Thursday, August 25, 2011
Serious talk about religion and politics (especially Mormon undergarments and those crazy evangelicals)!
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, wants to dig deeper into the religious faith of the GOP candidates. He explains:
This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity, which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.
I honestly don’t care if Mitt Romney wears Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans, or if he believes that the stories of ancient American prophets were engraved on gold tablets and buried in upstate New York, or that Mormonism’s founding prophet practiced polygamy (which was disavowed by the church in 1890). Every faith has its baggage, and every faith holds beliefs that will seem bizarre to outsiders. I grew up believing that a priest could turn a bread wafer into the actual flesh of Christ.
So does transubstantiation count as "baggage" or just bizarre? And putting aside the fact that Rick Santorum is Catholic, why does evangelical Christianity raise concerns about the separation of fact and fiction? I'm all in favor of more conversation about faith and politics, but let's be careful that the call for conversation isn't just an excuse for tut-tutting about those silly religious people.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/08/serious-talk-about-religion-and-politics-especially-mormon-undergarments-and-those-crazy-evangelical.html
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Rob,
Does anybody REALLY want religion in the public square? I think what most people who claim they do want some occasional nondenominational Judeo-Christian (but mostly Christian) piety that can be embraced by almost anyone who isn't a militant atheist. I don't think the vast majority of people REALLY want to know anything at all about Catholic beliefs about transubstantiation or whether Mormons really believe an angel wrote the Book of Mormon on gold plates would be startling proofs of the truth of the Mormon religion but were (I think) given back after being transcribed.
I think Michele Bachmann gave a totally phony explanation of what it means for a wife to be "submissive," just the way John McCain, after misspeaking terribly about the economy being fundamentally sound, claimed that what he was talking about when he said "the economy" was "the American worker," and how DARE anyone criticize the American worker! If Michele Bachmann really believed in being submissive to her husband (as I think she tried to imply she did when she did what he told her to even though she disagreed), we ought to know an awful lot more about her husband, because he would have the power to dictate national policy. But I don't think we believe our presidential candidates are really going to adhere to their religion in all but the broadest way. So it is probably foolish to talk about it.
I think we really don't want our presidents (or other politicians) to take their religion too seriously. Maybe we want them to be against homosexuality, abortion, etc., but beyond that, I think most people would be creeped out. I would have to say, as someone who was raised Catholic, that I find it difficult to understand how anyone could actually believe the book of Mormon was transcribed from gold plates provided by the Angel Moroni, and I also find it difficult to understand how anyone could actually believe in the literal truth of the Bible from Genesis on. But I think probably anybody who gets to be a presidential nominee for a major party, no matter what his religious beliefs are, is ready to abandon them for the sake of politics.