January 8, 2007
Watergate Revisited Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:15 PM EST Since everyone deserves a vigorous defense, someone should stand up for Charles Colson. Why not John Steele Gordon? Mr. Gordon accuses me of hypocrisy for arguing that states should restore the voting rights of ex-felons while also mocking Colson. On the contrary. Colson should absolutely be permitted to vote. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t recall the criminal operation he built and ran inside the Nixon White House—an operation that illegally sabotaged rival presidential campaigns (particularly, that of Sen. Ed Muskie), willfully violated the civil rights of numerous private citizens, and employed toughs to physically assault antiwar protesters. Colson served seven months in prison. It should have been seven years. In any event, I’m not suggesting that he shouldn’t be permitted to vote. I just don’t believe a word he says. Neither am I crying for Chuck Colson. He’s as powerful today as he was when he was coordinating criminal projects for Richard Nixon. His life turned out just fine. Conservatives should treat all ex-convicts with such open arms. (Note to Mr. Gordon: Have I defended Webster Hubbell in these pages, or in any other forum? I don’t recall having done so. Unless he can refresh my memory, he should not intimate what is not true.) On the topic of Charles Colson, it’s worth noting that Fred Fielding, the high-powered Beltway attorney who has just been named to replace Harriet Miers as White House chief counsel, was also a member of the Nixon White House. As an assistant to White House counsel John Dean, Fielding sat in on FBI interviews with White House personnel during the initial investigation into the Watergate burglary. He did so with the explicit permission of L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director. This is partly why Gray never got to serve as director in his own right. It was a completely inappropriate violation of Bureau procedure, just this side of obstruction of justice. Fred Fielding played only a bit role in the cover-up. But he was there. Interestingly, before it materialized that Mark Felt was Deep Throat, the confidential government source featured in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s bestseller All the President’s Men, Fielding was rumored to be the mole. Then again, so were about 100 other people.
January 8, 2007
Mitt Romney, Again II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:50 PM EST I have just two comments.
First, Joshua Zeitz writes, “If a politician makes faith a central part of his message, as Romney has done, he should explain precisely what that faith entails. Voters have a right to know.”
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I am not aware that Mitt Romney has made his faith “a central part of his message.” He has said that he is a person of faith, but I’m sure he has come out foursquare in favor of Mom and apple pie as well. Exactly what has Mitt Romney said that makes his faith “a central part of his message”? What Mr. Zeitz quoted him as saying in South Carolina is simply standard political boilerplate. George Bush, who in the last six years has not turned the country into a theocracy, would be perfectly willing, I’m sure, to say the same thing. So would many other politicians, including not a few who would be lying when they did so.
Second, he writes, “In an interview about the prospects of a Romney candidacy, Charles Colson, the Watergate felon who once was lost but now is found (Colson is a leading evangelical conservative), invoked the story of Martin Luther, who said he would rather be ‘ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.’ Doesn’t sound like Colson will be heading up Former Watergate Felons for Romney.”
Mr. Zeitz has argued on this blog that felons should have their full rights as citizens, including the right to vote, restored upon completion of their sentences. In other words, they should be assumed to have been rehabilitated and to be, once more, accepted among their fellow Americans. If he actually believes that—and it is a perfectly respectable position—then surely they should be treated with as much respect as other citizens, unless they give evidence of not deserving that respect. Bygones, Mr. Zeitz has eloquently argued, should be bygones.
Mr. Zeitz does not do so here.
Since Mr. Colson’s release from prison—more than three decades ago—he has, as far as I know, not only lived a life within the law but has indeed devoted that life to helping other felons regain their lives and their places in society, working tirelessly in prisons and other unpleasant places to achieve that. On his release from prison he founded the Prison Fellowship, (prisonfellowship.org), an organization that seeks “to mobilize and assist the Christian community in its ministry to prisoners, ex-prisoners, victims, and their families; and in the advancement of restorative justice.” The movement has now spread to 112 countries. In 1993 Colson won the Templeton Prize for his work, an award also won by Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Immanuel Jokobovits, and Freeman Dyson, among many other distinguished people of faith. Mr. Colson, according to Wikipedia, has donated his book royalties to the organization he founded. I know I haven’t given away any of my royalties, and I doubt Mr. Zeitz has either.
Does someone who has accomplished all that since his own release from prison deserve Mr. Zeitz’s snide sarcasm and to have his long-ago prison record thrown in his face because he doesn’t attend Mr. Zeitz’s political church?
