Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Huckabee’s NRA Speech, September 28, 2007

And somehow, by the grace of God, when I squeezed the trigger, my Weatherby .300 Mag, which has got to be the greatest gun, I think, ever made in the form of a rifle — for my sake in hunting, I’ve never squeezed the trigger and not gotten something — did its work, and somehow the angels took that bullet and went right to the antelope, and my hunt was over in a wonderful way.

YouTube - Huckabee: Divine Providence Helps My Poll Numbers, December 4, 2007

STUDENT at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University: Recent polls show you surging… What do you attribute this surge to?

HUCKABEE: There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people. (Students applaud–rapturously.) That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing. And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite. There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has. And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits. And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well. That’s honestly why it’s happening. (More rapturous applause.)

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.

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.

Munson: The most obvious difference between Mitt Romney’s situation today and John Kennedy’s in 1960 is that the Christian Right has become a key component of the Republican Party’s electorate and Romney cannot win the Republican presidential nomination without its support. Kennedy did not need to worry about “Christian conservatives” in running for the Democratic nomination and he was able to win the general election despite the opposition of Christian fundamentalists as well as that of more moderate evangelicals like Billy Graham. (In the 1960s, Christian fundamentalists would never have accepted the label “evangelical” that many fundamentalists today routinely embrace.)

Ironically, the same Christian fundamentalists who continue to view Mormon politicians with suspicion have become accustomed to working closely with conservative Catholics, even though their view of Catholicism as a form of heretical idolatry has not changed. (The justices on the Supreme Court who regularly support the Christian Right’s positions are all conservative Catholics.) The Christian Right has said virtually nothing about Rudy Giuliani’s Catholicism, although many conservative evangelicals are extremely disturbed by his views on abortion and gay rights and his personal history of adultery and divorce.

One reason some conservative evangelicals will end up voting for Romney is the widespread view that Mike Huckabee cannot win the GOP nomination or the general election and that a vote for him is in effect a vote for Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton.

Eventually, Christian fundamentalists will probably become as tolerant of Mormon politicians as they now are of Catholic politicians like Pat Buchanan and Rick Santorum. But they have not reached that point yet. And that is one reason the Romney campaign is in trouble.

Kenneth Woodward, Mitt Romney Is No Jack Kennedy - New York Times, December 5, 2007

INEVITABLY, Mitt Romney’s long-awaited speech on faith and religious freedom tomorrow at the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M will be compared to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Protestant ministers in Houston, just 90 miles away. Like Kennedy, Mr. Romney faces questions about his religious beliefs and how they might affect his judgments as president. Also like Kennedy, Mr. Romney realizes — and polls demonstrate — that a sizable number of voters (again, mostly Southern white Protestants) oppose him because of his religion.

But the differences are more pronounced than the similarities. In 1960, Kennedy had already won the Democratic nomination and, as a Catholic, faced a phalanx of religious groups working publicly against his election. Among them was Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, which was opposed in principle to any Catholic as president. An Episcopal bishop, James A. Pike of California, was its best-known spokesman.

Five days before Kennedy’s speech, moreover, a group of prominent Protestant clergymen headed by Norman Vincent Peale and L. Nelson Bell, the editor of Christianity Today and father-in-law of Billy Graham (Mr. Graham himself backed out at the last minute), mobilized the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom specifically to block Kennedy’s bid. In addition, the Baptist state conventions in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona and Texas had already voted to oppose any Catholic candidate for president. In short, Kennedy knew his adversaries, some of whom were seated right in front of him.

Mr. Romney, in contrast, faces no organized religious opposition he can allude to, no anti-Mormon campaign he can shame — as Kennedy adroitly did — for blatant religious bigotry. On the contrary, most Americans still do not know much about the Mormon Church, and many of them are willing to accept Mr. Romney’s assertion that Mormons are Christians, albeit of a highly unorthodox kind. Unlike Kennedy, he has no ready audience to convince.

