Mighty Mitt's polemic against the "religion of secularism"
This is a video of 08/05/07 in which Romney talks more specifics about the Mormon faith than he included in his much-discussed speech this week (for another segment from this interview, see the end of this post)
Some of the concepts in Mitt Romney's speech on religion, whose main point was that religious people should unite against vile, evil atheists and agnostics, had some really kooky ideas. The invaluable Joe Conason weighs in on the speech in Romney and Huckabee's religious intoleranceSalon 12/07/07.
My own choice for particular bizarreness was his notion, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. ... Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
What can you even say about something like that? Do this man or his speechwriters have even the most superficial knowledge of the history of religion?
The Christian religion, to take just one, managed to survive from the first century to the Enlightenment without much of anything like what we now think of as freedom of religion. And doesn't that contradict everything about the Republicans' new dogma that the "Islamofascists" are the greatest menace to freedom in the history of the universe? I mean, Victor Davis Hanson and other conservative columnists and pundits remind us regularly how Muslim nations violate freedom of religion and how Islam supposedly is hostile to freedom. If Romney's little formula is correct, and what the anti-"Islamofascists" say is true, shouldn't Islam have died out as a religion centuries ago? That little aphorism of Romney's is just so vapid it blows my mind.
And as far as the terrible menace of secularism: Look, if God exists, why would he or she or whatever be worried about people saying she doesn't exist? I mean, if you believe God is the Creator of the universe, do you really think he's so thin-skinned he's bothered by village atheists nitpicking favorite fundamentalist truisms?
It reminds me of the story about how, in 1954, on the 100th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth, an event was arranged in a major Anglican church in London to commemorate his life and work. Some people grumbled that maybe it wasn't appropriate for a church to host such an event honoring a man who, in his entire adult life until his death (by assisted suicide) in 1940, was an outspoken atheist.
The sponsors of the event put out a press release that said (quoting from memory), "We are quite sure that Mr. Freud is no longer an atheist."
Speaking of Freud, even though he was an atheist he had enormous respect for religion and studied religious matters closely. In his own education, his family had a Jewish edition of the Christian Bible at home when he was growing up, which included Jewish commentary on the Scriptures. Freud was very familiar with both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. And that Bible edition's discussions of Biblical symbolism apparently was a major inspiration for his own analyses of symbolism in dreams and art.
Christians should pray for their fellow believers to take religion as seriously as the incorrigible atheist Freud did.
This is a long-time fundamentalist concept, defining absence of religion as a religion in itself. There's a certain authoritarian logic to the argument, as weird as it is in substance. One of the best descriptions I've seen of the thought process behind it is in Chris Hedges' (unfortunately titled) 2007 book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America.
Hedges talks about how fundamentalist subcultures in America often redefine words so that a commonly-understood word takes on a whole different meaning for them. Political fundamentalist leaders - the term "Christianist" seems to be coming into brader use to describe them - define "religious freedom" as having Protestant Christianity imposed in various ways by the government. They get to this Orwellian usage through the concept that true freedom or liberty is in being "saved" and living in a right relationship to God through Jesus Christ, as understood in their religious circles. So being free means being Christian, so religious freedom is a condition which allows maximum latitude for Christian proseltyzing.
It's related to a concept that even the Federalist Society doesn't seem to buy as a legal notion, but still serves as a useful rhetorical device for Christianists. Christianists argue that everyone has some kind of religion, even atheists and agnostics. Though nonbelievers claim to have no religion, nonbelievers actually practice the religion of "secular humanism". Taking Christian prayer out of schools or other measures by which government takes a non-sectarian stand is actually imposing the religion of secular humanism, in this argument. Therefore enforcing separation of church and state as we know it in the US and other democratic countries is actually a violation of Christians' freedom of religion because it subjects them to a government-imposed religion of secular humanism.
Yes, the notion is cracked. That strange swimming feeling in your head after you try to follow that line of argumentation is one that you start to recognize after digging through it and others like it for a while. But that is the conceptual framework for the Republican fundis to whom Romney is trying to appeal.
It's bad religion and bad politics that make for bad policy. The Christian religion has done exceptionally well in the American competitive free market of religious ideas. And Christian and other religious institutions receive massive government financial subsidies in the form of tax exemptions on contributions to religious institutions.
Intermingling church and state goes both ways, a reality that many fundis today foolishly ignore. It should be a warning to them that it's no longer possible to understand US Middle East policy without knowing the basic outlines of Protestant "premillenial dispensationalist" apocalyptic thinking. Romney mentions apocalyptic beliefs of the Mormon Church in the YouTube video at the beginning of this post that certainly seem to share common elements with the Protestant fundamentalist version, although Protestants don't normally assume that Jesus will rule the world from Independence, Missouri. Having their "eschatological" (end-times) ideas discussed in "the public square", as they like to call it, is not going to enhance public respect for their theology, their judgment or their broader moral sense.
Are they really sure they want fundamentalist theology to be a daily topic of political debate? Mainstream Christians have nothing to fear from such discussions. God presumably doesn't, either. But white fundamentalists might want to think this thing out a little better than they have recently.
Joe Conason's piece linked above includes the useful advice:
Distasteful as all the Bible thumping and ostentatious piety of the Republican presidential aspirants certainly are, the time may have come to address their religious pretensions directly, instead of turning away in mild disgust. For the truth is that no matter how often candidates like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee promise to uphold the Constitution and protect religious freedom, they are clearly seeking to impose the restrictive tests of faith that the nation's founders abhorred. ...
Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals -- including agnostics and atheists -- have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader -- which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid's religion. (my emphasis)
This is an additional segment from the Romney interview in the YouTube video linked above. This is an earlier portion of the interview. It includes Romney stating his determination to have the courts overturn Roe v. Wade.
