Religion and politics in the US

John Courtney Murray, one of the most important theorists of religious freedom that you may never have heard of

Garry Wills has a good article in the New York Review of Books, Romney and JFK: The Difference 12/19/07 (01/17/08 issue; publicly available as of this writing). He reminds us that liberal Democrats, then and now, have very valid concerns about the relations of the people's government to the churches. He writes:

The objections some have to Mitt Romney's religion are twofold, theological and cultural. Those against John F. Kennedy when he gave his 1960 speech in Houston about his Catholicism were more solidly political. The theological problems with Romney come from evangelicals, who know that his Jesus is not a member of the divine Trinity. ...

But theology is not what bothers most of those who feel uneasy about Mormonism. They object to its unfamiliarity. ...

The only objection to Mormons on political grounds would be their record of polygamy and racism, both of which have been officially abjured. But Kennedy's problem was precisely political. Catholics were familiar enough to Americans - there was no weirdo factor. (People wearing white hoods over their heads had little right to call others weird.) And Kennedy's opponents were not interested in theological questions like transubstantiation. But there were solid grounds for political doubts about Catholics. The Vatican had not, in 1960, formally renounced its condemnation of American pluralism and democracy. In fact, one of Kennedy's advisers on his Houston speech, the Jesuit John Courtney Murray, had recently been silenced by the Vatican for defending religious pluralism.

I hadn't realized, or at least I'd forgotten, that Murray was an adviser to Kennedy on that speech. Murray is an important figure in Catholic Christianity. He was officially silenced by the hierarchy for proposing that the Catholic Church adopt a position consistent with democratic governance on the separation of Church and State. At that time, the Church wanted to be the official state church in, well, as many countries as they could get. The ideal Cathlic model for governance of that time came closest to realization in the Austrian Standestaat (corporate state) dictatorhip of 1933-1938 under Englebert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg. As Wills writes:

There was a cogently argued case against papal politics. Paul Blanshard had maintained, in the best-selling American Freedom and Catholic Power (1948), that Catholics were just pretending to be democrats till they could get into power and imitate such Vatican - approved regimes as that of Francisco Franco in Spain. A strong lobby, Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, had continued to argue the Blanshard position. It had successfully blocked the sending of a full ambassador to the Vatican. The Protestant ministers who organized against Kennedy's campaign, under Norman Vincent Peale, feared the Pope's power more than his doctrines — just as they had when Al Smith ran for president in 1928. (my emphasis in bold)

Murray's story on that issue had a happy ending when his position was adopted by the Second Vatican Council. For more on Murray, see John Courtney Murray, S.J., and Religious Pluralism Woodstock Report Mar 1993(Woodstock Theological Center). The Time story from the issue imaged above is also available online, City of God & Man 12/12/1960.

But Vatican II came after Kennedy's death. Wills describes the essential difference between Romney's religion speech and Kennedy's famous one in 1960:

Kennedy had to convince people that he would not let the Vatican push him around. Romney has let evangelicals know that he would let them push him around. He not only has given them a theological formula on Jesus which he hopes they will accept - he implicitly has attacked Kennedy's absolute separation of church and state using the evangelicals' own slogan: those who think (like Kennedy) that "religion is seen merely as a private affair" are, Romney said, "intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong." That phrase has not been much noticed in public comments on Romney's speech, but it is a key statement for the evangelicals. Like George Bush's speechwriters, Romney has learned the code of Rightspeak - just as he learned Leftspeak when running for governor in Massachusetts.