Munson: Evangelical support for Baptist minister Mike Huckabee is clearly due, in part at least, to the evangelical view of Mormonism as a “cult.” Some conservative evangelicals have expressed a willingness to support Romney despite his Mormonism–the most notable case being that of Bob Jones III–the archetypal fundamentalist. But for many conservative evangelicals, even in 2007, voting for someone whose religion is based on the idea that the Bible represents a flawed version of the word of God is simply impossible.

Mormons and the Bible, Every Word - New York Times, Dec. 1, 2007

One moment that drew particular attention at Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate was a video questioner’s asking whether the candidates believed every word of the Bible.

Mitt Romney, a Mormon, hesitated a bit in answering, then was drawn into a thicket of theology underscoring just how complicated the issue of his faith remains as he courts evangelical Christian voters, a crucial constituency in the Republican base.Mr. Romney replied, “I believe the Bible is the word of God, absolutely.”

Then, when asked again — this time by the moderator, Anderson Cooper of CNN — whether he believed every word of it, Mr. Romney added: “Yeah, I believe it’s the word of God. The Bible is the word of God. I mean, I might interpret the word differently than you interpret the word, but I read the Bible and I believe the Bible is the word of God. I don’t disagree with the Bible. I try to live by it.”

While that may have appealed to those evangelicals who believe that the Bible is “inerrant,” Mr. Romney may have tripped himself up among Mormons, who believe categorically that it includes errors.

LDS.org, an official Web site of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, notes: “Latter-day Saints revere the Bible. They study it and believe it to be the word of God. However, they do not believe the Bible, as it is currently available, is without error.”

“As the Bible was compiled, organized, translated and transcribed, many errors entered the text,” the site says, adding at another point: “In addition to the Bible, Latter-day Saints reverence and study the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price and the words of modern prophets and apostles. All these sources of eternal truth work together to establish, clarify and testify of the plan of our Heavenly Father and to bring people unto Jesus Christ.”

Ruth Marcus - In Iowa, They Like Mike - washingtonpost.com, December 5, 2007

WAUKEE, Iowa — Lori Hommer is threading blue ribbon through contribution envelopes to hang on the Christmas trees at Point of Grace Church, and she scarcely pauses when asked if she’s decided on a candidate in next month’s caucuses.

“Yes, Mike Huckabee,” said Hommer, 50, who teaches at the church. “He has conservative Christian values . . . the same values I have.” As to the man who had been leading in the polls here until recently, she said, “I could probably support Mitt Romney if I had to. I’m just a little leery of him. I’m just not sure he’s genuine.”

…With evangelicals expected to comprise four in 10 Republican caucusgoers, voters such as Williams hold the key to a Huckabee victory — and they could deliver it. In the latest Post-ABC News poll of likely GOP caucusgoers, the former Arkansas governor led Romney 44 percent to 22 percent among evangelical Protestants.

It is no coincidence that Huckabee’s new TV ad opens with a shot of the Southern Baptist minister and the words “Christian Leader.” A little unsettling — imagine an ad touting Joe Lieberman as a “Jewish leader” — and perhaps a subtle effort to reinforce evangelical voters’ squeamishness about Romney’s Mormonism, but no doubt effective: Huckabee’s “Christian values” was the most commented-on selling point I heard here.

George F. Will - None of The Below - washingtonpost.com, December 2, 2007

On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee’s candidacy rests on serial non sequiturs: I am a Christian, therefore I am a conservative, therefore whatever I have done or propose to do with “compassionate,” meaning enlarged, government is conservatism. And by the way, anything I denote as a “moral” issue is beyond debate other than by the uncaring forces of greed. His is a moralist’s version of the intellectual vanity once ascribed to Oxford’s Benjamin Jowett:

My name is Jowett

Of Balliol College;

If I don’t know it,

It is not knowledge.

Many Iowans think it would be wise to nominate a candidate who, when the Republicans were asked during a debate to raise their hands if they do not believe in evolution, raised his. But, then, Huckabee believes America can be energy-independent in 10 years, so he has peculiar views about more than paleontology.

Huckabee combines pure moralism with incoherent populism: He wants Washington to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public, show more solicitude for Americans of modest means and impose more protectionism, thereby raising the cost of living for Americans of modest means.

