But Of Course There’s A Double Standard

In the WaPo today, Richard Cohen fumes that “It is absurd that [Mitt] Romney feels compelled to deliver a speech defending his beliefs and that [Mike] Huckabee does not have to explain how, in this day and age, he does not believe in evolution.” (Cohen previously wrote of Romney “You name the issue and he’s been for it and against it — gun control, abortion, gay rights. Call this what you may, it is proof that Romney is not enslaved by any dogma.”)

As I wrote in my much-delayed analysis of Romney and his platform last night, one of the things I found myself surprised about was that despite having malleable beliefs about a great many issues, one that he seems to stand firm on is the separation of church and state. There is no reason at all to doubt the sincerity of his faith, and at the same time little reason to fear that whatever he believes about the divine and the supernatural will have the slightest influence on how he would govern the country.

The new front-runner in Iowa, Mike Huckabee, presents quite the opposite problem — he is an ordained minister of a mainstream Christian denomination, but his also quite explicit that “My faith is my life – it defines me. My faith doesn’t influence my decisions, it drives them. For example, when it comes to the environment, I believe in being a good steward of the earth. I don’t separate my faith from my personal and professional lives.” I don’t understand a word of this. Huckabee fails to relate environmental stewardship to his faith here; perhaps there is some sort of a rhetorical shortcut he is taking that makes more sense to someone who is faithful that I am missing. More importantly, I really don’t understand the difference between “influencing” a decision and “driving” it. To “drive” a decision suggests being a motive force, a reason why a decision is made, as in: “I invaded Iran because my faith drove me to that decision,” or more simply, “God told me to do it.”

Both Romney and Huckabee are, apparently, strong in their personal religious beliefs and as moral and upright as politicians can possibly be. It’s not like the Book of Mormon professes that people should do objectively evil things, either (as least, no more so than the mainstream Christian Bible). So, Cohen asks, why is it Romney, who has to make an elaborate apology for his faith while Huckabee does not? Cohen sees a double standard here.

And of course there’s a double standard. “Mainstream” Christians simply presume that they are right about all matters theological and from there have varying degrees of tolerance for the rest of us who err from the truth. My experience in Tennessee leads me to think that your typical Baptist there considers both Catholics and Mormons to simply not be Christians at all, but rather to practice polytheistic worship practices in which one of the many deities worshipped has the same name as the Jesus that “real” Christians worship.

That’s one extreme, and it is directly to people who think that way that Romney will speak Thursday night in College Station, Texas. The other extreme is represented by Huckabee himself, who is very clear in saying that “I have much more respect for an honest atheist than a disingenuous believer.” (Thanks, Guv!) A more mystical approach honors the methods and thoughts of “seekers” of all sorts, and shows as much respect for ethical thought and moral conduct as it does for matters theological. But despite this tolerant attitude he is nevertheless absolutely certain, to the very core of his being, that he is right and Romney is wrong. He doesn’t need anything like what I would call objective evidence to support this absolutist, black-and-white world view; he only needs the Bible. While Huckabee (who seems to be a fundamentally decent man, but so does George W. Bush, so that tells you something about decency in government) may be tolerant of Romney’s personal choices, he is also saddened by them, because he knows (without evidence) Romney is wrong.

And so do the very voters to whom Romney is attempting to appeal. And that’s the double standard. Romney has been set up to attempt to appeal to evangelical voters not to tolerate his differing belief system, but to disregard it.

Romney, in seeking the Republican nomination for President, steps into a world where this kind of arrogant faith has been caressed and massaged by Republican political leaders for a generation. They need only to engage in the free exercise of their faith for that faith to inform them that they are right and everyone else is wrong. How can you not develop some degree of intellectual arrogance when you are fed a steady diet of “We’re right and we’re going to heaven because of it, and everyone else is completely wrong and going to hell for it” — at least twice on Sunday, once Wednesday evenings, on high religious holidays, and for many, with supplemental repetitions in Bible Study classes and social activities organized around the church?

Two generations ago, John Kennedy could say that of course he would not take marching orders from the Vatican and that the happenstance of his Catholicism would have nothing meaningful to do with the way he would lead America. He could do that because Protestants had never before been encouraged to integrate their faith and their politics to any significant degree. The Prohibition movement had a significant religious component to it, to be sure, but no one attempted to pick up the Prohibition churches and mobilize them towards any other issue. Certainly no one tried to mobilize Prohibition churches towards a political party. So Kennedy simply had to assure them that he was his own man, capable of thinking and deciding things without consulting the Pope first — a fairly easy burden for a man with his forceful personality to carry. And the Protestants to whom he had to make that appeal, as much as they preferred their own faith to that of others, had the ability to see that faith and politics were different things, and they were being asked to make a political, and not a religious, choice.

But that’s just the kind of distinction that has been blurred today. The second-generation religious voters out there are overwhelmingly Republican and they have become so well-organized and mobilized that they represent something like 25% of the Republican primary vote. They have developed not just a common identity as evangelical Christians but a multi-faceted political platform, with issues like abortion, gun control, taxes, education policy, and foreign relations all related specifically back to Biblical authority. And you can’t run for President (as a Republican) without making a meaningful appeal to this group. And these folks know that their theology is right and everyone else’s is wrong. Since their politics flow from their theology, they know, then, that their politics are right and everyone else’s is wrong — “right” and “wrong” taking on moral weight here.

The Protestant leaders of 1960 also confronted a world that, while polarized along its own terms, had not yet twisted its partisan splits to conform to the ideological differences of the day. The Democrats were not the “pro-civil rights party” and the Republicans were not the “anti-integration” party; there were plenty of Republicans who insisted on the “progressive” stance towards racial issues (Eisenhower, who ordered the troops to integrate the schools) and plenty of Democrats who resisted civil rights laws and integration (Strom Thurmond was a Democrat in those days). So it was a more complex, ambiguous time than now. Kennedy could navigate through that ambiguity and explain why he was a good political choice for those people to make.

Romney is not operating in a similar kind of political landscape. He has to appeal to people with a polarized view of the world — a view that has welded together religion, morality, and politics into a single amalgam. Now, he’s certainly with his target voters on the issues. But because these folks presume that politics is built upon a bedrock of theology, and they see that Romney’s theology is quite different from their own, they distrust him. Unlike the Protestants of yesteryear considering whether to vote for the Catholic JFK, the linkage between politics and religion has been made in the minds of those voters today. And because of that, these voters will always mistrust Romney no matter what he says Thursday.

I think they should mistrust Romney, but for a different reason — he’s flip-flopped so much on so many issues that no one can really know what he stands for or what direction he wants to take the government. You can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth. I also think, after reading a lot of his campaign website, that he has a “Powerpoint” mentality about the government. He selectively edits facts and presents vapid bromides as solutions to real problems. His “solutions” are all superficial and his “action plan” is to shuffle off problems to other people to solve later, in order to reap short-term political benefits, with the result that people with less authority will be forced to confront a magnified issue. But this is, after all, what he did as the managing partner of Bain Capital and Governor of Massachusetts. None of this has anything to do with his theology, though.