Or are only liberal ex-felons—Webster Hubbell comes to mind—entitled to be treated with respect by Mr. Zeitz?
January 8, 2007
Mitt Romney, Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST Referring to my statement that politicians who make their faith a central theme of their candidacy should be prepared to answer specific questions about that faith, John Steele Gordon writes, “I’m sorry, but I smell a political rat here. Mr. Zeitz, after all, will not be heading up the Upper West Side Romney for President Club. This seems to me to be an invitation for people of faith to get tangled up in public theological discussions that will win them no votes but might well cost them votes, especially if they make some misstatement or fail to express clearly some obscure point, providing an opening for their political enemies to twist it into something else entirely.”
For starters, Mr. Gordon is absolutely correct. I will not be heading up the Upper West Side Romney for President Club. I live on the Upper East Side. And I spend much of my year in England.
As for Mr. Gordon’s point—“Mr. Zeitz didn’t reply to my question as to whether a Nexis search would turn up concerns among the ‘religious right’ regarding Romney’s Mormonism”—the answer is yes, and no. A quick Nexis search revealed that James Dobson, the powerful head of the Focus on the Family, said recently, “I don't believe that conservative Christians will vote for a Mormon, but that remains to be seen, I guess.” He should know. Tom Minnery, Dobson’s policy advisor, pointedly declined to say whether Dobson would refuse to endorse Romney on religious grounds. In an interview about the prospects of a Romney candidacy, Charles Colson, the Watergate felon who once was lost but now is found (Colson is a leading evangelical conservative), invoked the story of Martin Luther, who said he would rather be “ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.” Doesn’t sound like Colson will be heading up Former Watergate Felons for Romney. Strike two for the governor.
Recognizing the sectarian dilemma inherent in a Mormon candidacy, Romney’s campaign recently organized a sit-down between the candidate and leading evangelical Christians, including Gary Bauer, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, and the pastors of several important megachurches. Several of the attendees were impressed by Romney and told reporters that while they had serious theological qualms with the governor, they were willing to give him a serious look because they liked his stance on political questions.
Ironically, a recent Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll revealed that the two groups that are most resistant to installing a Mormon in the White House are people who attend church more than once a week, 50 percent of whom said they would not vote for a Mormon, and Democrats, 42 percent of whom made the same claim. The former group includes a disproportionate share of evangelical Christians. So, at least one can say that Mormon politicians help Democrats and devout Christians find common ground. Sort of.
Mr. Gordon writes, “Mr. Zeitz says that people of faith should be cross-examined by a bunch of intellectuals to find out exactly what faith and what tenets and what the pattern on their theological boxer shorts is. Mr. Zeitz’s offer for people of faith to sit down and discuss the details of that faith is one that can—and undoubtedly will—be refused. Can anyone imagine candidates without faith sitting down and discussing the reasons for their agnosticism at length, or even admitting that they are agnostic?”
I don’t recall having suggested that we subject candidates who profess a strong faith to trial by university professors. Unlike Mr. Gordon, who postures as a populist but clearly has trouble imagining that non-intellectuals are concerned about and engaged by the political debate, I think that most voters are genuinely interested in knowing what ideas drive and inspire political candidates. If a politician makes faith a central part of his message, as Romney has done, he should explain precisely what that faith entails. Voters have a right to know. If a religious candidate doesn’t tout his faith as a selling point, then his faith is, and should remain, a private affair.
Mr. Gordon ignores my larger point—to wit, that by making a fetish out of “faith,” we denigrate faith.
If history is any indicator, evangelical Christians and Mormons will likely find ground for political cooperation—if not this year, then eventually. Remember that in the mid-twentieth century, fundamentalists and Catholics were deeply distrustful of each other. This was particularly true of fundamentalists, who regarded Catholicism as an apostate creed and often speculated that the Roman church might very well be in league with Satan. Prominent fundamentalists like Otto Klink casually denounced Catholicism as a “monster of iniquity, ” while Bob Jones, Sr., founder of Bob Jones University, a leading Bible college, argued that the “Roman Catholic Church in its organization and its exaltation of saints and a priesthood, is veiling Christ as our Intercessor. You don’t need any Virgin Mary to intercede for you. You don’t need a pope or a priest. The humblest Christian who walks this earth has as much access to God the Father through Jesus Christ the risen Lord as a priest, a bishop, or a pope. We Christians in this church age are a ‘kingdom of priests.’”
