Romney says Freedom requires Religion

Chumly wrote:

Finn dAbuzz wrote:
.........in the context of the weighty threats that face us.
Could you amplify on these weighty threats?

Actually those were Romney's words so you will have to ask him, but I can guess:

1) Islamic Jihadis
2) Environmental degradation
3) Denial of the Spirit
4) Nuclear proliferation

Among others

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What's your perspective of this viewpoint in the context of the argument that this is the longest and most successful peacetime period in the history of North America? Then I'll let the thread go back to it's ways.

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Chumly wrote:

What's your perspective of this viewpoint in the context of the argument that this is the longest and most successful peacetime period in the history of North America? Then I'll let the thread go back to it's ways.

Whether or not we are living within the longest and most successful peacetime period in the history of North America, we still face threats that we ignore at our own peril.

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Even In context, the"freedom requires religion ...." statement is pandering. Just as Huckleberry went ballistic when asked about his views on Creationism in science, focusing on religious practice by the candidate is more an attempt to deflate the coming focus on it as an issue.
Romney will be able to overcome as long as reporters dont paint LDS as a cult. Huckleberry, on the other hand, is joined at the hip with the BAptists Convention. He may have a day in the sun with his base, but I predict that, when the posse gets slimmed down, Huckleberry'll be gone.

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I listened to the speech and reread it here. I don't disagree with much of what he says (and I'm no fundamentalist religionist), but I can't help but notice that he uses the term "founders" and then quotes only Adams -- the only fundamentalist Christian of the group and one who truly felt that this was a Christian nation with a Christian agenda. Adams was at direct odds with many, if not most, of his contemporaries.

While I agree with the premise of religious freedom and have no qualms about the next President being a person of faith (name me one who wasn't), I am troubled by the link to the founders as the basis for what the country should be when there was tremendous discord on that very subject within the founders themselves. Atheists did not have a founding spokesman, but the balance between religion and governmental influences was of tantamount importance to Washington. He realized that balance between individual morality (generally taught within the faith traditions) and secular oversight of the state's interests was the only thing that would allow the experiment of Democracy to succeed.

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Juan Cole's take on Mitt's speech;

Mitt Romney's speech in Texas on Thursday was supposed to be an attempt to fend off religious bigotry. Instead, it betrays some prejudices of its own (against secular people), and seems to provoke others to bigotted statements. It has been likened to the speech of John F. Kennedy on his Catholicism. But we knew John F. Kennedy, and Mitt Romney is no John F. Kennedy. Kennedy strongly affirmed the separation of religion and state. Romney wants to dragoon us into a soft theocracy (not as a Mormon but as a Republican allied to the Pat Robertsons of the world). Kennedy wanted to be accepted as an American by other Americans. Romney wants to be accepted as a conservative Christian by other conservative Christians.

This conundrum is the price the Republican Party is paying for pandering to the religious Right. Can a secular person even win the Republican nomination any more? If you make yourself captive of the Protestant Right, then you will discover that they believe Mormons are heretics. The Republican Party has established its own litmus test, and since it has been a dominant party in recent years, we've all been affected by it. Romney's plight in finding it hard to be accepted by that constituency mirrors the plight of secular and unchurched Americans, on whom the very people Romney is sucking up to want to impose their narrow and sectarian values.

The unsavory aspects of this entire discourse are apparent in the op-ed of Naomi Schaeffer Riley for the Wall Street Journal. While she depicts Mormons in a positive light, she displays the most gut-wrenching bigotry toward Muslims. She writes:

' A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That's roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: Why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders?'

I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge. Islam is not 'the faith professed by 9/11 hijackers.' Islam is the religion of probably 1.3 billion persons, a fifth of humankind, which will probably be a third of humankind by 2050. Islam existed for 1400 years before the 9/11 hijackers, and will exist for a very long time after them. Riley has engaged in the most visceral sort of smear, associating all Muslims with the tiny, extremist al-Qaeda cult.

We could play this game with any human group. Some Catholics were responsible for the Inquisition. Shall we blame Catholicism for that, or all Catholics? Of course not. Jewish Zionists expelled hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Is that Judaism's fault or that of Jews in general? Of course not.

