That Romney Speech
Jason Kuznicki on Dec 7th 2007 12:25 am |
You’d win your bet, Jim: I definitely have some responses to Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech.
First, in the biggest non-surprise of the campaign so far, Romney compared himself to Kennedy. As potentially the first president of a faith that hasn’t had its turn in the Oval Office, it seems reasonable enough. But historical analogies are never really precise, and this one seems less so than most.
Let’s not put too fine a point on this: The people who worried about Kennedy were worried because they thought he might be involved in some sort of Catholic conspiracy, or that he would take his orders directly from the Pope, or that the Jesuits or somesuch would end up controlling America. These fears are deeply rooted in Anglo-American political culture, as reprehensible as they are.
To be sure, there are the anti-Mormon conspiracy theories too, and these sometimes make it as far as the Wall Street Journal. But what worries most conservatives about a Mormon in the White House isn’t that he’ll hand the country over to his co-religionists. It’s simply that they find his religion profoundly weird, and weird things tend to upset conservatives. There’s the sacred underwear. The hidden gold plates, the weird languages, and the decoder lenses. There’s the Mormon Garden of Eden — in Missouri. Mormons are too far out of the mainstream to take over America or even to try to. But they’re still strange enough to give conservatives the creeps.
Now, as someone of no faith whatsoever, I can only look on in bemusement: Every single election produces another President whose theological beliefs are pretty well alien to mine. Even if I’m familiar with their content (the Catholic more than most, since I was raised that way), I still don’t share anything like the belief. I almost feel like telling Evangelicals to get over themselves here and just support the guy. I would definitely vote for a Mormon who happened to share my political beliefs.
Yet I personally can’t support Romney. As a gay man, I remember him from back when he used to portray himself as one of the “good” Republicans, of the urbane, socially liberal wing of the party, the type that was genuinely embarrassed by the social conservatives. I remember thinking of him favorably for a time. I haven’t forgotten it, although he apparently has. I suspect that many politically aware gay men feel just the same. It’s not merely that he takes anti-gay stands as a matter of habit or tradition. For him they are a calculated political stance. By contrast even a Huckabee is preferable to us.
I’m also an atheist, and Romney’s speech makes it clear enough that atheists aren’t really a part of America as he sees it:
There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they are at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the Creator. And further, they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom. In John Adams’ words: ‘We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.’
Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.
All of this will probably do a lot to bring Romney’s religious issues to a close, because at least people of the common American religions also have a common enemy: the non-religious. It’s sure nice to have someone to scapegoat.
As a gay atheist, I belong to both of the least electable groups in America. (Dare I mention that I’m also a libertarian?) As such I wonder a bit about all the sensitivity to Romney’s religious plight. What I wouldn’t give to have that man’s problems. If I did, I’d promise to resist the temptation to scapegoat — oh let’s pick someone at random — Mormons.
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As if on cue, Jason, here comes Carol Iannone creating one of the worst atheist strawmans ever, as if us atheists don’t have enough going against us.
http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzE4OTg1NzEzMmMwMzc1Nzc0M2EzYmY1NzExZTc1NjY=
“Why do we have to listen to these boorish atheists criticizing religion and mocking our holidays and falsely characterizing what a specific religion must mean in a believer’s life. Why don’t we characterize the results of what their atheism implies in their lives. A person who believes that all life evolved through random processes and natural selection has no basis for a belief in consciousness, morality, freedom, and will, and no basis for holding anyone responsible for his deeds. As Clarence Darrow said in the Leopold and Loeb case, how can you blame these boys for committing murder once they had been taught Nietzsche at the University of Chicago. Since atheists believe that human life is no different from animal life, how can they be trusted to respect the surpassing dignity of each individual human being? (One scientific manifesto declares, pompously, that “as far as the scientific enterprise can determine … [h]uman capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals.”) And coasting off of traditional morality or pretending that they have arrived at a humanistic ethics, which is actually derived from traditional morality, doesn’t count. Neither does it count that individual atheists are upright or benign. We’re talking about a basis for all mankind. And we should ask them, since you believe all life derived from a big bang, followed by a series of accidents, totally purposely and directionlessly, how do you arrive at purpose and meaning in your own life? Don’t say I make it up myself, because Jack the Ripper can do that. I think it was Cardinal Newman who said that if the atheist were a gentleman he would not mock religious belief. “
[...] In the wake of Romney’s speech, in which those highlight the attack on the secular, the debate topic above between the secular philosopher Habermas and the non-secular philosopher Ratzinger might be of interest. At the very least it demonstrates that reasonable and intelligent people can disagree on the answer (yes or no) on this question. Blog neighbors Jason Kuznicki and David Schraub for example attack Romney because he holds a position opposing theirs as being un-American and/or unreasonable. I don’t think that’s the case … especially in the light of the above debate. [...]