Fifty years later, leading evangelical and Catholic conservatives collaborate comfortably in their political opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage, and in their push for stronger human rights laws and funding for faith-based initiatives. Sectarian boundaries have tended to crumble in America, if slowly and in fits and starts. But as I said in my initial post on this subject, history doesn’t always move in a linear fashion, and even when it does, its direction is not always forward-looking.
January 4, 2007
Optimism in War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST An article in Foreign Policy, “Why Hawks Win,” by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics at Princeton, and Jonathan Renshon, a graduate student in Harvard’s department of government, argues that people proposing the use of military force tend to win arguments over government policy because of fundamental psychological predispositions. As the two put it, “These psychological impulses—only a few of which we discuss here—incline national leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries, to misjudge how adversaries perceive them, to be overly sanguine when hostilities start, and overly reluctant to make necessary concessions in negotiations. In short, these biases have the effect of making wars more likely to begin and more difficult to end.” Political leaders are on this account “receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war.” The evidence Kahneman and Renshon cite is necessarily historical evidence, since while our propensity to overestimate our abilities as drivers of automobiles is the sort of thing that can be tested in a lab, that quirk is not what interests them here. They are interested in war and foreign policy, and propositions about those fields can only be tested historically, if at all. Does history bear them out? It is hard to say, since the long data series used to test such propositions tend to be assembled by political scientists, whose professional deformation makes them strikingly insensitive to the difficulties of comparing historical data for purposes of this kind. But we certainly can look at the specific historical evidence cited in this article by Kahneman and Renshon, and see if it holds up. For example, the two write that “the optimistic bias and the illusion of control are particularly rampant in the run-up to conflict. A hawk’s preference for military action over diplomatic measures is often built upon the assumption that victory will come easily and swiftly. Predictions that the Iraq war would be a ‘cakewalk,’ offered up by some supporters of that conflict, are just the latest in a long string of bad hawkish predictions. After all, Washington elites treated the first major battle of the Civil War as a social outing, so sure were they that federal troops would rout rebel forces.” Actually, the first phase of the Iraq War—the part that ended with the fall of Baghdad and destroyed Sunni Arab domination of Iraq, probably forever—was easier than many predicted; Saddam’s regime was destroyed at a trivial cost to the Allies , around a third as many Allied losses as in the first Gulf War, itself an astonishingly one-sided victory. In the first Gulf War, staggering Allied losses had also been predicted, but in the event hundreds of thousands of Iraqi troops were routed at a cost to the Allies of a few hundred men. In the second Gulf War, what was underestimated was not the cost of destroying the Iraqi army that underpinned Saddam’s tyranny—that was overestimated—but the cost, perhaps the very possibility, of shaping a decent Iraq after we had destroyed Baathist rule. We underestimated our power to destroy and overestimated our power to create, which is not quite what Kahneman and Renshon are suggesting. How about the American Civil War? It is true that Washington elites overestimated our chances on the eve of Bull Run. But shortly thereafter, McClellan again and again underestimated his chances and overestimated the strength of his enemies, for the next long phase of the war. This arguably protracted the Civil War and increased suffering. And consider the implicit bias here, which assumes that an accurate estimate of your chances lowers your will to fight, which is further assumed to be a good thing. Is it in all cases? What if Northern elites had in 1861 accurately estimated the cost of preserving the Union, and subsequently of abolishing slavery? Had they then decided that the game wasn’t worth the candle, that would have probably have been a catastrophe; an illiberal, even more racist nineteenth century would have been a plausible outcome of such a decision. So overestimating your chances in war can be a blessing for all concerned. Similarly, if British elites had acted on a rational calculation of their chances in June of 1940, they would have made peace, which would probably have meant a comparable disaster. Back to Kahneman and Renshon on military history. Writing of the First World War, they assert, “In fact, almost every decision maker involved in what would become the most destructive war in history up to that point predicted not only victory for his side, but a relatively quick and easy victory. These delusions and exaggerations cannot be explained away as a product of incomplete or incorrect information. Optimistic generals will be found, usually on both sides, before the beginning of every military conflict.” Some obvious exceptions spring to mind. British and French generals fatally underestimated their chances of fighting Hitler between 1936 and 1939, and statesmen were eager, very eager, to listen to them. Kahneman and Renshon acknowledge that the hawks were right on that occasion, and the doves wrong, but they do not, for my taste, acknowledge it extensively enough, since the surplus mortality that can be laid to the door of the doves that time is on the order of 50 million people. And is that the only significant exception to this alleged rule? I was last week reading about Ludwig Ritter von Benedek, the Austro-Hungarian general charged with stopping the Prussians in 1866, who probably underestimated his chances and is normally faulted for having