She goes on to further stick her foot in her mouth by complaining that she heard conservative Christians call it 'the fourth Abrahamic religion' (alongside Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and complains that they compared a Muslim belief she considers 'wacky' to Mormon stories. It is all right for her to call folk Islamic motifs wacky, mind you. She's only interested in being fair to Mormons, not to Muslims.

Riley's remarks exemplify the problems with Romney's speech, which demands fairness for his group but not for, e.g., secularists.

Thus, he says:

"In John Adams' words: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution," he said, "was made for a moral and religious people." Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."

What Romney omits is that many of the "religious people" among the founding fathers were Deists, who did not believe in revelation or miracles or divine intervention in human affairs. Thomas Jefferson used to sit in the White House in the evening with scissors and cut the miracle stories out of the Gospels so as to end up with a reasoned story about Jesus of Nazareth, befitting the Enlightenment.

Some Founding Fathers were Christians, some were not, at least not in any sense that would be recognized by today's Religious Right. Jefferson believe that most Americans would end up Unitarians.

As for the insistence that you need religion for political freedom, that is silly. Organized religion has many virtues, but pushing for political liberty is seldom among them. Religion is about controlling people. No religiously based state has ever provided genuine democratic governance. You want religion in politics, go to Iran.

Liberty can survive religion, especially a multiplicity of religions within the nation. Because that way there is not a central faith that imposes itself on everyone, as Catholicism used to in Ireland or Buddhism used to in Tibet. But organized religion would never ever have produced the First Amendment to the US constitution, and the 19th century popes considered it ridiculous that the state should treat false religions as equal to the True Faith.

Deists, freethinkers and Freemasons--the kind of people that Romney was complaining about-- produced the First Amendment. When Tom Jefferson tried out an earlier version of it in Virginia, some of the members of the Virginia assembly actually complained that freedom of religion would allow the practice of Islam in the US. Jefferson's response to that kind of bigotry was that other people believing in other religions did not pick his pocket or break his leg, so why should he care how they worshipped? And that's all Romney had to say. But he did not want to say that. Romney said the opposite. He implied that is is actively bad for a democracy if people are unbelievers or if there is a strict separation of religion and state.

We know the Founding Fathers and Romney is no founding father.

By Romney's definition of freedom, Sweden and France, where 50% and 40% of the population, respectively, does not believe in God, cannot have a proper democracy. But of course Swedish democracy is in many respects superior to that in the United States.

The text of Mitt Romney's sermon is here.

Romney says:

' But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It's as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America?-the religion of secularism. They are wrong. '

Look, the reason that Americans took religion out of the public sphere was because the religious kept fighting with each other in the most vicious way. We had violence between Catholics and Protestants in schools in the 19th century because religion was in the public schools, and therefore each branch of Christianity wanted to dominate and control it. You take religion out of the schools, suddenly people stop fighting about it.

People like Romney who want to put religion back into the public sphere are just going to cause a lot of trouble. 14% of Americans don't believe in God. Another 5% belong to minority religions (and both categories are rapidly growing). That nearly 20% doesn't necessarily want sectarian Christian symbols in public schools. Even a lot of the 80% that are some kind of Christian don't belong to a church and aren't necessarily orthodox in their views.

So Romney's so-called plea for tolerance is actually a plea for the privileging of religion in American public life. He just wants his religion to share in that privilege that he wants to install. Ironically, the very religious pluralism of the United States, which he appears to praise, will stand in the way of his project.

--
Posted By Juan Cole to Informed Comment at 12/07/2007 06:30:00 AM

http://www.juancole.com/2007/12/romney-some-beliefs-are-more-equal-than.html

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georgeob1 wrote:

However, I don't believe the issue itself is very important.

Neither do i. However, that's hardly the point. The topic of this thread is a statement on religion by one of the candidates. Therefore, one either discusses the topic, or digresses from the topic, or does not participate.

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Brand X wrote:

Haven't heard/seen remarks from Huck on mormons...but I did hear him say he isn't going to question what Romney believes and that he isn't qualified to dissect Romney's beliefs.

I heard a report to that effect on the radio yesterday--which, obviously i can't link here. I did find this at Salon, which i realize is not considered to be a reliable source by many people:

Joe Conason at Salon wrote:

Huckabee was honest enough not to deny that he believes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a cult -- and in fact, many if not most of his fellow Southern Baptists regard the LDS church as a satanic cult.

