| I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge. |
And here, without more ado,
| What Iowans Should Know About Mormons By Naomi Schaefer Riley (Ms. Riley is the Journal's deputy Taste editor.) Yesterday, at the end of Mitt Romney's speech, he told a story from the early days of the First Continental Congress, whose members were meeting in Philadelphia in 1774: "With Boston occupied by British troops . . . and fears of an impending war . . . someone suggested they pray." But because of the variety of religious denominations represented, there were objections. "Then Sam Adams rose and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were [sic] a patriot." Were Adams alive today, he most certainly would hear a prayer from a Mormon. It is hard to imagine a group more patriotic than the modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But there is reason to believe that voters in Iowa and elsewhere will not accept Mr. Romney's invitation -- put forward implicitly in his remarks yesterday at the George Bush Library -- to ignore religious differences and embrace him simply as a man of character who loves his country. A recent Pew poll shows that only 53% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Mormons. That's roughly the same percentage who feel that way toward Muslims. By contrast, more than three-quarters of Americans have a favorable opinion of Jews and Catholics. Whatever the validity of such judgments, one has to wonder: why does a faith professed by the 9/11 hijackers rank alongside that of a peaceful, productive, highly educated religious group founded within our own borders? Many evangelicals in the GOP view Mormonism as "a cult," or at least not a Christian faith. One Southern Baptist leader recently called it the "fourth Abrahamic religion." I remember, a couple of years ago, sitting in on an apologetics class at a Christian high school in Colorado Springs, Colo., and hearing the teacher describe a critical moment in the history of the Muslim faith, when the rock that now sits under the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem tried to fly to heaven and had to be restrained by Mohammad. Acknowledging that it sounded a little wacky, the teacher added: "Well, it's no stranger than that guy who found golden tablets in upstate New York." The students laughed uproariously at the reference to the Mormons' founding father, Joseph Smith. Six years ago, I probably could have counted on one finger the number of Mormons I had met. Having lived most my life in the Northeast, my situation was hardly unique. Then, while researching a book on religious colleges, I decided to spend some time at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In preparation, I picked up Mormon America: The Power and the Promise by religion reporters Richard and Joan Ostling. The Ostlings offer a comprehensive account of the church's history and theology, as well as helpful descriptions of the Mormons' cultural and political outlook. "The onetime believers in plural marriage, considered a dire threat to Victorian probity and the entire nation," the authors write, "have become the exemplars of conservative monogamous family values." It is hard to disagree. Mormons marry young and have large families. They don't drink, smoke or gamble. The church does not condone homosexuality. Members give at least 10% of their income to the church and often volunteer more than 20 hours a week in some religious capacity. With no professional clergy, the survival of congregations (or "stakes") is entirely dependent on lay participation. All young Mormon men and many women spend two years as missionaries, their travels funded by their own families. The church stocks soup kitchens across the country and internationally (both its own and those of other faiths) with food from its farms and warehouses. Rather than behaving like an insular cult, members are integrated into the society around them, sending their kids to public schools and assuming leadership positions locally and nationally. Once Mormons complete their missionary service, they are not obliged to proselytize, so having Mormons as neighbors doesn't mean a constant bombardment with invitations to join up. But many Americans, unless they've actually had a Mormon neighbor, might find all these rosy facts meaningless, feeling deeply uneasy with some of Mormonism's tenets. A lot of what we call religious tolerance depends on social contact, not theological understanding, and there are only about six million LDS members in the U.S., mostly concentrated in the Western states (though increasingly less so). If you press Baptists, they will acknowledge finding Catholics' belief in transubstantiation implausible at best; Jews like me have a little trouble getting over the virgin birth. But we all get along, for the most part, because we know each other and live similar lives as Americans, whatever faith we profess. But most Iowans will not meet a Mormon in the next six weeks unless Mr. Romney comes to call -- Mormons make up less than one half of 1% of the state's population. So let me offer a brief snapshot, not in the hope that Iowans will vote for Mr. Romney but in the hope that, if they don't vote for him, their decision won't have anything to do with his religion. The young men and women at Brigham Young University are among the smartest, hardest-working and most pleasant college kids you will find anywhere. (For better or worse, I have visited dozens of college campuses.) The student body lives by the Mormon principle: "The glory of God is intelligence." Most reside off campus without adult supervision, yet they adhere strictly to curfews, rules about contact with the opposite sex and every other church directive. They are purposeful but seem to enjoy themselves, spending their free time hiking in the sprawling desert. And BYU has America's largest ROTC program outside of our military schools. This last fact is one I had occasion to think about on my trip. I left for BYU on Sept. 7, 2001, and returned home a week later. On 9/11, the students gathered for a campuswide devotional. The university president tried to comfort the students with "the eternal perspective." My eternal perspective is not the same as theirs, of course. But hearing more than 20,000 young people around me reciting the Pledge of Allegiance made me realize that our temporal perspective is the same. I'm sure Sam Adams would have agreed. |
