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.
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