The news report i heard was on CBC, and they don't archive their ordinary newscasts, only their regularly scheduled programs. I tried a search at CBC, but came up dry.

If you find the remark about Huckabee offensive, then ignore it. I am willing to stipulate that i don't know that Huckabee made such a remark. That would not alter my conviction that Romney is motivated by a desire to convince the religious right that he "shares their values."

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Agreed. And I believe my comments, including the reference to the relative unimportance of the subject, were both relevant and illuminating.

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Relevant, perhaps--dismissive, certainly.

Illuminating? That would depend upon a relative and subjective judgment of just how benighted other members reading here can alleged to be.

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The Crisis of Faith
As a "non-believer" (more politically correct than atheist) I was disgusted by Romney's pandering campaign speech. If you ain't a christian, you are trash. Maybe he can buy Jesus' approval just as he is attempting to buy the election with his own money. ---BBB

December 7, 2007
New York Times Editorial
The Crisis of Faith

Mitt Romney obviously felt he had no choice but to give a speech yesterday on his Mormon faith. Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation's founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office.

Mr. Romney spoke with an evident passion about the hunger for religious freedom that defined the birth of the nation. He said several times that his faith informs his life, but he would not impose it on the Oval Office.

Still, there was no escaping the reality of the moment. Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

Mr. Romney tried to cloak himself in the memory of John F. Kennedy, who had to defend his Catholicism in the 1960 campaign. But Mr. Kennedy had the moral courage to do so in front of an audience of Southern Baptist leaders and to declare: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

Mr. Romney did not even come close to that in his speech, at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, before a carefully selected crowd. And in his speech, he courted the most religiously intolerant sector of American political life by buying into the myths at the heart of the "cultural war," so eagerly embraced by the extreme right.

Mr. Romney filled his speech with the first myth ?- that the nation's founders, rather than seeking to protect all faiths, sought to imbue the United States with Christian orthodoxy. He cited the Declaration of Independence's reference to "the creator" endowing all men with unalienable rights and the founders' proclaiming not just their belief in God, but their belief that God's hand guided the American revolutionaries.

Mr. Romney dragged out the old chestnuts about "In God We Trust" on the nation's currency, and the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance ?- conveniently omitting that those weren't the founders' handiwork, but were adopted in the 1950s at the height of McCarthyism. He managed to find a few quotes from John Adams to support his argument about America's Christian foundation, but overlooked George Washington's letter of reassurance to the Jews in Newport, R.I., that they would be full members of the new nation.

He didn't mention Thomas Jefferson, who said he wanted to be remembered for writing the Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia and drafting the first American law ?- a Virginia statute ?- guaranteeing religious freedom. In his book, "American Gospel," Jon Meacham quotes James Madison as saying that law was "meant to comprehend, with the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."

The founders were indeed religious men, as Mr. Romney said. But they understood the difference between celebrating religious faith as a virtue, and imposing a particular doctrine, or even religion in general, on everyone. As Mr. Meacham put it, they knew that "many if not most believed, yet none must."

The other myth permeating the debate over religion is that it is a dispute between those who believe religion has a place in public life and those who advocate, as Mr. Romney put it, "the elimination of religion from the public square." That same nonsense is trotted out every time a court rules that the Ten Commandments may not be displayed in a government building.

We believe democracy cannot exist without separation of church and state, not that public displays of faith are anathema. We believe, as did the founding fathers, that no specific religion should be elevated above all others by the government.

The authors of the Constitution knew that requiring specific declarations of religious belief (like Mr. Romney saying he believes Jesus was the son of God) is a step toward imposing that belief on all Americans. That is why they wrote in Article VI that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

And yet, religious testing has gained strength in the last few elections. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, has made it the cornerstone of his campaign. John McCain, another Republican who struggles to win over the religious right, calls America "a Christian nation."

CNN, shockingly, required the candidates at the recent Republican debate to answer a videotaped question from a voter holding a Christian edition of the Bible, who said: "How you answer this question will tell us everything we need to know about you. Do you believe every word of this book? Specifically, this book that I am holding in my hand, do you believe this book?"

The nation's founders knew the answer to that question says nothing about a candidate's fitness for office. It's tragic to see it being asked at a time when Americans need a president who will tell the truth, lead with conviction and restore the nation's moral standing, not one who happens to attend a particular church.