Meanwhile, back on the carpet,
| I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet when I read this bilge. Islam is not 'the faith professed by 9/11 hijackers.' Islam is the religion of probably 1.3 billion persons, a fifth of humankind, which will probably be a third of humankind by 2050. Islam existed for 1400 years before the 9/11 hijackers, and will exist for a very long time after them. Riley has engaged in the most visceral sort of smear, associating all Muslims with the tiny, extremist al-Qaeda cult. We could play this game with any human group. Some Catholics were responsible for the Inquisition. Shall we blame Catholicism for that, or all Catholics? Of course not. Jewish Zionists expelled hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Is that Judaism's fault or that of Jews in general? Of course not.[1] She goes on to further stick her foot in her mouth by complaining that she heard conservative Christians call Mormonism 'the fourth Abrahamic religion' (alongside Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and complains that they compared a Muslim belief she considers 'wacky' to Mormon stories. It is all right for her to call folk Islamic motifs wacky, mind you. She's only interested in being fair to Mormons, not to Muslims. Mormons are good people, but some of their forebears were also involved in violence in the 19th century of a sort that other Americans viewed as terrorism. Riley's remarks exemplify the problems with Romney's speech, which demands fairness for his group but not for, e.g., secularists. Thus, he says: "In John Adams' words: 'We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. ... Our Constitution,' he said, "was made for a moral and religious people.' Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." What Romney omits is that many of the "religious people" among the founding fathers were Deists, who did not believe in revelation or miracles or divine intervention in human affairs. Thomas Jefferson used to sit in the White House in the evening with scissors and cut the miracle stories out of the Gospels so as to end up with a reasoned story about Jesus of Nazareth, befitting the Enlightenment. Some Founding Fathers were Christians, some were not, at least not in any sense that would be recognized by today's Religious Right. Jefferson believe that most Americans would end up Unitarians. As for the insistence that you need religion for political freedom, that is silly. Organized religion has many virtues, but pushing for political liberty is seldom among them. Religion is about controlling people. No religiously based state has ever provided genuine democratic governance. You want religion in politics, go to Iran. Liberty can survive religion, especially a multiplicity of religions within the nation. Because that way there is not a central faith that imposes itself on everyone, as Catholicism used to in Ireland or Buddhism used to in Tibet. But organized religion would never ever have produced the First Amendment to the US constitution, and the 19th century popes considered it ridiculous that the state should treat false religions as equal to the True Faith. Deists, freethinkers and Freemasons--the kind of people that Romney was complaining about-- produced the First Amendment. When Tom Jefferson tried out an earlier version of it in Virginia, some of the members of the Virginia assembly actually complained that freedom of religion would allow the practice of Islam in the US. Jefferson's response to that kind of bigotry was that other people believing in other religions did not pick his pocket or break his leg, so why should he care how they worshipped? And that's all Romney had to say. But he did not want to say that. Romney said the opposite. He implied that is is actively bad for a democracy if people are unbelievers or if there is a strict separation of religion and state. We know the Founding Fathers and Romney is no founding father. By Romney's definition of freedom, Sweden and France, where 50% and 40% of the population, respectively, does not believe in God, cannot have a proper democracy. But of course Swedish democracy is in many respects superior to that in the United States. Look, the reason that Americans took religion out of the public sphere was because the religious kept fighting with each other in the most vicious way. We had violence between Catholics and Protestants in schools in the 19th century because religion was in the public schools, and therefore each branch of Christianity wanted to dominate and control it. You take religion out of the schools, suddenly people stop fighting about it. People like Romney who want to put religion back into the public sphere are just going to cause a lot of trouble. 14% of Americans don't believe in God. Another 5% belong to minority religions (and both categories are rapidly growing). That nearly 20% doesn't necessarily want sectarian Christian symbols in public schools. Even a lot of the 80% that are some kind of Christian don't belong to a church and aren't necessarily orthodox in their views. So Romney's so-called plea for tolerance is actually a plea for the privileging of religion in American public life. He just wants his religion to share in that privilege that he wants to install. Ironically, the very religious pluralism of the United States, which he appears to praise, will stand in the way of his project. posted by Juan Cole @ 12/07/2007 06:30:00 AM |
The gut of the WGAS got a bit distracted, it looks like. Nausea began with Big Management Party neocomradess N. S. Riley badmouthin’ Muslims to entertain the tasty readership of the Jingo, which has not much to do with Gov. Romney on the errors of Deism. Rather au contraire, I should think, since any toleration His Latter-Day Excellency can win from Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh for persons hereditarily encumbered with silly fables about Mr. Joseph Smith logically ought to apply to Dome of the Flying Rock fans as well. To be sure, "logically" often does not go down well with religionists and neoreligionizers, but that is scarcely poor Mitt's fault.
