Balkinization

The Religious Aesthetics of Running for President

Fred Gedicks

My thanks to Jack Balkin for the invitation to guest blog on Balkinization.

The convergence of Mitt Romney’s unexpected early success as a Republican presidential candidate with current academic and popular interest in Mormonism nicely illustrates some contemporary American attitudes about religious belief. Although I’m a Mormon, my purpose here is not to apologize for Mormon history or theology, whose stranger aspects have drawn criticism not just from the Christian right ("Mormonism is a cult"), but also from the secular left ("Who’s crazy enough to belief this stuff?"). Instead, I think current discussions about Mormonism--and Romney’s Mormonism in particular–-expose a contradiction in popular beliefs about the role of faith in public life.

1. One of Romney’s challenges mirrors that facing the contemporary Mormon church-–how to show Mormonism as a mainstream faith without abandoning its distinctive beliefs and practices. (Another of Romney’s challenges is how to credibly explain that his recent conversion to the conservative Christian social agenda was not influenced by his decision to run for president, but that would be another post.) Mormon angels, gold plates, polygamy, temple rites, etc. make it easy to argue that any person who believes in such nonsense is either scary or irrational (or both), and thus unfit for public office (and, I suppose, much else). But this is really just old-fashioned religious bigotry, whether launched from the right or the left. From the right, it’s simply an attack on religious difference, and not a very persuasive one: The theological bed rocks of conservative Christianity–-the Trinity, resurrection, real presence, virgin birth, atonement for sins and salvation by grace–-are all as bizarre as the strangest Mormon doctrines, but seem "reasonable" because they’ve been around for centuries and are shared by large American majorities. Thus James Dobson argues--without any sense of irony--that the U.S. should be governed by (his version of) the teachings of a God who was born to a virgin, allowed himself to be crucified, and then brought himself back from the dead to an eternal life, at the same time that he suggests that Mormons or Muslims are simply too weird to be trusted with political power or office. From the left, the attack on Mormonism is an attack on religion generally. Unless one is willing to distinguish reasonable extra-rational beliefs from unreasonable ones–-the trap into which Dobson and conservative Christians fall--it’s hard to see how any religion could have survived the Enlightenment. That is, I think, pretty much Sam Harris’s argument.

2. On the other hand, Harris has a point–or, at least, half a point. How comfortable would most Americans be with a President who makes policy decisions by personal revelation and prayer? Not very, I think, and with good reason. One of the things that makes nonbelievers uncomfortable with believing government officials, and conventional believers uncomfortable with unconventionally believing officials, is the fear that such officials will take actions based on spiritual inspiration that is unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, rational argument (as the unbelievers or conventional believers see it). To paraphrase Jon Krakauer, people will do pretty much anything if they think that God is telling them to do it, and that’s pretty scary in a President (and, frankly, in a neighbor). It’s ok, then, for a President to pray for personal "strength," or "insight," or "courage, or even "inspiration," but not to ask God if the U.S. should, say, invade Iraq or raise taxes.

3. What this means is that, despite the desires of the Christian right and the fears of the secular left, the personal religious devotion of presidential candidates functions mostly as an aesthetic. Think Ronald Reagan. Personal religiosity communicates that the candidate is a "good person," meaning that he or she is a person-–more realistically, projects the image of a person--with whom the electorate is comfortable and to whom it can relate at some imagined personal level, but does not govern the candidate’s policy decisions in any but the most abstract, background sense.

Fred Gedicks

Labels: Religious aesthetics

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