Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Republican religions (click to view)
Date: October 12, 2011
As we discuss on the
Filibuster podcast this week, good ol' Mitt Romney has once again found himself in the midst of controversy regarding the compatibility of his religious faith with that of the Republican base. During last week's always influential
Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. (you can tell it's influential because Ron Paul won their straw poll), Dallas megachurch pastor, and avid Rick Perry supporter Robert Jeffress took time out of his speaking schedule to lecture reporters about why Romney was clearly not the Christian choice.
"Mitt Romney's a good moral person, but he's not a Christian," he said. "Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity."
And just like that, the press has gone gonzo, once again returning to the never tiresome "is American ready for a Mormon president?" trope that they got so much mileage out of back in 2008. Granted, the question may be a bit more pressing now. With Romney his party's obvious frontrunner in a way he never was in '08, the seeming inevitability of his victory is just the sort of thing to prompt a ton of last minute second-guessing, especially among large portions of the GOP right who have never much wanted the man to be their standard-bearer in the first place. Add that to the fact that Romney presently has so many candidates running to his right, and you can see that there's certainly a strong possibility for the former governor's primary opponents to make gains from exploiting his vulnerability on this issue.
Evoking memories of the ambiguous answers some Republicans gave when confronted with the "birther" question back in the day, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain have both pointedly refused to denounce the "cult" comments outright, saying only that Romney is clearly a religious man and has a right to believe whatever he believes. Perry himself gave a clear "no," but has also not engaged in any of the traditional political theatrics of publicly severing his relationship with Pastor Jeffress, implying the man hasn't really done anything too offensive.
Just out of personal interest, I've been learning more about Mormonism and the LDS Church lately, and while I'm no theologian, it's clear that the religion is so elaborate and revolutionary, in terms of the amount of new scripture and new understandings of Christ and biblical history it introduces, it's not hard to understand how a learned man in some other, more traditional denomination could make the case that the faith is simply too "out there" to be regarded as part of Christianity proper. Mormons, of course, argue that their faith is, in fact,
the only legitimate form of Christianity, period, since all their new stuff — the Book of Mormon and the decrees of their latter-day prophets and so forth — has been delivered directly from the same the Christian god who gave us everything else. The whole point of denominations in the first place is to make these sorts of claims of exclusive truth and knowledge. A doctrinaire Baptist like Jeffress would have an almost equally large problem with the supposedly un-Christian "deviations" of Catholicism, for example — and actually did state such criticisms of the Catholic Church in
this follow-up interview with Anderson Cooper.
The question is whether this kind of theological nit-picking actually matters, even to the aggressively Christian voters who will doubtlessly play a large role in the Iowa and South Carolina primaries that decide Romney's fate. We sometimes lose track of this basic fact, but among those Evangelicals
et al who vote "faith and values," the Christianity of candidates is just as often viewed as a means to an end as it is an end unto itself. That is to say, while it's all well and jolly to have a guy in the White House who attends the same sort of Sunday services as you do, the bigger priority is that he promote the sorts of policies and causes that are consistent with your religiously-inspired principles of right and wrong, and not intentionally lead American down the path of immorality and sin. By this logic, even an
atheist candidate could be somewhat palatable so long as he championed the sort of hard-right anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-HPV vaccination, anti-whatever agenda that religious conservatives have been pushing for so many decades. Even Pastor Jeffress himself has admitted that he'd gladly vote for a cultist like Romney before a socialist pro-sodomy Christian like President Obama, if that's what it came down.
But if the Mormon fear-mongering gets too intense, and some of the... I guess... "colorfully unconventional" beliefs of the LDS Church become too widespread in public gossip, it seems possible that Romney could suffer simply through his association with a religion that voters deem too ridiculous or goofy to be befitting of presidential intelligence. I don't know enough about the Church to pass those kinds of judgements myself, but one can certainly expect many liberal activists during the general election — should Romney make it that far — to have little shame using the few damning Mormon facts they do know to try and taint the former governor with just such a kook image.
When asked, most Americans early declare themselves willing to vote for just about any sort of guy (or gal) for president, and state that superficial variables like the candidate's race, religion, and lifestyle matter little when compared to the bigger concerns of values and competence. In my view, Romney's unusual faith presents no reason to call into question the former, but may eventually pose serious problems for the latter.
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