Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Among voters in general:

Munson: While it is striking that the Pew poll found that 25% of the general electorate would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate, it is even more striking that 61% would be less likely to vote for a candidate who did not believe in God.

Pew Forum: How the Public Perceives Romney, Mormons, December 4, 2007

Candidate Recently Discussed the Role of Religion in Public Life

Scott Keeter, Director of Survey Research, Pew Research Center
Gregory Smith, Research Fellow, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
December 4, 2007

Overall, one-in-four respondents to a recent nationwide Pew survey said that they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate for president, and those who take this point of view express substantially more negative views of Romney, compared with those who express no such reservations about voting for a Mormon….

Though Mormonism is viewed as far less of a liability for a presidential candidate than not believing in God or being a Muslim, more people do express reservations about voting for a Mormon (25%) than about supporting a candidate who is an evangelical Christian (16%), a Jew (11%) or a Catholic (7%).Furthermore, the group of Americans most likely to say they value religiosity in a president - white evangelical Protestants - is also the group most apt to be bothered by his religion. More than one-in-three evangelical Republicans (36%) expressed reservations about voting for a Mormon, a level of opposition much higher than that seen among the electorate overall.

Munson: The fact that a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination is often asked what he believes about Jesus is scandalous, as is the fact that he feels compelled to say that he believes that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of Mankind.” Let us hope the day will come when presidential candidates of both parties will feel free to say “I don’t believe Jesus is the son of God, moreover I don’t believe candidates for public office should be asked about such matters.”

Romney’s ‘Faith in America’ Address - New York Times, December 6, 2007

“There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

Official Leaves Post as Texas Prepares to Debate Science Education Standards - New York Times, December 3, 2007

HOUSTON, Dec. 2 — After 27 years as a science teacher and 9 years as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science, Christine Castillo Comer said she did not think she had to remain “neutral” about teaching the theory of evolution.

“It’s not just a good idea; it’s the law,” said Ms. Comer, citing the state’s science curriculum.

But now Ms. Comer, 56, of Austin, is out of a job, after forwarding an e-mail message on a talk about evolution and creationism — “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” according to a dismissal letter last month that accused her of various instances of “misconduct and insubordination” and of siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of “intelligent design.”

Her departure, which has stirred dismay among science professionals since it became public last week, is a prelude to an expected battle early next year over rewriting the state’s science education standards, which include the teaching of evolution.

Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the state’s education agency in Austin, said Ms. Comer “resigned. She wasn’t fired.”

“Our job,” Ms. Ratcliffe added, “is to enact laws and regulations that are passed by the Legislature or the State Board of Education and not to inject personal opinions and beliefs.”

Ms. Comer disputed that characterization in a series of interviews, her first extensive comments. She acknowledged forwarding to a local online community an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution group, about a talk in Austin on Nov. 2 by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and an expert witness in the landmark 2005 case that ruled against the teaching of intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., schools.

Avraham Burg: Time to attack - Haaretz, August 28, 2007

There is no theological difference between certain rabbis from Hebron, the former Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the evangelical preacher hoping for Armageddon at the site of our Megiddo. Those who say that “God’s law is first” are no different from one another, whether they wear a rabbi’s skullcap, Hezbollah’s turban or the cloak of a North American spiritual leader. They are all engaged in a cruel battle against me. They are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and are hostile to liberty, equality and the status of women.

In a world like this, we must form new coalitions. The division between “us” and “our enemies” cannot be based merely along national or familial lines, or in beliefs and genetics. The world is divided into a coalition of some Jews, some Christians and some Muslims, versus other members of their nations and religions. Democracy versus theology.

This is not a “gentle” argument, but rather war - the rabbi against the sovereign, the “Jewish” against the “democratic,” halakha and sharia against civil law, the church against the state. They cannot live under the same roof, and they are currently fighting the most ancient and most modern war - religion versus state.

And in war, like in war: The legal standing of the inciting rabbi is the same as that of the inciting sheikh, because both are equally hostile. One wants to see me dead physically, and the other wants to see me dead democratically and morally. Since I oppose the death sentence in all cases, I cannot thus condemn my domestic enemies. But the army of the democratic state, as well as its systems of governance, must purify itself from all the enemies planted by theocracy. The “army of God” must not be permitted to gain control of the institutions of state power.

god hates the world

Established in 1955 by Pastor Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) of Topeka, Kansas still exists today as an Old School (or, Primitive) Baptist Church….

WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colorful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS, GOD GAVE FAGS UP, NO SPECIAL LAWS FOR FAGS, FAGS DOOM NATIONS, etc.

Perceiving the modern militant homosexual movement to pose a clear and present danger to the survival of America, exposing our nation to the wrath of God as in 1898 B.C. at Sodom and Gomorrah, WBC has conducted over 22,000 such demonstrations since June, 1991, at homosexual parades and other events (including funerals of impenitent sodomites, like Matthew Shepard). WBC teams have picketed all over the United States, and internationally (including Canada, Jordan and Iraq). The unique picketing ministry of Westboro Baptist Church has received international attention, and WBC believes this gospel message to be this world’s last hope.

For more information about WBC, feel free to attend one of our weekly church meetings. We are located at 3701 W. 12th Street in Topeka, KS. Regular service time is 11:30 a.m. (Central time).

Photo: AP/Cheryl Senter

A Salon photo composite of Mitt Romney and the Mormon Temple.

Walter Shapiro, Mitt Romney, GOP race, Mormons | Salon.com, December 6, 2007

America has been wacky about religion and the Oval Office since Richard Nixon, a Quaker, asked Henry Kissinger, a non-practicing Jew, to pray during the depths of Watergate. (That incident was memorably parodied during the first season of “Saturday Night Live” when Nixon, played by Dan Aykroyd, said to John Belushi’s Kissinger, “Don’t you want to pray, you Christ-killer.”)

During a 1984 presidential debate, Ronald Reagan became the first candidate to use the terrorism excuse to explain why he did not attend religious services: “I don’t feel that I have a right to go to church, knowing that my being there could cause something of the kind that we have seen in … Beirut, for example.” Bill Clinton prayed with the Rev. Billy Graham in early 1998 on the same day that the president denied for the third time that he had any involvement with Monica Lewinsky. Graham told reporters, “I know he is sincere.”

Even with this tangled history, it is hard to recall a campaign year when electing a president has been so wrapped up in religion. Huckabee’s new TV ads promote him as a “Christian leader”; the recent CNN-YouTube debate demanded that GOP presidential contenders reveal whether they believe every word in the Bible in a literal sense; and even Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are eager to testify to their religious faith. How far we have come in just four years from the 2004 NPR debate in Iowa in which John Kerry bravely confessed, “My experience in Vietnam … made me question [my faith] for a period of time.”

Is it a sign of societal progress that in a campaign featuring a woman, an African-American and a Hispanic, it is the straight-arrow white male Mormon who is the only major target of prejudice? All this year national polls have painted a chilling picture of the extent of religious bigotry against Mormons. A Time magazine survey in May found that 30 percent of all voters would be “less supportive” of a Mormon candidate. That figure contrasts with 9 percent who say that they would be “less supportive” of a Catholic candidate and 11 percent of a Jewish candidate.

Fifty percent of all voters in a July Newsweek poll said that America was not yet ready to elect a Mormon president. So what does America need to get ready for a Mormon president? Another 218 years of the Constitution’s barring a “religious test” for public office?

Critics of the Church of the Latter Day Saints can easily point to passages in the Book of Mormon that seem bizarre and unfathomable to non-believers. But the same can be done with the Book of Revelation or Old Testament accounts of a “wrathful” God. Religious beliefs by their very nature are not subject to the same dispassionate analysis as healthcare plans.

Christopher Hitchens, Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about his Mormon faith, Slate Magazine, November 26, 2007

Mitt Romney appears to think that, in respect of the bizarre beliefs of his church, he has come up with a twofer response. Not only can he decline to answer questions about these beliefs, he can also reap additional benefit from complaining that people keep asking him about them. In a video response of revolting sanctimony and self-pity last week, he responded to some allegedly anti-Mormon “push poll” calls in Iowa and New Hampshire by saying that it was “un-American” to bring up his “faith,” especially “at a time when we are preparing for Thanksgiving,” whatever that had to do with it. Additional interest is lent to this evasive tactic by the very well-argued case, made by Mark Hemingway in National Review Online, that it was actually the Romney campaign that had initiated the anti-Mormon push-poll calls in the first place! What’s that? A threefer? Let me count the ways: You encourage the raising of an awkward question in such a way as to make it seem illegitimate. You then strike a hurt attitude and say that you are being persecuted for your faith. This, in turn, discourages other reporters from raising the question. Yes, that’s the three-card monte.