"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom" is possibly a bit barf-inducing, but it is probably not really very venomous. Like most neocomrades and some other shallow thinkers, poor Mitt assumes that all the things that he happens to like must be united by some intrinsic bond more impressive than "being liked by Willard Mitt Romney." The Narcissus Perspective is all that such muddle comes to, usually. As an actual practitioner of Big Management, though, the governor may mean somethin’ more sinister, for the GOP/CEO/HVS/MBA gentry invariably consider that their True Freedom consists in the ability to bigmanage unobstructed. Exactly what such a specimen would consider its True Religion to consist in could be problematical, though more likely it would be only the basis for a phony fellowship with his managees, "Hey, look, I let Father Zeus bigmanage me, so why can't you guys . . . &c. &c.?" A very old song. [2]
Don Juan's countersong is familiar as well, and none too persuasive in context. Suppose we stipulate that His Latter-Day Excellency's "so-called plea for tolerance is actually a plea for the privileging of religion in American public life," what does this wicked "privileging" substantially amount to? Is the Mormonite brand of Enthusiasm and Superstition particularly oppressed and persecuted because other brands do not recognize it as a proper E&S? Not very obviously, and even if it were, by Don Juan's own principles, that would be no business for Uncle Sam to take action about. It is not inconceivable that the barbarians may benefit in some respects from being located outside the Great Wall of Separation. To decide that such benefit involves a "privileging" and must be regulated out of existence is contradictio in adjecto, to abandon the separation under pretence of enforcing it. Naturally the devotees of E&S can't be permitted to assign themselves extra votes at elections because of their devotion, but neither can the devotees of anything else, TrueFreedom™ and freedom and toleration included.
The jingo neocomradess is out beyond the Great Wall also. At least I cannot think of any plausible way to restrict her badmouthin’ of Muslims. N. S. Riley and her co-conspirators and her dupes must be allowed one vote per election also, and Uncle Sam would be misbehaving if he tried to alter that magic number 1.00 either upwards or downwards. The Straight Way is so easy to detect and expound hereabouts that the importance of walking in it may be lost sight of. There are lots of good reasons for disliking bad people, Enthusiasm and Superstition are far from alone in affording such reasons. The ’phobe Riley's own specialty, Taste, is perfectly adequate. She'd never dream of votin’ for a Muslim terrorist swine, and nobody is gonnta tell her different. If she wants to dress up Neocomrade R. Neuhaus's naked public square with op-eds against terroristical swine, Uncle Sam, at least, can do nothing to stop her. Unlike TrueFreedom™, plain public-domain freedom does tend to run to an unedifying tune: we can be most assured that we are bestowing it upon the needy when the needy insist on behavin’ so as to inspire warm holiday thoughts like "I just wanted literally to puke on my living room carpet."
Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.
____
[1] Oh, dear.
[2] To insist on the bigmanagement of Zeus theologically might indeed make a religionizer averse to Deism, although the consequence is not strictly logical. Still, His Latter-Day Excellency would probably not care to be held to a Deistic standard of competence in operations control, with everything foreseen in the Original Intent and no course corrections ever necessary afterwards. Indeed, if a Big Manager doesn't get to meddle as he muddles through, is he really "managing" at all, let alone bigmanaging? Even though there is patently no need to meddle? Father Zeus does not have to worry about establishing Who is in control, the mythographers claim, but mere mortals are not often so fortunate. A poor Mitt could quite conceivably degrade the Mark I plan a few percentage points in order that all his subalterns understand clearly that it is the Romney Plan they must comply with.
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