doomed to hell but, in the meantime, they were welcome to join the Moral Majority.  During the past quarter century, Mormons have typically placed a stronger emphasis on Jesus Christ as savior and in general sounded more and more like evangelicals.

Yet significant tensions remained. Not only was Mormonism not really Christian in the eyes of many evangelical and fundamentalist leaders, but also these theological conservatives and the LDS competed in the missionary field. Doctrinal differences and lingering suspicions provided an opening for political exploitation — especially in the insular world of Republican caucuses and primaries.

Governor Romney apparently thought he could win the Republican presidential nomination by combining relatively cosmopolitan appeals in places like New Hampshire, where there were few religious conservatives, while fitting into the traditionalist family values niche in places like Iowa, where there were lots of them.  Few Republicans in New Hampshire seem to care that Romney is a Mormon.  But evangelical and fundamentalist Republicans in Iowa apparently do, as they almost certainly will in states with comparable religious constituencies.

Still, how deeply they care and what this says about religious tolerance in the United States is hard to say. Undoubtedly they would care less about Mormonism if Romney’s chief opponent were Rudolph Giuliani, a thrice married Catholic of sorts. But Governor Huckabee fills the traditionalist family values niche just as well as Romney, and he is, more importantly, an evangelical himself.

An even harder question is to what extent evangelicals in Iowa are supporting Huckabee because he is one of their own, a fact he is strongly advertising, and to what extent he is winning support because his campaign is exploiting anti-Mormon sentiment. According to press reports, Huckabee has declined to say whether or not he considers Mormonism a cult or just a different but legitimate version of Christianity. An American is certainly allowed to believe and declare that “my religion is better than yours,” but at least since the 1930s no serious presidential candidate has said so even in private. Perhaps Huckabee should be the candidate giving a speech on church, state, and religious tolerance.

Romney’s speech on those subjects contained few surprises. Much of it echoed Kennedy in 1960. He was a American running for president who happened to be a Mormon rather than the Mormon presidential candidate. He endorsed the separation of church and state. He would not take orders from LDS leaders. He would rather lose than repudiate his faith.

Most of the civil religion passages could have been lifted from addresses by Eisenhower or FDR. The merit of religion in general was a persistent theme. Liberty was said to be God’s gift. John Adams and Abraham Lincoln were invoked as men of faith, as indeed they were, but Romney did not note that their Christianity was considerably less orthodox than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Methodist social gospel. Following the now standard ritual, he ended by asking God to bless America. He did not suggest, along with Lincoln, Jimmy Carter, and even Richard Nixon, that God might decide otherwise.

Three points were noteworthy, if far short of extraordinary. First, fighting for the traditionalist family values niche, he promoted religion in general in the public square, including religious symbols in literal public squares, and scorned the “religion of secularism.” Second, perhaps to reassure evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, he called Jesus the “Son of God and Savior of Mankind.” Third, Romney admitted that religious intolerance is one of our American traditions, and he cited the travails of dissident puritan Anne Hutchinson and LDS leader Brigham Young as cases in point.

Romney’s speech will probably not affect the outcome of the Iowa caucus. It does not rank with either of Kennedy’s 1960 addresses as a political performance or a serious discussion of church and state. Nonetheless, the speech shows that Romney has begun to think about questions that he will face over and over and over again if he wins the Republican nomination.

One thing that has not changed significantly since 1960 is the dismal performance of the news media when covering religion and politics. There are exceptions. This week these included Kenneth Woodward’s New York Times op ed on the differences between the situations faced by JFK and Romney. Reporters now feel obligated to call scholars to explain, for example, the difference between Mormons and evangelicals. But expert advice rarely affects the main narrative line, which still highlights the atypical and the lurid. As Kennedy told the editors in his lesser known 1960 speech, they should stop “magnifying” and “oversimplifying” religious issues.

Leo P. Ribuffo, a professor of history at the George Washington University, specializes in 20th century U.S. history and American intellectual history.

