Now That's Just Crazy Talk
We’re all long used to cross-waving in national politics. It’s practically political suicide not to profess your profound commitment to the Lord: you galvanize the right wing against you, and engender vague alienation in the center. Ah, but which Lord, exactly? This is America, rooted in Puritan intolerance; a churchgoer is even more suspect in the eyes of the religious right if he goes to the wrong church than if he attended no church at all.
That’s the pickle Mitt Romney finds himself in. Sentiment is strong against the Republican party generally. To win the presidency, any candidate they put forward will have to win the core constituency, and win it big, to offset losses among the independent voters. And, like John Kennedy before him, Romney found it necessary to deliver a speech explaining that, while deeply religious himself, he has no intention of bringing his particular religion to the White House.
(Personally, I felt the speech oozed insincerity. Romney is no more religious than any politician, and far less than some. Unfortunately, he can’t simply cut loose with an honest statement admitting to a secular life, because of that political suicide thing. It seems to me that anyone acknowledging the existence of an all-powerful, all-wise deity would be crazy, and willfully commit evil, to put mere human law before such a deity’s commands. But religious hypocrisy is nothing new, neither in politics nor outside it.)
Such reassurances to a secular left would be entirely appropriate. Making them to the religious right is downright weird. As a group, the Mormons look pretty much identical to fundamentalist Christians. They eschew little vices like alcohol and extramarital sex and uppity women leaving the kitchen, or even talking about the possibility of such things, and employ aggressive social pressure to remove them from society. At the same time, they are willing to turn a blind eye toward big vices like war and corporate greed and neglecting the needy. One would think that quibbles like whether human souls go to an invisible heaven or to an impossibly distant planet, or whether one’s favorite angel is named Gabriel or Moroni wouldn’t need smoothing over. But they do.
To help explain the reasons for such distrust between religious sects, NPR had a fundamentalist minister on recently. He didn’t highlight and denounce some of the wackier ideas of Mormonism, which would have been easy enough, and I respect him for it. Maybe he’s simply a noble soul, although I suspect a keen awareness of public sentiment towards some of the wackier ideas of Christian fundamentalism may have played a part. Nor did he focus on some of the more cult-like qualities of the Mormon Church, which also would have been easy. Maybe he simply feels the Mormons themselves are simply doing the best they can to bring their children up in the ways of their fathers, and to spread the good word, although, again, I suspect a keen awareness of some of the more cult-like qualities of the evangelical movement may have played a part. Nor did he focus on some of the less savory acts of the Mormon church, like murdering passing settlers for their possessions and children, which also would have been easy. Perhaps he was practicing Christian virtue in forgiving sinners without condemning their ideals, although I suspect a keen awareness of Christian participation in horrors like the Crusades and Inquisition may have played a part. No, instead, he grounded his objections entirely in the doctrinal credentials of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
The essential problem, he explained, was that the Mormons were revisionists. They came along a couple thousand years after the establishment of the One True Religion revealed to us through God’s mortal agent, elevated some self-appointed theologian to the status of divinity, manufactured a tale of an angelic vision endorsing this prophet, and, while not exactly dismissing the age-old religion as entirely wrong, nonetheless added an entire body of text to its holy scriptures, completely altering their meaning. Mormons weren’t bad people, but they followed an arbitrary revision of religious tradition.
I had to wonder: what on earth could this guest minister think of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, and what could Jewish listeners think of him?