been beaten in his own mind before he began. That underestimate may have been a significant misfortune, for German unification achieved in the historical fashion is not normally thought to have been a smashing success. On another note, Kahneman and Renshon assert that “during the run-up to World War I, the leaders of every one of the nations that would soon be at war perceived themselves as significantly less hostile than their adversaries.” They did indeed, but some of them were right about that, and others wrong. Kahneman and Renshon imply that a more accurate reading of potential adversaries’ desires would have forestalled war. The reverse is at least as likely: We now know that Germany was determined to go to war with Russia, and Austria-Hungary to go to war with Serbia. That first determination was the overwhelming cause of the First World War. It is possible that a clearer understanding of Allied hostility to the prospect of German triumph might have put off the war, but that seems the reverse of what Kahneman and Renshon are arguing. Kahneman and Renshon also make a few remarks about political choices in the Middle East, with the implication, at least to my eye, that mistaken assumptions about the malevolence of adversaries have been a serious problem. Maybe so. It is at least possible, however, that from the early 1990s through the year 2000 the Israelis were more prone to overestimate than to underestimate the good faith of their Palestinian interlocutors. In 1979-1980, and at various points since, the American government was at least as likely to underestimate as to overestimate the malevolence of the people running the Islamic Republic of Iran. Given the century just past, when powerful states were led by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and also by Wilhelmine and Japanese militarists, and other adversaries included people like Pol Pot, it seems strange to assert that overestimating the malevolence of adversaries was the worst sin of Western statesmen.
January 4, 2007
Vice Presidents Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:10 PM EST It seems increasingly likely that Barack Obama will run for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. He has certainly been getting press that other hopefuls would give their right arms for. He is very personable, well-spoken, and a new face. That, of course, is also one of his biggest problems: His résumé is very thin. After seven years in the Illinois state senate, not in the leadership, he beat a very weak candidate in the 2004 election to win a U.S. Senate seat. Two years in the Senate is not much of a career in the political big leagues from which to launch a presidential bid. Many commentators have suggested that what he is really running for is not President but Vice President. A respectable showing in the primaries would make him a very attractive possibility for that nomination, which is in the gift of whoever wins the presidential one. He is only 45 years old, so he has plenty of time, and serving as Vice President would certainly take care of the résumé problem. The Vice Presidency has been a strange office. Constitutionally it could hardly be weaker. The Vice President serves as president of the Senate, but has a vote only if there is a tie. As a result, Vice Presidents, at least after the early days, were often very obscure, chosen for geographical reasons and then ignored once elected. Unless, that is, they inherited the Presidency, as did John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, and Chester Arthur. Once their terms were over they faded back into the obscurity from which they had come. There was an old joke about two brothers. When they grew up, one went to sea and one became Vice President. Neither was ever heard of again. The only vice-presidential quote to make it into Bartlett’s was by Thomas R. Marshall, Vice President under Wilson, who said that “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” There were exceptions, of course. Martin Van Buren was a major political figure in his own right and went on to be elected President, the last sitting Vice President to do that until George H. W. Bush. Theodore Roosevelt was very well known, but he was given the Vice Presidency so that Thomas Platt, who ran the New York State Republican Party, could get the bumptious Roosevelt out of the governor’s mansion and he could get someone into it who would do what he was told. “I am going to Washington,” Platt told friends just before the inauguration, “to watch Theodore take the veil.” Things didn’t work out too well for Boss Platt, thanks to an assassin’s bullet. But since World War II, the Vice Presidency has had a renaissance. It is still constitutionally powerless, but as the world has gotten more complicated and far more dangerous, presidential nominees generally have chosen more and more prominent politicians for the Vice Presidency and have kept them fully informed regarding what was going on. Dick Cheney is, in a very real sense, an assistant President. Harry Truman, in contrast, had not even known about the Manhattan Project when he suddenly found himself running the country. This has made the Vice Presidency a very attractive political position, which it never was before. Much publicity now comes the Vice President’s way. He lives in a terrific house on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, and is well positioned to run for the top job, if it doesn’t fall to him through death or disgrace. Two postwar vice Presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford, inherited the White House, and five—Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, George H. W. Bush, and Al Gore, won their party’s nomination for President. So Barack Obama, should he choose to run, may well have a lot of upside potential and little downside risk. If he wins the presidential nomination, great. If he doesn’t, he’s well positioned to get the vice presidential one. If his ticket then wins, the presidential nomination in eight years’ time will be his to lose. If his ticket loses, it won’t likely be blamed on him, and he will be in good shape to run again in four years. I bet he goes for it.