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Re: The Crisis of Faith

BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:

As a "non-believer" (more politically correct than atheist) I was disgusted by Romney's pandering campaign speech. If you ain't a christian, you are trash. Maybe he can buy Jesus' approval just as he is attempting to buy the election with his own money. ---BBB

I'm not a Christian by most definitions either, certainly not one according to Mormon or Baptist traditions, but I didn't come away with a sense of being called trash. And, believe me, I'm VERY sensitive to being called trash.

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Romney and Huckabee's religious intolerance
Romney and Huckabee's religious intolerance
Nonbelievers have long been more tolerant of believers in office than the other way around.
By Joe Conason - Salon
112/7/07

Dec. 7, 2007 | Distasteful as all the Bible thumping and ostentatious piety of the Republican presidential aspirants certainly are, the time may have come to address their religious pretensions directly, instead of turning away in mild disgust. For the truth is that no matter how often candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee promise to uphold the Constitution and protect religious freedom, they are clearly seeking to impose the restrictive tests of faith that the nation's founders abhorred.

The most egregious offender against basic American civics today is Huckabee, who told a group of students at Liberty University, the center of higher learning founded by the late Jerry Falwell, that his sudden rise in the Iowa polls is an act of God. He compared the improvement in his political fortunes to the New Testament miracle of the loaves and fishes. He wasn't joking, as both his demeanor and his words demonstrated.

The Rev. Huckabee has proved willing to risk his oversold reputation as the "nice" evangelical with a primary strategy that draws attention to his qualifications as a "Christian leader," in contrast to the suspect Mormonism of Romney. Huckabee was honest enough not to deny that he believes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a cult -- and in fact, many if not most of his fellow Southern Baptists regard the LDS church as a satanic cult.

In response, Romney delivered an address that simultaneously pleaded for religious tolerance and urged intolerance of what he termed the "religion of secularism." The former Massachusetts governor at once declined to discuss the specific dogmas of his own faith while seeking to convince the bigots in his political party that, like them, he accepts Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his Savior. (Actually, Mormon beliefs about Jesus, which Romney insists he will not abandon, are considerably more complicated than his speech implied and bear little resemblance to the theology of orthodox Christianity.)

Whatever bland assurances they may offer to the contrary, both Romney and Huckabee have implicitly endorsed religious tests for a presidential candidacy. Both suggest that only leaders who accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are qualified to lead. Huckabee says that we should choose a president who speaks "the language of Zion," meaning a fundamentalist Christian like himself. Romney says that among the questions that may appropriately be asked of aspiring presidential candidates is what they believe about Jesus Christ, a question he endeavored to answer in a way that would assuage suspicions about his own religion.

So if these two worthy gentlemen seek to exploit or extol their own faith, why should we bar ourselves from exploring the subject more deeply? They have invited a discussion of the sublime and the absurd in their religious doctrines, and of how those doctrines would influence them in office. We have already seen the destruction inflicted on America and the world by a dogmatic chief executive who believes that God urged him to wage war. (And let's not forget that Rudolph Giuliani, among others, has echoed the notion that President Bush was divinely chosen and inspired.)

We can begin with Romney's speech Thursday, in which he declared, as Joan Walsh noted with alarm, that there can be no liberty without faith. "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom ... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

This statement is so patently false that it scarcely deserves refutation. If Romney has studied the bloody history of his own church, then he knows that the religious fervor of its adversaries drove them to deprive the Mormons not only of their freedom but their lives, and that the Mormons reacted in kind. If he has studied the bloody history of the world's older religions, then he knows that the most devout Christians of all sects have not hesitated to suppress, torture and murder "heretics" throughout history. Only the strictest separation of church and state has permitted the establishment of societies where freedom of conscience prevails -- and those freedoms are firmly rooted in societies where organized religion has long been in decline.

Surely Romney knows that Mormonism, in particular, was historically hostile to liberty for blacks as well as women. The founders of his church believed that God had cursed the world's dark-skinned people. They rejected abolitionism and later the civil rights movement. And their acceptance of full membership for African-Americans in the LDS church dates back only 30 years.

If Romney is going to attack humanists and secularists as "wrong," then let him explain why they were so far ahead of his church on the greatest moral issues of the past half-century.