SH:
I think you misspelled Carol’s name. Based on that screed, it must be Inaneone.
- Charles
As Clarence Darrow said in the Leopold and Loeb case, how can you blame these boys for committing murder once they had been taught Nietzsche at the University of Chicago.
I think that’s a good question. And neither can I come up with a good rebuttal to Prof. Peter Singer’s quite rational case that “consciousness” trumps human DNA.
Without God, all things are indeed possible. American atheists by and large seem to be wonderful and moral people, but it remains to be seen if they’re the product of their philosophy or their Judeo-Christian cultural milieu.
“I think that’s a good question”
(Hi, Tom – me again)
I agree, but most likely for entirely different reasons. I lean toward a weak-form determinism which ameliorates “blame”, but also (as I mentioned before) toward order and it’s attendant demand for accountability. Of course, the specific case in question strains any tendency toward “understanding” since the motivation (IIRC) was so purely “evil”.
We (the non-religious – I have problems with the label “atheist”) are no doubt the product of the cultural milieu of which various philosophies (which one is “their[s]“??) are a part. But Ivan was wrong (or would have been had he actually said his famous “quote”). Even if God doesn’t get you, society will. And any event, based on my experiences the non-religious are no more inclined toward sin than the religious – maybe even less since those I know are relatively moderate in their animal appetites (aka boring).
“Peter Singer’s quite rational case …”
Cite? Thanks.
- Charles
And any event, based on my experiences the non-religious are no more inclined toward sin than the religious – maybe even less since those I know are relatively moderate in their animal appetites (aka boring).
But your experience occurs in what’s left of a Judeo-Christian milieu.
The problem with Romney’s rhetoric, and even those who are less clumsy, is that the atheist or non-theist hears, “You don’t believe in God, therefore you aren’t moral.” Quite insulting on its face, and patently untrue.
As for accountability, the holes in any legal system leave that problematic, and so we’re still left with the problem of virtue, or character, or what you do when nobody’s watching.
Or, as a quote by the quite secular Jurgen Habermas asks, [that Pseudo-Polymath cites]:
Does the free secularized state exist on the basis of normative presuppositions that it itself cannot guarantee? This question expresses a doubt about whether the democratic constitutional state can renew from its own resources the normative presuppositions of its existence, it also expresses the assumption that such a state is dependent on ethical traditions of a local nature.
We certainly can reach a point, with Nietzsche, for instance, where “normative” has no meaning at all.
As for Peter Singer, the Wiki will do for a start. I can’t lay my hands on the very dramatic account of Singer’s meeting with a young lawyer, who, according to Singer’s ethics, could have been willfully destroyed even after her birth as genetically defective, for the greater good of us all.
“your experience occurs in what’s left of a Judeo-Christian milieu.”
True, and we pass along to our progeny the pragmatically confirmed values of that cultural background – but junk the purely doctrinaire aspects.
I and several of my friends are examples of that process. Our parents weren’t particularly religious, if at all, but instilled in us the values that they presumably got from their parents; who in turn may or may not have been particularly religious, but perhaps got their values from a religion-inspired cultural tradition; etc, etc. So, the question seems to be whether those pragmatic values can survive once separated from their religious origins. Based on my experience, I’d say, “so far, so good”.
OTOH, I think the answer to Habermas’s question currently hangs in the balance. But if the answer turns out to be “no”, I suspect that it will be due to people like Romney having scuttled values like Equal Protection (the legal embodiment of the pragmatic “golden rule”) and not “activist judges” having scuttled rituals like government mandated prayer in public schools or stamping “In God we trust” on coins.
“what you do when nobody’s watching”
Which is a reprise of our previous exchange. If no one is “watching” (ie, adversely impacted), why is it of concern to the state? It may offend God, but that’s for Him to deal with. The majority’s will isn’t necessarily His.
- Charles
I’m not referring to “sin” or doctrine here, and would argue neither with the general public. I think Romney was trying to say something along the lines of Habermas, who’s quite secular.
But in trolling for Evangelical votes competing with Huckabee, Romney made a hash of it, forgetting a more inclusive rhetoric that would have satisfied most everybody.
So far, so good? Not in my opinion, but we agree the jury’s still out, and “post-Christian” Europe will be the test case. My friends in the UK see it becoming more like a rental property, not a home.
