Faith in America
After the Romney speech last week, the national discussion has escalated.
Peggy Noonan wonders whether Romney needed to give that speech on religion.
Yes. When you’re in a race so close you could lose due to one issue, your Mormonism, you must address the issue of your Mormonism. The only question was timing: now, in the primaries, or later, as the nominee?
He wanted to give this speech months ago. It seemed necessary now.
He seized the opportunity to connect his candidacy to something larger and transcendent: the history of religious freedom in America. He made a virtue of necessity.
Says a lot about where America is right now.
So…
How did he do?
Very, very well. He made himself some history. The words he said will likely have a real and positive impact on his fortunes. The speech’s main and immediate achievement is that foes of his faith will now have to defend their thinking, in public. But what can they say to counter his high-minded arguments?
Ah, good question. Always a good question to ask….what do opponents of a high-minded argument have to say?
And why was it high-minded?
His text was warmly cool. It covered a lot of ground briskly, in less than 25 minutes. His approach was calm, logical, with an emphasis on clarity.
Clarity is an extremely good and rare thing.
He started with a full JFK: “I am an American running for president. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith, nor should he be rejected because of his faith.” No “authorities of my church” or any church, will “ever exert influence” on presidential decisions. “Their authority is theirs,” within the province of the church, and it ends “where the affairs of the nation begin.” “I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law.” He pledged to serve “no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest.” He will not disavow his religion. “My faith is the faith of my fathers. I will be true to them and to my beliefs.”
Bracingly: “Some believe that such a confession of my faith will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be it.” Whatever our faith, the things we value — equality, obligation, commitment to liberty — unite us. In a passage his advisers debated over until the night before the speech, Mr. Romney declared: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.” He made the call. Why? I asked the aide. “Because it’s what he thinks.”
It was a startling moment. To me, one of the stonger moments when he said….”so be it.”
Speaking of JFK, Phil Lawler at CWNews thinks this is not only a natural comparison, it’s actually better.
Like JFK, Romney asked to be judged on the basis of his political stands rather than his theological views. But he did not promise to leave his religious views aside. On the contrary, Romney made a forceful argument that religious principles should be welcomed in American politics….
Some people see Romney’s faith as a threat to American democracy. A Boston Globe editorial intoned: “Someone with ambitions to lead all the people in a pluralistic society should not identity so closely with any religion or religious figure, even one as revered as Jesus.”
Do you see what that editorial is saying? It is announcing that no devoutly religious person is qualified for the presidency. It is imposing a religious test.
Peggy Noonan makes a very keen observation, and a proposition that completes Lawler’s thought. At the same time, it probably makes the candidate more invicible.
There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.
My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else.