January 3, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:15 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “As a voter, I would like to demand more of candidates who vaguely profess the importance of their faith without explaining what exactly their faith tells them.”
I’m sorry, but I smell a political rat here. Mr. Zeitz, after all, will not be heading up the Upper West Side Romney for President Club. This seems to me to be an invitation for people of faith to get tangled up in public theological discussions that will win them no votes but might well cost them votes, especially if they make some misstatement or fail to express clearly some obscure point, providing an opening for their political enemies to twist it into something else entirely.
Mr. Zeitz provides a perfect example of the political perils here. He writes, “. . . in a campaign swing last year, Mitt Romney said, ‘Most people in South Carolina want a person of faith as their leader. But they [South Carolina voters] don’t care what brand of faith that is. . . . I believe Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe in God. I’m a person of faith and I believe that’s the type of person Americans want.’
“There is considerable ambiguity in this statement. Does Mitt Romney mean to suggest that Americans want a person of ‘faith’ to govern their affairs, or someone who accepts Christ as his or her personal savior? If he means the latter, then I beg to differ. If he means the former, then is it not fair to ask, faith in what?”
I do not see at all how Gov. Romney’s statement is in any way ambiguous. He is using the word “faith” simply to mean a belief in God. He says that the people of South Carolina want a leader who believes in God but doesn’t care about the details of that belief, and then he states that his God, as it happens, is a Christian one.
Mr. Zeitz writes that John F. Kennedy did not wear his Catholicism on his sleeve. He’s right, he didn’t. But neither does Gov. Romney wear his Mormonism there. It seems to me that some people, including Mr. Zeitz, want to pin it there for their own political purposes. Mr. Zeitz didn’t reply to my question as to whether a Nexus search would turn up concerns among the “religious right” regarding Romney’s Mormonism. I do not have access to Nexus, but I would be very curious to learn the answer to that question. My guess is that there is none, but perhaps Mr. Zeitz will be kind enough to run a search and report the results.
Kennedy said in his speech, “I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair.” Mr. Zeitz quotes Dwight Eisenhower as saying, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith [i.e. a belief in God]—and I don’t care what it is.” Gov. Romney says the same thing. Mr. Zeitz says that people of faith should be cross-examined by a bunch of intellectuals to find out exactly what faith and what tenets and what the pattern on their theological boxer shorts is. Mr. Zeitz’s offer for people of faith to sit down and discuss the details of that faith is one that can—and undoubtedly will—be refused. Can anyone imagine candidates without faith sitting down and discussing the reasons for their agnosticism at length, or even admitting that they are agnostic? I sure can’t. Does anyone care about Hillary Clinton’s opinion on transubstantiation or the importance of good works in achieving salvation? Then why does anyone care about Mitt Romney’s opinions on whether we are living in the latter days of human history?
I think it is perfectly proper to ask one question regarding a political candidate’s faith, the question that John F. Kennedy answered in his speech: If a situation were to arise where your faith and your public duty fundamentally conflicted, would you resign the office you hold? Kennedy answered that question unequivocally in the affirmative. I have no doubt that Governor Romney would too, but by all means ask him. Beyond that, his faith is no one’s damn business but his own.
January 3, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan VI Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon draws an obvious but important parallel between Mitt Romney, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts and a devout Mormon who is currently planning to run for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, and John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first (and, to date, only) Catholic President. As Mr. Gordon explains, in 1960 Kennedy delivered a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in which he vigorously defended the separation of church and state and affirmed that America was a secular democracy “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” Mr. Gordon concludes that any questions about Mitt Romney’s religious convictions are as crass as were questions about Kennedy’s Catholicism.
In temperament and spirit, I agree with Mr. Gordon, though as a matter of history, I don’t think the Kennedy-Romney analogy is operative, and as a voter, I would like to demand more of candidates who vaguely profess the importance of their faith without explaining what exactly their faith tells them.