That secularism is a religion is a position fiercely held by some on the right. They use it to say that separating church and state breaches the First Amendment, which forbids the establishment of a religion. In their topsy-turvy arguments, the First Amendment thus forbids the separation of church and state. Romney was speaking in that code. In his speech he made many other appeals to the religious right, as when he put "the breakdown of the family" in his list of most pressing national problems (another hit at Giuliani). He praised the use of religious symbols "in our public places." Though he did not specifically mention the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, he implied approval of their presence there. (He should be questioned on this matter.) The Bush administration and its lackeying Republican Congress would do anything for the religious right. When the right said "Jump!" on the Terri Schiavo case, the President and Congress said "How high?" Romney signals that he would act in the same way. (my emphasis in bold)

Alan Wolfe also wrote about liberals' concerns over the pre-Vatican II Catholic position on Church and State in Liberalism and Catholicism The American Prospect 11/30/02:

Despite conservative aspects of Church doctrine, American Catholics were an important component of liberal success in the years after World War II. Many union members were Catholic, and they offered an effective liberal counterbalance to southern conservatives, nearly all of whom were Protestant, in the Democratic Party. A disproportionate share of union leaders were Catholic, too, not only in the AFL-CIO, but even in more radical unions, such as the Transport Workers Union, that had close ties to the communists. Father Coughlin's foil during the 1930s was Monsignor John A. Ryan, the "Right Reverend New Dealer," as his opponents called him, whose arguments in favor of economic justice Americanized and brought up to date the social teachings embodied in papal encyclicals. Dorothy Day kept alive a Catholic pacifist tradition that would bloom in the 1960s among activists like Michael Harrington, the Berrigan brothers, and (from time to time) Tom Hayden. Still, postwar liberal intellectuals often wrote as if there were no such thing as a Catholic left wing - or even a Catholic center. They knew the Church from its spokesmen, and that was all they needed to know.

No American liberal symbolized this hostility toward the Church more than Paul Blanshard, whose American Freedom and Catholic Power became a best-seller in 1949. Blanshard defined what he called "the Catholic problem" this way: "What is to be done with a hierarchy that operates in twentiethcentury America under medieval European controls?" To drive his point home, he asked his readers to imagine what might happen if and when Catholics became a majority in the United States--a real possibility, he believed, since Catholics were "outbreeding the non-Catholic elements in our population." Blanshard envisioned the passage of a constitutional amendment declaring America a Catholic republic, the "capture" of public schools by the hierarchy, and the subjection of the entire American people to Catholic strictures on marriage and divorce. Was his picture fanciful?, Blanshard asked his readers. Anything but, he answered, for the Catholic Church did not even require a majority of Catholics to impose its plan. "In our individualistic nation," he wrote, the Catholic Church "may operate on the balance-of-power principle, which has been so useful in giving Catholic political parties in Europe a dominating position." The attitudes of such liberals constituted one of the sorrier chapters in the history of American liberalism, revealing strains of intolerance and misunderstanding despite liberalism's language of openness. At various points, such liberals as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lewis Mumford, McGeorge Bundy, and Reinhold Niebuhr all expressed concerns about the absolutist, hierarchical, or corporatist aspects of Catholicism as a threat to American liberalism. (my emphasis)

Tags: alan wolfe, garry wills, paul blanchard, romney, separation of church and state

Bless us, Father President, for we have sinned

Since one of our two major parties now thinks we are living in a Christian Republic - a Christian Republic that proudly practices torture and believes that Our Christian Leader is not required to obey the law or the Constitution, not even to think about international law - we're going to be plagued with judging candidates on their religious beliefs for a long time. People used to say that in a Presidential race, we're electing the national head of government, not the national pastor. But the reality is that the Republicans now do think we're electing the national pastor.

The following exchange this week at the Huffington Post is an example of what our democratic politics have descended to. Jason Linkins bitches about actor Lawrence O'Donnell's rant against Mormonism on the McLaughlin Group shout-fest program in Lawrence O'Donnell Loses His Ever-Loving Mind on McLaughlin 12/09/07. Video of the O'Donnell's rant included.

Ryan Davis responds with a defense of O'Donnell in Lawrence O'Donnell was Right About Mormonism Huffington Post 12/12/07.

It's enough to make me want to go out and join some weird heathen California religious group. Or, better yet, start my own. At least that way I could make sure there was nekkid pagan dancing involved. And that Britney Spears would be appropriately idolized.