Although Huckabee is considered affable, two subliminal but clear enough premises of his Iowa attack on Mitt Romney are unpleasant: The almost 6 million American Mormons who consider themselves Christians are mistaken about that. And — 55 million non-Christian Americans should take note — America must have a Christian president.

Another pious populist who was annoyed by Darwin — William Jennings Bryan — argued that William Howard Taft, his opponent in the 1908 presidential election, was unfit to be president because he was a Unitarian, a persuasion sometimes defined as the belief that there is at most one God. The electorate chose to run the risk of entrusting the presidency to someone skeptical about the doctrine of the Trinity.

If Huckabee succeeds in derailing Romney’s campaign by raising a religious test for presidential eligibility, that will be clarifying: In one particular, America was more enlightened a century ago.

People For the American Way - Texas: “Patriot Pastors” for Perry, 2006

Texas is home to a pioneer of pulpit-based politics, Rick Scarborough, the former minister of First Baptist Church in Pearland and a long-time ally of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Scarborough’s efforts to “mobilize” pastors in politics go back at least as far as 1996, when he ran an ultraconservative-insurgency campaign for president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. (He lost.) In his book that year, Enough Is Enough, Scarborough described his success in creating a local political machine around his church, strongly urging his congregants to run for office at all levels: “At this writing, three members of our church serve on the city council. . . Four of our members serve on the school board. The city manager is a member of our church. The police chief is a member of our church. The assistant district attorney of Brazoria County is a member of our church. . .”[27]…

By 2004, Scarborough created his own network of “Patriot Pastors” to lead evangelicals to the polls for the 2004 election, and expanded it to at least 5,000 by the time Texas voters ratified a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2005. “One of my goals in life is to give the Republican Party courage,” he told The Washington Post during the debate over the “nuclear option” to push through Bush’s extremist judicial nominees.[29] At the same time, Scarborough’s Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration worked in Washington to push Bush’s judicial nominees, organizing a conference timed around the death of Terri Schiavo at which DeLay urged the impeachment of judges, and other speakers suggested execution.[30]

GreenvilleOnline.com -Local News-Bob Jones III endorses Romney for president - 10/16/2007

Dr. Bob Jones III, chancellor of the fundamentalist Christian university that bears his name, is looking past his religious differences with Gov. Mitt Romney and endorsing the Mormon for the Republican nomination for president, he told The Greenville News today.

“This is all about beating Hillary,” Jones said. “And I just believe that this man has the credentials both personally and ideologically in terms of his view about what American government should be to best represent the rank and file of conservative Americans.

“If it turns out to be Guiliani and Hillary, we’ve got two pro- choice candidates, and that would be a disaster.”

Asked whether Romney’s religion was a stumbling block for him, Jones replied, “What is the alternative, Hillary’s lack of religion or an erroneous religion?

“As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism,” he said. “But I’m not voting for a preacher. I’m voting for a president. It boils down to who can best represent conservative American beliefs, not religious beliefs.”…

“As Christians we should not endorse a cult member as our president,” Wayne Owens Sr., a self-described rank-and-file conservative Christian said in an e-mail to The News. “Bob Jones’ basic premise is in error. It is not about beating Hillary. It’s about doing what is right.”

Social conservatives fracture as Robertson endorses Giuliani, McClatchy Washington Bureau, November 7, 2007

WASHINGTON — Televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani’s campaign Wednesday, a surprising embrace that underscored the divisions among Christian conservatives about the field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.

By itself, Robertson’s support of the former New York mayor was an unusual partnership between a Christian conservative who once blamed the 2001 terrorist attacks on American sins such as abortion and a social liberal who supports abortion rights and gay rights.

But coming the same day that another prominent Christian conservative — Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas — endorsed Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and two days after influential conservative Paul Weyrich endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, it was a fresh sign that one of the most influential blocs of voters in the party remains splintered.

Raised arm of evangelical woman praying, by Christopher Morris/VII

Evangelical Movement, Presidential Election of 2008, New York Times, October 28, 2007

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State — the public face of the conservative Christian political movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel’s pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, “Answering the Call.” Major national conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its North American Mission Board.