By Hunter Baker on 12.7.07 @ 12:08AM
His speech yesterday was about as good as it possibly could have been.
When Mitt Romney spoke at the Bush presidential library at Texas
A&M, he did so standing on a razor's edge that cuts in two
directions. On the one hand, his Mormon faith is a substantial
obstacle to his candidacy for the Republican nomination for
president. In his speech, Romney presented his Mormon faith as
another version of Christianity, but that view is contested to say
the least. Evangelicals make up a large part of the party's base as
do Catholics. For both groups, Mormonism is a heresy. On the other
hand, without the uniqueness of his Mormon faith and its reputation
for conservatism, one wonders whether the one term governor of a
liberal northeastern state would have earned as much press and
attention as he has. One way or another, Mormonism matters.
Yesterday, Governor Romney addressed that fact.
When Rudy Giuliani spoke at Houston Baptist University earlier
this year, we already had our JFK moment of the presidential cycle,
or rather an attempted JFK moment. The problem was that the analogy
was inexact. Conservative Protestants in the sixties wanted to hear
Kennedy say he wouldn't listen to the pope. As my former professor
Francis Beckwith has pointed out, the same group today would rather
have heard Giuliani say he would listen to the pope, at least with
regard to abortion!
Romney's speech in College Station was a better parallel.
Everyone wanted to know just how Mormon he is and what it means to
his politics. On the whole, Romney's speech was just about as good
as it possibly could have been. It lacked the dramatic flair of
Hilaire Belloc explaining that he prayed his rosary every day and
that if people wouldn't vote for him for Parliament on that basis
he'd rather be spared the indignity of representing them, but it
was good.
The pedestrian part of the speech was when Romney said what
everyone expected him to say. In short and paraphrased, "I am not
now, nor will I ever be under the control of the hierarchy in Salt
Lake. They control the church, but they don't control me." That is
just what Kennedy said about the pope back in 1960. It was
expected. Whether it is good theology in his church is beyond my
competency to answer. Whether he helped himself with religious
voters by distancing himself from his religion is questionable.
In the rest of the speech, however, Romney was nearly
perfect.
While one might quibble with the way Romney presented the
founding of the Republic and what it did or didn't settle about
religious liberty and established churches, he did an outstanding
job of framing the overall discussion.
Right off, Romney reminded his audience that the United States
has traditionally been a nation that recognizes freedom must be
paired with religion and morality if it is to persevere in
political society. This simple reiteration of the founding bargain
between Enlightenment deists and Great Awakening evangelicals is an
important message for a Republican electorate divided over the
nexus of religion, morality, and politics. Libertarians need to
hear it. So do secularists. When the governor embraced that point
of view, he put himself squarely in the conservative camp, not only
with religious conservatives, but with traditionalist Burkeans,
too.
Though his faith has some unique features (so unique that
thinking of it as "Christianity, but different" is a
big stretch), he planted his flag on
American values such as freedom, democracy, human rights, religious
liberty, and limited government. He was right to do so. It is
perhaps imperfectly understood that Mormonism is an American
religion with a major preference for American values. It is the
only major faith to be born in the United States. Mormonism is as
American as jazz music! Missionaries spread their faith and its
unique doctrines, but they also spread pro-Americanism. One would
be hard pressed to find Mormons abroad who hate America. There is a
long tradition of American Christians thinking of this land as the
new Israel. For Mormons, American soil is
the holy land.
Finally, Romney correctly recognized that while the church must
always seek to encourage the state, to critique the state, to urge
the state toward justice, it must never be part of the state. When
the church is part of the state, it either becomes a useless
Department of God, as is the case of European established churches,
or it becomes a dangerous theocracy of the sort we find in many
Muslim lands. The American model continues to serve both church and
state well. Institutional separation has made the church far more
influential than anyone might have expected.
Overall, the speech showed tremendous sophistication with regard
to religion and politics. What the governor achieved with this
speech, more so than he has been able to do so far, is to
demonstrate very vividly that while his religious doctrines may
vary dramatically from those of many Americans, the political
values that flow from his faith are American values which religious
conservatives in his own party share.
topics:
Religion, Abortion, Israel, Conservatism, Oil