According to Byron York, who has been riding around with Romney for National Review, it’s working, as well. Most journalists have tacitly agreed that it’s off-limits to ask the former governor about the tenets of the Mormon cult. Nor do they get much luck if they do ask: When Bob Schieffer of Face the Nation inquired whether Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden is or was or will be in the great state of Missouri, he was told by Romney to go ask the Mormons! However, we do have the governor in an off-guard moment in Iowa, saying that “The [Mormon] Church says that Christ appears and splits the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. … And then, over a thousand years of the millennium, that the world is reigned in two places, Jerusalem and Missouri. … The law will come from Missouri, and the other will be from Jerusalem.”

It ought to be borne in mind that Romney is not a mere rank-and-file Mormon. His family is, and has been for generations, part of the dynastic leadership of the mad cult invented by the convicted fraud Joseph Smith. It is not just legitimate that he be asked about the beliefs that he has not just held, but has caused to be spread and caused to be inculcated into children. It is essential. Here is the most salient reason: Until 1978, the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an officially racist organization. Mitt Romney was an adult in 1978. We need to know how he justified this to himself, and we need to hear his self-criticism, if he should chance to have one.

Andrew O’Hehir, This is not Romney’s Kennedy moment, Salon.com, December 6, 2007

When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney faces the cameras on Thursday at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he has promised to deliver a major speech “about the role of religion, faith, in America and in a free society,” he carries the legacy of Joseph Smith’s First Vision with him, whether he likes it or not. Romney is unlikely to tell the Protestants and Catholics in his audience that their creeds are an abomination, or that they are participants in a Great Apostasy that began shortly after Jesus ascended to heaven and continued, in all forms of Christianity, till Smith founded the Mormon church on a new set of scriptures in 1830. But he cannot quite evade those beliefs either, for they are fundamental tenets of his faith.

As the most prominent Mormon presidential candidate since his father, George, 40 years ago, or since Smith himself ran on a platform of “Theodemocracy” in 1844, Romney must negotiate between two opposing forces. The theology and tangled history of Mormonism is at odds with the quasi-theocratic nature of the contemporary Republican Party, which seems to have decreed that only Bible-believing Christians or their close allies may run for high office. Neither of these two forces is of Romney’s own making, but it was the candidate, and his decisions about how to run his campaign, who ensured that they would collide.

As Christopher Hitchens recently complained in Slate, political reporters have generally treated the details of Romney’s faith as a no-go zone. If the question were simply whether his beliefs (or anyone else’s) should qualify or disqualify him from public office, I would agree that there was nothing to discuss. Moreover, only Mitt Romney can know how much of Mormon doctrine he accepts without question and how much he takes with a grain of salt. Even in the most dogmatic of believers and the most dictatorial of denominations, faith is fundamentally a private process of negotiation.

Dichter cancels U.K. trip over fears of ‘war crimes’ arrest - Haaretz, December 6, 2007

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter canceled a trip to Britain over concerns he would be arrested due to his involvement in the decision to assassinate the head of Hamas’ military wing in July 2002.

Fifteen people were killed in the bombing of Salah Shehade’s house in Gaza, among them his wife and three children, when Dichter was head of the Shin Bet security service. He is the first minister to have to deal with a possible arrest.

Dichter was invited to take part in a conference by a British research institute on “the day after” Annapolis. He was supposed to give an address on the diplomatic process.

Dichter contacted the Foreign Ministry and sought an opinion on the matter, among other reasons because of previous cases in which complaints were filed in Britain and arrest warrants were issued on suspicion of war crimes by senior officers who served during the second intifada.

The Foreign Ministry wrote Dichter that it did not recommend he visit Britain because of a high probability that an extreme leftist organization there would file a complaint, which might lead to an arrest warrant. The ministry also wrote that because Dichter was not an official guest of the British government, he did not have immunity from arrest.