But Habermas uses the term “post-secular” to describe our particular moment in the West, where the “God’s not only dead, he’s really most sincerely dead” winds of the past century are proving increasingly insufficient to human needs and temperament. Some sort of pull toward the transcendent seems to be in man’s nature, Richard Dawkins’ “God Delusion” notwithstanding.
I find it [Habermas', not Dawkins'] an interesting concept. We’ll see about that, too. I’m not sure the pull toward the transcendent can truly be synthesized as secularism, and I’m not convinced that there’s not something special about Judeo-Christianity that brought us to our present moment. Elsewhere, Habermas says much the same, that the “Judeo” brought justice and the “Christian” brought love [read "rights," if you will] to building western civilization.
What was it in “Wise Blood,” The Church of Christ Without Christ? Before it’s all over, I reckon we’ll give that one a whack too.
“I’m not referring to “sin” … here”
Neither am I, really. I’m using it as a playful stand-in for more serious issues.
“‘So far, so good’?”
That was in the narrow context of it’s home paragraph. I, my close friends (all non-religious), and their children (non-religious as far as I know) though decidedly not candidates for sainthood, have stable families, no members of which are incarcerated, are at least adequate citizens, and seem to have relatively fulfilled lives. The greater US society? Apparently not so much. But polls showing huge majorities in the US at least claiming to be religious, the booming mega-church business, etc, seem to cast doubt on suggestions that our problems are primarily attributable to secularism.
Clearly, there is something unsatisfying about the current cultural “milieu” in the US – so many exhibit a degree of anger that seems incommensurate with their circumstances. One guess, based on absolutely no tangible evidence, is dissatisfaction with consumerism. Although I personally find that having money does “buy happiness” in the sense of providing a measure of security, spending it doesn’t do much for me. Perhaps those who take seriously advertising and it’s empty promises of purchased happiness and fulfillment are – as Jesus predicted – disappointed, frustrated, and resentful.
I honestly don’t have much sense of what the religious derive from their religions per se (ie, beyond attendant benefits like being part of a community). For a while now I’ve actually made a modest effort to get some insights by reading some theology, listening to/reading interviews with believers, and engaging in blog exchanges with a few, but it’s been pretty much a failed pursuit; they typically speak a language that is foreign to me. So, for all I know you are correct that it’s about the “transcendent”. A concept I can’t relate to – the profane here and now is enough for me.
It may well be true that “there’s [] something special about Judeo-Christian[]” western cultural history. And if following one of the more moderate derivative religions brings inner peace to others, good for them. But in general, doctrinaire extremism – especially when wrapped in misrepresentations and/or lies – doesn’t help (whether the doctrine is religious or not). And that’s what I heard in Romney’s speech (at least the ten minutes or so of it that I could stomach). I found it not only offensive but even somewhat threatening. Not only is he “no Jack Kennedy”, he’s not even Jimmy Carter.
- Charles
Yes, theology is a foreign language to the non-religious, and that leads to stuff like the current flap. There are certainly extremists, but I think the non-religious often hear an accusation where there is none, and that’s certainly true about Romney. He was clumsy, is all. Theology can also be a foreign language to the religious.
I don’t really discuss theology in neutral fora like this, but all I’ll say is that if someone says “we’re all sinners,” it’s easy to hear, “you’re a sinner, Charles.” But it’s not all bad. The Catholics are open to the possibility, even hopeful, that everybody goes to heaven. Who knew?
You put your finger on the question of materialism as a pressing one—absent some association with the transcendent, there seems little defense against consumerism. Habermas saw this early in his secular way, and much ignored by the papers in between hoo-hahing about the hot-button social issues is how much time John Paul II and Benedict have spent in addressing it as the real soul-stealing affliction of the modern age. When gratification is paramount, all other “sin” follows.
And it may be no coincidence that where both religion and materialism/consumerism are absent, a vociferous socialism tends to leap into the void. Indeed, the early Habermas was quite the Marxist.
As for the US, I agree all is not lost—my concern is more for post-Christian Europe. But perhaps post-secularism holds some hope. Anything but doctrinaire socialism, fer crissakes.
Well, Tom, this exchange largely confirms my suspicions that when religious (I am assuming, perhaps incorrectly, you are) and irreligious moderates discuss religious matters (other than perhaps theology – which I’m incompetent to do in any event), there’s not enough distance between them to generate overheated controversy. Ergo, my mantra that “extremists are the problem”.
BTW, I have no problem being called a “sinner”; my list is long. It’s being told by a political figure/party that my voice is preemptively dismissed by the government. Which is why I prefer the endorsement test – or at least the general principle underlying it. And Romney’s speech failed that test.
- Charles