David O’Brien: Is America the Real Religion?

Posted on by

Governor Romney says some wise things about faith and freedom and politics. He unfortunately joins the crowd of Christians who love to bash the straw man of secularism, but he is right to ask for respect and to challenge those who expect him to address specific Mormon doctrines. What’s missing is conscience, how religion’s claims are mediated by conscience and, as John Kennedy acknowledged on a similar occasion, a moment might come when a president, like a citizen, might be required to object, or to resign. What’s an even greater worry here is Governor Romney’s commitment to conventional civil religion: what really matters is America, for which we ask our people to risk death, and to kill, and willingness to do so is apparently the major test of genuine American religion. So the big question, for all Americans, is what is our common good and what happens to us when we confine debate about that question to those who really worship America?

David O’Brien is a historian of American Catholicism and professor of Roman Catholic studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Randall Balmer: Mitt Romney’s Defining Moment

Posted on by

In what may be seen as the defining moment of his campaign, Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a Mormon, sought to address the issue of his faith and its bearing on his pursuit of the presidency. Pundits and historians inevitably compared Romney’s speech in College Station, Texas, with the speech that John F. Kennedy gave at the Rice Hotel just down the road in Houston on September 12, 1960.

The parallels are unmistakable. Both men felt compelled to address what was openly discussed as the “religious issue” during the 1960 presidential campaign. Both men were reared from infancy in a tradition different from Protestantism, which in its various forms claims the allegiance of at least a plurality (if not a majority) of Americans.

But the parallels end there. Unlike Mormonism, Roman Catholicism was well known to most Americans in 1960, although many Protestants had a jaundiced view of the Roman Catholic Church. Many Americans today, by contrast, know little about Mormonism, officially named the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Much like the anti-Masonic movements in the nineteenth century, Americans see Mormons as secretive; their temples, for instance, are closed to “gentiles” (non-Mormons).

For evangelicals in particular, some of the tenets of Mormonism are troubling. The Mormon notion of God as both male and female, baptism for the dead, and even the practice of wearing Mormon underwear (thought by many to have protective powers) strike many evangelicals as unorthodox, if not downright bizarre.

Most crucial, however, is the doctrine of revelation. Mormons accept the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament as divinely inspired, but they believe that the Book of Mormon, discovered by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in 1827, is similarly inspired. And Mormons believe that the president of the Latter-day Saints is the conduit for continuing inspiration.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, have an almost talismanic view the Bible (Old and New Testaments), which they often refer to as “the word of God” and which provides their sole religious authority. For another religious group to “tamper” with the canon of scripture — much less add to it at any time — strikes most evangelicals as utter blasphemy.

All of these suspicions do not augur well for Romney. Politically conservative evangelical voters have become the core constituency for the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once provided the backbone of the Democratic Party. In order to win the Republican nomination, Romney needs the support of politically conservative evangelicals, who are especially active in Iowa.

Throughout the early months of the campaign, Romney sought to downplay his faith, protesting that he is not a spokesman for Mormonism. But many voters, evangelicals especially, have not been mollified — which led him to the dais of the George Bush Library in Texas Thursday morning (December 6) to deliver his “JFK speech.”

Two of the most compelling arguments central to Kennedy’s speech in 1960, however, are not available to Romney. Kennedy unequivocally affirmed his “absolute” support for the separation of church and state, and he also foreswore government support for religious schools. Romney cannot echo those positions, and indeed he hedged on the former and refused to address the latter. The leaders of the religious right preach that the separation of church and state, as encoded into the First Amendment, is a “myth.” They also seek taxpayer support for church-related schools.

So, in the end, Romney was reduced to bromides about religious liberty and “family values.” (Mormons are good at “family values.”)

Ironically, Romney missed the opportunity to make his best case for a Mormon to be president. Mormons believe that America’s charter documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are actually divinely inspired. After seven years of an administration that views the Constitution as a nuisance, many Americans, I suspect, would welcome a president who sought to defend the integrity of the Constitution rather than subvert it.

Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. His most recent book, GOD IN THE WHITE HOUSE: A HISTORY: HOW FAITH SHAPED THE PRESIDENCY FROM JOHN F. KENNEDY TO GEORGE W. BUSH, will be released by HarperOne in January.

Charles T. Mathewes: Romney and the Eisenhower Approach

Posted on by

Gov. Romney is attempting to do a jujitsu trick with this speech, which is actually an old political strategy. He is attempting to turn concerns about his faith, which seems very sincerely and intensely held, into recognition that the sincerity and intensity of faith is itself a good thing.

Consider two lines in the speech. First, Romney said that “[a]s governor…I did not confuse the particular teachings of my church with the obligations of the office and of the Constitution — and of course, I would not do so as President. I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.”

Along with this, he also said “no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.” He is trying to say that religion has a moral energy, but it cannot speak directly to issues of policy. This is a classic mid-century understanding of how religion can help moral and political life; it offers little unique in the way of direction to our moral endeavors, but it does offer something significant in the way of energizing our efforts.

It turns out that everyone was looking in the wrong place — or rather, to the wrong president. The antecedent figure to look to here is not Kennedy but Eisenhower, who famously said that “our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

The problem with this approach is precisely that it assumes a clear division between religion and politics, between “affairs of the nation” and “church affairs.” Historically, no clear division was acknowledged between those two things. It is an achievement of modernity, over the past several centuries, to begin to insinuate that religious belief and civic commitment are two viably distinct dimensions of human life. This is not to say that they were totally conflated in all times and places; but the distinctions Romney drew today are very unusual, historically speaking. And it is still not at all clear that those distinctions are right — that in fact we can imagine religion and politics as totally separate spheres of human life without tension between them.

In fact, contemporary political and cultural life is even more challenging than that. For many of our most fraught debates over the past several decades — on culture war issues as well as geopolitical issues — do seem to rest on judgments that are frankly moral, not a matter of neutral policy but grounded in assessments of reality that speak in necessarily normative vernacular. To what degree was the USSR an evil empire? What do we owe the poor in our own country? What do we owe those who suffer genocide, thousands of miles away? Is abortion the intrinsically evil killing of a human life, or the potentially tragic termination of a preliminary entity that would become a human life? These debates in the public realm are as much moral and metaphysical and theological debates as they are political ones.

Indeed, many of the Republican Party’s legitimate complaints about the expulsion of religion from the public sphere in the last few decades were built on a critique of just the approach Romney was using — which was, effectively, what much of the Democratic Party thought after the 1960s. Religion and politics are not supposed to relate to one another. They are wholly separate spheres of life, one “private,” the other “public.” It is ironic, then, that Romney’s speech was so focused on resolving his political views that he may have ended up replicating that approach, and that may mean he didn’t really address the issue at all. Evangelicals who are persuaded by critiques of such an approach to religion and politics will be no more satisfied that a Republican voices them than if a Democrat did.

Finally, one should bemoan Romney’s tepid appreciation of Islam. Was it all he could do to say that he admires the “commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims”? One imagines there is more to find admirable in Islam — for example, the seriousness with which Muslims take their religious practice, well beyond the requirement to pray five times daily. One might point to the zakat, the alms that good Muslims are supposed to give; or perhaps the month of Ramadan, recently concluded, during which Muslims avoid all forms of sensual pleasure (most notably eating, drinking, and smoking) during the daylight hours. Especially in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, attention to how a religious tradition can work against gluttony would not be a bad thing to point out. In any event, if you’re not willing to say something real, it seems unhelpful to say something so empty.

Charles T. Mathewes is an associate professor of religious ethics and the history of Christian thought at the University of Virginia and the author of A THEOLOGY OF PUBLIC LIFE (Cambridge University Press, 2007).