But until I hear directly from the Archangel Gabriel or one of his kinfolks, I'll just stick with regular old Catholic Christianity (Vatican II version).

It's certainly a legitimate concern that the Mormon Church officially held black people to be inferior to whites until 1978, supposedly not even allowing them to be members. But then, I've never met a Catholic who claimed to support each and every teaching of the Church. In fact, I've always understood it to be part of the definition of a Catholic that you never agreed with the hierarchy on everything.

The Catholic Church and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are opposed to capital punishment and to legalization of abortion. But rank-and-file Catholics in pretty much every survey I've ever seen have no significant differences with the rest of the American public on those issues.

So, if someone were to say, "Sen. X is a Catholic so he must believe [insert Catholic teaching here]", I would assume that the person speaking knew little about religion and had probably never met a real live Catholic. So bitching about Mitt Romney over something Joseph Smith said or did in the early 19th century doesn't strike me as very meaningful. I would be much more interested in their actual performance in office on the relevant policy issues.

On the other hand, if Romney had been particularly outspoken in defense of some controversial doctrine like the official teachings on black people up until 1978, that would be a relevant consideration.

There are no hard-and-fast, timeless rules over what's appropriate in this area. Until the Second Vatican Council, aka, Vatican II, in the early 1960s, it was still the official position of the Catholic Church that Catholic Christianity should be the state religion of, well, wherever.

As Adele Stan discussed in The American Prospect Online earlier this year, State of the Church 04/20/07, there are still concerns about the political bent of the Catholic Church in Europe, where the Church presents a more conservative face than in the US and where state religion (clericalism) was a reality in a way that it has never been in the US.

The attention recently to John Kennedy's 1960 stance on church and state has tended to focus attention on conservative Protestant concerns about the Catholic Church. But concern about the role of the Catholic Church in American politics hasn't been restricted to conservative Protestants. As Alan Wolfe discusses in Liberalism and Catholicism The American Prospect 11/30/02, in the immediate post-Second World War period, American liberals were significantly divided over the right approach to the world conflict with the Soviet Union and Communism. He writes:

For all the differences they demonstrated over communism, however, postwar liberals, as the Notre Dame historian John McGreevy has pointed out, were more unified in their hostility toward the Catholic Church. Three of the countries that had been fascist--Spain, Italy, and Vichy France--were Catholic. Pius XII, recently described as "Hitler's Pope" in Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, failed to help the Jews. Father Coughlin was a notorious anti-Semite and demagogue. Catholic colleges and universities were viewed as hostile to academic freedom and as hopelessly dogmatic and sectarian. Joe McCarthy was Catholic. So was Cardinal Spellman, who loved nothing more than supporting his co-religionists in the New York City Police Department. Film moguls in Hollywood were forced to submit their products to Catholic censors. No one talked about abortion back then, but that was the point: The Catholic Church was a crucial component of the consensus that made abortion illegal. In Texas and Connecticut, a Catholic oilman named Buckley was raising his children, many of whom would go on to revive American conservatism. John Dewey spoke for many liberals when he dismissed the Catholic Church as a reactionary world organization.

So it makes sense, now and then, to take notice if candidates have explicitly identified themselves with negative policies of their church.

And the issue of separation of church and state is always an important one in a democracy.

In the two posts referenced at the start of this post, I don't think that Lawrence O'Donnell's anti-Mormon spiel was as loony as Jason Linkins believes. I do think O'Donnell went overboard, though, as did Ryan Davis in defending him.

The Mormon version of Christianity has things about it that sound oddball to those outside the church? Wow, how could any religion ever have something like that! Mormons prior to the Civil War were pro-slavery and had white supremacist ideas about African-Americans? Gosh, I'll bet they were the only Americans who thought that way. Except, you know, the southern branches of every Protestant denomination. And the Catholic Church. And the only other people who had white supremacist notions were all the whites who supported slavery, and darn near every white person that opposed slavery. So, besides the Mormons, only about 98% of the white population held white supremacist ideas.