John Kennedy did not wear his Catholicism on his sleeve, claim Catholicism as his primary intellectual influence, or advocate a more prominent place for religion in the public sphere. In private, Kennedy was a devout Catholic, but one who questioned many of the prevailing tenets of his faith. In a letter to his mother in the early 1940s, he wrote, “. . . don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church[?] We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchial [sic] structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top—a structure that allows for no individual interpretation—or are we?” The question was, of course, rhetorical. Twenty years before Vatican II, there was indeed little if any space for individual interpretation of the Word in Catholic culture. The ultramontane Catholic revival of the previous century asserted the predominance of formal worship and experiential religious rites over interior dialogue and inquiry. It also placed a high premium on ecclesiastical authority. Kennedy knew this and grappled with it. Whatever his beliefs, he did not feature them in his public life. Though he died before the effects of Vatican II were fully felt, it’s a reasonable speculation that JFK, ever the ironist and skeptic, would have been more comfortable in the post-1963 Church.
In the speech that Mr. Gordon cited, John Kennedy said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
By contrast, in a campaign swing last year, Mitt Romney said, “Most people in South Carolina want a person of faith as their leader. But they [South Carolina voters] don’t care what brand of faith that is. . . . I believe Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe in God. I’m a person of faith and I believe that’s the type of person Americans want.”
There is considerable ambiguity in this statement. Does Mitt Romney mean to suggest that Americans want a person of “faith” to govern their affairs, or someone who accepts Christ as his or her personal savior? If he means the latter, then I beg to differ. If he means the former, then is it not fair to ask, faith in what?
Secularists—liberal secularists especially—take a lot of heat for their alleged mockery of, or disregard for, people of faith. But there is a flip side to this argument. If people of faith demand to be taken seriously, they should be willing to discuss the tenets of their faith. In another forum, Mitt Romney said that Mormonism is like “every other faith” because its “fundamental values . . . are quintessentially American.” This is about as lame a statement as I’ve ever read. It is also decidedly disrespectful of faith in a way few liberal secularists would dare be. Faith is about belief. Theology is about moral revelation and understanding. Not all religions are the same, programmatically or in their core beliefs and values. To collapse “faith” into a process (believing) rather than a discrete set of beliefs (believing in something) is to mock the very substance of faith.
Moreover, there are, according to Wikipedia, 6.5 billion persons on Earth (and, if I might use a little circular logic, the number must be accurate, because 6.5 billion potential Wikipedia contributors can’t be wrong). 300 million of these people live in the United States. The various religions of 95.4 percent of the world do not “quintessentially” reflect the values and beliefs of 4.6 percent of the world. To suggest otherwise is to mock the very serious components of—and differences between—the world’s many faiths.
To be fair, Mitt Romney is not the only public official in recent U.S. history to speak in such lame terms about faith. Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.” Which makes about as much sense as saying, our government is founded on a deeply felt political idea, and I don’t care what it is. Democracy? Republicanism? Autocracy? Anarchy? Radical collectivist socialist state? Take your pick—all are good, as long as you deeply believe in one of them.
It’s not just conservatives who have embraced this wishy-washy idea of faith (which, I’ll say it again, is inherently, if ironically, disrespectful of faith). In his influential book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), the liberal theologian Will Herberg argued that America was a nation of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, with each group committed to a vague “American way of life” and divided only nominally on significant questions of faith.
If this is indeed true—if Dwight Eisenhower, Will Herberg, and Mitt Romney are right—if faith is just the process of believing in something, no matter what, then faith really matters very little, and we shouldn’t waste our time discussing it in the political arena. If, however, faith is something altogether more serious than process, and if people of faith believe that their religious convictions lend them special qualification to hold office, then the substance of their faith is fair game.
If this argument seems to conflict with my initial post, in which I lamented the speculation over Romney’s religion, I’d suggest it does not. What I lament is the possibility that certain religious voters will veto a candidate solely on the basis of his sectarian affiliation. This is something altogether different from asking a candidate who places his faith front and center to discuss that faith.