As for Huckabee, let him answer a few pertinent questions about his faith, too. Does he actually believe in creationist dogma that insists the planet is less than 10,000 years old, and that humans once walked with dinosaurs? How would that loony idea influence his science policies as president? Is he a believer in "end times" eschatology, which holds that American foreign policy should be shaped by the coming Armageddon in the Middle East? Would he apply the harsh punishments of the Old Testament to biblical sins such as homosexuality and adultery?

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion.

Liberals and progressives have no apologies to make, or at least no more than libertarians and conservatives do. Cherishing the freedoms protected by a secular society need not imply any disrespect for religion. But when candidates like Romney and Huckabee press the boundaries of the Constitution to promote themselves as candidates of faith, it is time to push back.

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Well, there was this:

Quote:

. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: We do not insist on a single strain of religion ?- rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith.

Which does beg the question of, so, if I'm not religious at all, I'm not your friend and ally? If I'm not religious at all, I'm not welcomed?

Transcript here.

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He obviously relates to Adams in sentiment -- a sentiment that was divisive over 200 years ago and will be so today. That portion of the speech was directed at those who want to hear such things. I don't need to fill in the blanks on what was left unsaid because he'll say something else directed to those who feel left out. And then he'll get tripped up trying to balance the two statements - it's the nature of the beast.

I don't think it will be effective -- too many worries from those that statement was trying to unruffle on his choice of religion and too many worries from those who worry that he's too religious. The speech was inevitable. I haven't seen any commentary by the far right but I'd be surprised if he was successful in his efforts.

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Yeah, doesn't seem like the speech had enough oomph.

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georgeob1 wrote:

I don't know what he really meant ( I haven't yet read or seen the speech),

So any comment you have would be a priori misinformed then..however one could make the argument that any government or political system that doesn't acknowledge any power higher than itself is capable of anything. In the contest between the individual and the state (certainly an essential test of freedom) there must be some prior restraint on the state.

one could, of course describe the US Constitution as having been derived from Natural Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

Quote:
John Locke incorporated natural law into many of his theories and philosophy, especially in Two Treatises of Government. While Locke spoke in the language of natural law, the content of this law was by and large protective of natural rights, and it was this language that later liberal thinkers preferred, and while Jefferson calls on a "Creator" as First Cause, in the Declaration of Independence it need not be so.

Certainly the track record of the atheistic Fascist & Socialist systems of the late, unlamented 20th century doesn't paint an encouraging picture. To be sure history reveals no dearth of slaughter and oppression at the hands of theistic and even religious states - and much of it was done in the name of religion. However, there are as many counter examples available - and that is not the case with modern, avowedly atheistic states.

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I don't normally like Brooks, but he has an excellent column on the topic today.

Quote:

December 7, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Faith vs. the Faithless
By DAVID BROOKS

Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek and the author of "American Gospel," which describes the history of religious liberty in the United States. Richard John Neuhaus is the editor in chief of First Things and the author of "The Naked Public Square," which is about efforts to banish religion from public conversation.

Yesterday, Mitt Romney delivered a speech that artfully blended the centrist Meacham and the conservative Neuhaus.

From Meacham, whose book he has read twice, Romney borrowed the language of America's political religion. He argued that beneath the differences among America's denominations there is a common creed, a conception of a moral order described in the Declaration of Independence, and lived out during the high points in the nation's history. He recounted Sam Adams's plea for unity in a time of crisis, and how his own father's commitment to the basic American creed caused him to march with Martin Luther King Jr.

From Neuhaus, Romney borrowed the conviction that faith is under assault in America ?- which is the unifying glue of social conservatism. He argued that the religious have a common enemy: the counter-religion of secularism.

He insisted that the faithful should stick stubbornly to their religions, as he himself sticks to the faith of his fathers. He insisted that God-talk should remain a vibrant force in the public square and that judges should be guided by the foundations of their faith. He lamented the faithlessness of Europe and linked the pro-life movement to abolition and civil rights, just as evangelicals do.

It is not always easy to blend an argument for religious liberty with an argument for religious assertiveness, but Romney did it well. Yesterday, I called around to many of America's serious religious thinkers ?- including moderates like Richard Bushman of Columbia, and conservatives like Neuhaus and Robert George of Princeton. Everyone I spoke with was enthusiastic about the speech, some of them wildly so.