This is a village atheist kind of an argument. However it may connect with the spiritual realm, religion is a very human institution. So to condemn religion in general or a particular branch of religion because 150 years ago they had some dumbass ideas is just silly. Like I said, village atheist kind of stuff.

The Penguin Lives series includes a biography of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, titled simply Joseph Smith (2002), by Andrew Jackson biographer Robert Remini. He does a good job of placing Smith and his religious ideas in the context of the utopian movements in the early half of the 19th century. Ryan Davis sneers at the thought of "wading through all the revelations and counter-revelations, angels, gold tablets, and the true origin of Native Americans according to Mormonism" that are part of the story of Mormonism.

But comparison, Remini gives this account of a set of visions which Joseph Smith's Congregationalist father, Joseph Smith Sr., experienced, which began during the period just prior to the War of 1812:

Joseph and Lucy Smith [the parents of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr.] also suffered during this turbulent period as they kept up a frantic search for a better life. The arrival of several more children - Samuel (1808), Ephraim (1810), William (1811), and Catherine (1813)- only intensified their poverty. But immersed as they were in the revivalist tumult of the age, they had faith that the Lord would assist them in their search. Not surprisingly, it was at this time that Joseph Smith Sr. had a religious experience of profound importance. Lucy said that her husband's mind had recently become "much excited upon the subject of religion." He went to bed one night while "contemplating the situation of the Christian religion, or the confusion and discord that were extant," and had an extraordinary dream. It seems he was walking in a wide, open, and barren field and saw nothing but dead and fallen trees. Silence prevailed in this gloomy desert. "An attendant spirit" accompanying Joseph told him that the field was the world, which lay "inanimate and dumb, in regard to the true religion, or plan of salvation." The spirit then instructed him to walk on where he would find a box on a log, "the contents of which, if you eat thereof, will make you wise." Joseph found the box and when he opened it "all manner of beasts, horned cattle, and roaring animals, rose up on every side in the most threatening manner possible, tearing the earth, tossing their horns, and bellowing most terrifically" around him. Joseph dropped the box and ran for his life. Yet, strangely, in the midst of all this, "I was perfectly happy," he told Lucy, "though I awoke trembling."

This was the first of seven dreams or visions, as Lucy called them, that Joseph Smith Sr. experienced between 1811 and 1819. The appearance of a spirit messenger in dreams was not uncommon in folk magic at this time and the presence of a box that could make one wise would later play a significant role in his son's encounter with the supernatural. Revivalists at the time preached that dreams were inspired by God. But Joseph Sr.'s visions apparently confirmed his belief that all churches knew no more about the Kingdom of God than any layman. (my emphasis)

Though Mormon believers would probably prefer to frame it differently, Smith and his father were acquainted with rural folk magic and various occult ideas. During his youth was also the time of the Protestant Christian revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening. Young Joseph had the first vision of his own in 1820 at the age of 14.

Of course, neither the father's visions nor the son's can lay claim in secular history to being more than what the Catholic Church calls "personal revelations". But the point of quoting that passage about Smith's father is to illustrate that may sound kooky to us today wasn't necessarily so in the religious and social context in which Smith grew up. But you're not going to get that through the village-atheist version, which only aims to sneer at religion. Let's not be too harsh on the atheists, though. Christian fundamentalists generally sneer at Mormonism even more intensely.

So, yes, by all means, let look carefully at how political candidates may want to impose their religious beliefs on us or undermine freedom of religion and conscience. But we need to look at it in the real world in which we live, not in some vague, sophomoric ideological terms the way O'Donnell and Ryan approach it.

And if you're interested in a careful but relatively compact secular account of the founder of Mormonism, Remini's biography of Smith is worth reading.

Tags: adele stan, alan wolfe, jason linkins, joseph smith, lawrence o'donnell, mormonism, robert remini, ryan davis, separation of church and state