January 2, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz quotes from an article in The New Republic as follows: “In the case of Mitt Romney, citizens have every reason to seek clarification about the character of his Mormonism. Does he believe, for example, that we are living through the ‘latter days’ of human history, just prior to the second coming of Christ? And does he think that, when the Lord returns, he will rule over the world from the territory of the United States? Does Romney believe that the president of the Mormon Church is a genuine prophet of God? If so, how would he respond to a command from this prophet on matters of public policy? And, if his faith would require him to follow this hypothetical command, would it not be accurate to say that, under a President Romney, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would truly be in charge of the country—with its leadership having final say on matters of right and wrong?” He asks if these are fair questions. No, they are not. Substitute “Catholic” for “Mormon,” and the doctrine of papal infallibility, etc., for the tenants of Mormonism listed above, and that paragraph could have been written in 1928 regarding Al Smith. I find it, frankly, obscene. If Mitt Romney were to ask my advice on how to handle the religious issue (and I am not sitting by the phone waiting for his call), I would suggest that he simply arrange to give a speech before some suitable group and then tell his speechwriters to take the day off, the speech is already written. John F. Kennedy gave it 46 years ago, on September 12, 1960, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. . . .” Kennedy told the group. “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish—where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” He added, “But let me stress again that these are my views—for contrary to common newspaper usage, I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters—and the church does not speak for me.” He concluded, “. . . if the time should ever come—and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible—when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same. “ It’s a great speech, one that might well have tipped the election to Kennedy, and I recommend reading it in its entirety here. I’m not about to argue with a Nexus search. If the commentating on the “issue” of Gov. Romney’s religion has been more from the right than the left, that’s fine with me. But I am sure that Mr. Zeitz will agree that among the intellectual elite, of whatever political stripe, deep religious faith is not commonly found and, indeed, causes at the least a certain uncomfortableness and, often, sneers. I wonder if a Nexus search would bring up any articles written by evangelicals huffing and puffing over Mitt Romney’s religion. Is Jerry Falwell, or whomever, all bent out of shape on the subject of Gov. Romney’s religion? I don’t know, but my guess is no.
January 2, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:35 PM EST Josh Zeitz writes on Mitt Romney, quoting an article by Damon Linker in The New Republic. Linker writes, “In the case of Mitt Romney, citizens have every reason to seek clarification about the character of his Mormonism. Does he believe, for example, that we are living through the ‘latter days’ of human history, just prior to the second coming of Christ? And does he think that, when the Lord returns, he will rule over the world from the territory of the United States? Does Romney believe that the president of the Mormon Church is a genuine prophet of God? If so, how would he respond to a command from this prophet on matters of public policy? And, if his faith would require him to follow this hypothetical command, would it not be accurate to say that, under a President Romney, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would truly be in charge of the country—with its leadership having final say on matters of right and wrong?” Josh asks, “Are these questions fair game? Or do they violate the spirit of the Constitutional prohibition against religions means tests for office holders? A question for my fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributors.” Okay, I’ll bite. First of all, I think a religious test for office holders should be understood as a legal requirement that an office holder subscribe to a particular religious doctrine, which I think is how the Founders understood the phrase, because they were vividly aware of the Test Acts in Great Britain, which placed various disabilities on Roman Catholics and Dissenters and generally prohibited them from holding public office. The first legislation specifically doing the latter was passed in the reign of Charles II. There were others; comparable religious tests for public office existed in many other European states, and in Great Britain these requirements were mostly abolished in the first third of the nineteenth century. Article VI of our Constitution bars a legal requirement, and The New Republic is not requiring one, but Josh asks whether entertaining such questions means violating the spirit of the Sixth Amendment. I do not think it does, because I am not sure that portion of the amendment should be imagined as extending to matters of private judgment, rather than state action, which makes me uncertain about what it means to talk about its spirit, rather than its letter. A religious test, like censorship, is peculiarly ominous when practiced by a state, which backs prejudice with legal sanction. But assume that there is a spirit of the Sixth Amendment, and for the sake of the argument, call its violation bigotry. Okay, is it bigoted to ask whether a subscriber to a religious doctrine is likely to surrender the power of his office to an unelected religious authority, to which he may think he owes great deference, or even absolute obedience? Pondering similar questions, non-Catholics long worried about voting for Catholic office-seekers. That sort of attitude is either prejudice or prudence, and the wisdom of entertaining the question depends on the time, the place, and the person. Very few Americans now imagine that a Catholic officeholder will inevitably take his marching orders from the pope, but if a very pious candidate of any persuasion subscribes to religious doctrines, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask him whether he will invariably defer to authorities whose legitimacy he seems to concede. I also think it is unreasonable to assume in advance that any answer in the negative is a lie. This is an interesting and sometimes urgent question, rarely a relevant one in modern America, but fearfully relevant in other places. When an Islamist party ran for office in Algeria, up to the last minute its adherents dodged the question of whether they would leave office if voted out, thus breaching God’s law in deference to human law. That was, alas, a reasonable question, and when, at the very last moment the Algerian Islamists claimed they would so defer, they were not believed, a military coup was launched, and a truly horrific civil war ensued. Recently a Turkish Islamist party answered the question the other way, was widely believed, and now governs Turkey, in many respects governing it very well. In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, it was hard to wholly fault even savage and kleptocratic Algerian generals for refusing to take on faith those very-last-minute protestations of deference to human law. As for America and Mitt Romney, I have no opinion in advance, because I know little if anything about the candidate or his church. It may be relevant to remember that from the atheist’s point of view, a believer’s passionate convictions do not necessarily prohibit supporting him for national office. Many American Presidents have been devout believers, were convinced that we were a light unto the nations, that a special Providence superintended our history, and that various hard things must be done in God’s name, and in a sense at his command: “If God wills that it [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” I know a fair number of atheists who’d have voted Republican that time.