Before yesterday, most pundits thought Romney was making a mistake in giving the speech now. But in retrospect, it clearly was not a mistake. Romney didn't say anything that the Baptist minister Mike Huckabee couldn't say, and so this one address will not hold off the Huckabee surge in Iowa. But Romney underlined the values he shares with social conservatives, and will have eased their concerns. Among Mormons, the speech may go down as a historic event.

And yet, I confess my own reaction is more muted.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other's passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn't start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people's minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I'm assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

In Romney's account, faith ends up as wishy-washy as the most New Age-y secularism. In arguing that the faithful are brothers in a common struggle, Romney insisted that all religions share an equal devotion to all good things. Really? Then why not choose the one with the prettiest buildings?

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln's God or Reinhold Niebuhr's God or the religion most people know ?- the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

Romney's job yesterday was to unite social conservatives behind him. If he succeeded, he did it in two ways. He asked people to rally around the best traditions of America's civic religion. He also asked people to submerge their religious convictions for the sake of solidarity in a culture war without end.

Romney's speech reminded me of something I've been thinking for a while: the double standard of religion in politics. For years, we've been told that it's wrong to judge a politician based upon their religion; but on the other hand, we're constantly assailed (from the Right wing, especially) with exhortations of religious belief and adherence to creed by those who wish to be elected, as a reason for electing them.

It's as if we are only allowed to draw positive conclusions about a candidate's religious beliefs, never negative ones. Not a credible attitude. If Romney (or Huckabee) are going to base their campaigns in large part upon the concept that they are good and stalwart followers of their religions, they have an obligation to take the bad along with the good. In Romney's case, the 'bad' is the fact that Mormonism is not a topic which can be discussed out loud. He can't get into the details. To begin, half of the details sound, and I mean this, more then a little crazy. And the ones which don't necessarily sound crazy, don't jive with the fundamentalist and evangelical Christian voting blocks who Romney must woo in order to receive the nomination.

So what we get is a bland, pap-filled speech, one in which every good point of religious belief is held up as an ideal for a candidate, and every bad point is... ignored. No new information was shared at all, really. Just a warm reassurance offered to Christians that he will represent their interests when he is president; and there's no other word for that besides pandering, something which we all know Romney excels at.

I found the 'freedom requires religion' line to be offensive, as a non-religious person. Now, I'm not demanding a retraction or hollering in the street about it; he's just wrong.

Cycloptichorn

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georgeob1 wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:
... Our gov't isn't a business, though I understand that many Republicans would like it to be. It shouldn't be run as a business. The goals aren't the same and the moral and ethical nature of those who are involved in the two are not necessarily the same either.

Are you sure you know what you are saying here? Leadership - good or bad - is pretty much the same everywhere human beings are involved. There are many situations in which it can be suitably tested and demonstrated, and business is one (Certainly Romney's experience with Bain & Co. was an impressive one in that world). In my experience it is leadership and wisdom that makes the difference in both arenas. The "moral and ethical nature" of politicians is not detectably any better than that of businessmen - on the contrary one could make a strong case for a much higher level of venality among politicians. Good and bad examples can be found among both groups. I think you are allowing yourself to be led by some prejudgements here that are not supported by observable reality.

I've asked you this before, without you providing an answer: what specifically do you know about his leadership in business? What details do you know about it? Please don't google it and answer, but give me an honest assessment of what actual knowledge led you to say that his leadership was 'impressive.'

I really, really believe that the quality which leads you and others to believe this is: he made lots and lots of money. And that's fine. But that's something completely different then running the USA, and in many cases, the qualities which will allow one to be an efficient and effective manager of business do not necessarily translate to the qualities which will allow one to be an effective leader of our country. The cold knife of Efficiency is not a form of governance, and it's what gets guys like Romney ahead.

I asked before for you to name the modern business-leader presidents, and you could not, because there simply is no track record of success in that area. If leadership translated as easily as you seem to assume it does, I doubt that would be true. In fact, I believe it is quite possible to be successful in business while being a corrupt bastard. Complimentary, in fact. This isn't to say that Romney was, or is, such a person (Giuliani, on the other hand...) but that the simple record of his achievement in business is not indicative of any sort of positive morality whatsoever.

Cycloptichron

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"positive morality"?

Laughing

Can you name a single president that has had "positive morality"?

Being a leader does not equate well with "positive morality" beyond religious leaders. It's not a leaders job to provide morality. Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent*.

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Romney says Freedom requires Religion

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