January 2, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST As luck would have it, just hours after I submitted my post on Mitt Romney, in which I argued that “there has been rampant speculation that his religion might turn off a sufficient number of voters—especially evangelical Protestants, whose support is crucial for GOP primary candidates—to cost him the election,” I received my copy of this week’s New Republic. Its cover story is entitled, “A Mormon in the White House? Why Religion Matters.” Maybe John Steele Gordon is right to “wonder . . . exactly who is continually bringing up the subject of Mitt Romney’s religion today? Is it the religious right or commentators on the right? Or is it liberal commentators (atheists or at least agnostics to a man and many of them profoundly theologically ignorant) assuming, as usual, that the ‘religious right’ is a monolithic group of intolerant bigots, who will reject anyone who is not one of them?”
A quick Nexis search revealed a good deal more speculation in conservative journals (e.g., National Review, The Weekly Standard) about Romney’s fitness for office than in liberal journals (e.g., The New Republic, The Nation). Moreover, when they ponder the topic, conservative and liberal journals alike have focused almost singularly on, as National Review put it, “Evangelicals for Romney?—A major question of the coming period.” The prevailing assumption is that liberals will probably not vote for Romney because many of his positions—on abortion, on gay rights, on religion in the public sphere—are conservative. The wild card is evangelical Christians. As Mr. Gordon points out, they share many policy goals with Mormons. But will they shelve their sectarian misgivings and support Romney?
I’m dismayed but not surprised by Mr. Gordon’s characterization of “liberal commentators” as “atheists or at least agnostics to a man and many of them profoundly theologically ignorant.” I’d venture a guess that the editorial staff at The New Republic, a magazine that runs probing articles on the current and historical interplay between religion and politics, knows a lot more about theology than the average American and includes not a few religiously devout persons. Ditto the staff of other leading left-wing journals of opinion like Dissent, The Nation, and Commonweal. Indeed, Mr. Gordon sounds especially preposterous when he writes of “liberal commentators” as “atheists or at least agnostics to a man,” and ignorant of matters pertaining to religion and theology. One has nothing to do with the other (a person can be agnostic and know more than his fair share about theology), and both are incorrect in any event. As a historian, Mr. Gordon surely knows that Christian theologians have been critical players in the development of postwar liberalism, from Reinhold Niebuhr (neo-fundamentalist) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (black evangelical), to William Sloane Coffin (mainline Protestant) and Charles Curran (Catholic).
But back to The New Republic. Though I stand by my lament that Mitt Romney faces a problem his father didn’t have to confront in 1968—namely, his religion—I think TNR’s article raises a fair point. Damon Linker, the author of the cover story, provides an impressive historical overview of Mormon theology and suggests that two tenets of the faith—the central role it assigns to living prophesy, and its view of America as a key staging ground in millennial eschatology—pose theoretical conflicts with secular democracy. Linker’s point is not that Mormons or any other religious group are unqualified to serve as President, but rather that any candidate who makes his religious convictions a focal point of his candidacy, as Romney has done, should be prepared to discuss those convictions in full and address potential conflicts with public office-holding.
Linker writes, “In the case of Mitt Romney, citizens have every reason to seek clarification about the character of his Mormonism. Does he believe, for example, that we are living through the ‘latter days’ of human history, just prior to the second coming of Christ? And does he think that, when the Lord returns, he will rule over the world from the territory of the United States? Does Romney believe that the president of the Mormon Church is a genuine prophet of God? If so, how would he respond to a command from this prophet on matters of public policy? And, if his faith would require him to follow this hypothetical command, would it not be accurate to say that, under a President Romney, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would truly be in charge of the country—with its leadership having final say on matters of right and wrong?”
Are these questions fair game? Or do they violate the spirit of the Constitutional prohibition against religions means tests for office holders? A question for my fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributors.
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