The incident started off in one, fairly benign, direction. Former Massachusetts Gov. and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (R) was campaigning at the Lake Miona Regional Recreation Center in The Villages, Florida, generally considered a GOP stronghold. An anti-Mormon loud mouth blasted Romney for his faith.
“You, sir, are a pretender,” the guy said. “You don’t know the Lord. You are a Mormon.”
The rest of the audience booed the identified Republican voter, but Romney, at first laughed it off. After chuckling a bit, Romney said, “Let me, uh, let me offer just a thought. And that is, uh, one of the great things about this great land, is we have people of different faiths and different persuasions.”
So far, so good. America is diverse, we have more faith traditions than any country on earth, so a nod to diversity makes sense. But Romney couldn’t stop there, adding, “And uh, I’m convinced that the nation, that the nation does need, the nation does need to have people of different faiths but we need to have a person of faith lead the country.” The GOP audience responded by giving Romney a standing ovation.
Now, there are a couple of ways to look at this. My initial reaction was a constitutional one, encouraging Romney to read Article II and Article VI — the prior explains the eligibility requirements for the presidency; the latter notes there can be no religious test for public office.
But that’s not quite right. Romney wasn’t talking about the law; he was talking about politics. This was his opinion — that a president should be religious. On this point, Atrios wrote a series of insightful posts over the weekend, but I think his best piece was this one.
In the current state of our discourse, “people of faith” are good and the right kind of people to be president and it’s perfectly acceptable to point that out. If I wrote: “I don’t think a person of faith should be president,” I’d be accused of being an anti-religious bigot, of religious intolerance, etc.
But it’s perfectly acceptable for Mitt Romney to say: “We need to have a person of faith lead the country.”
Quite right.
Faith is a presumed good; lack of faith is a presumed character flaw. To say a religious person shouldn’t be president is to denigrate millions of believers; but to say a religious person must be president seems to have no bearing on how (or whether) it denigrates millions of nonbelievers. One is intolerance, the other is just common sense.
I believe this is different from, say, outreach to religious voters. If a political party, office holder, or candidate finds that he or she lacks support from a specific constituency — say, Roman Catholics who attend church weekly — I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the party/official/candidate targeting those voters and trying to establish some support.
But that’s not the issue with Romney and the anti-Mormon loudmouth. The conventional wisdom would never consider it this way, but in effect, the GOP voter said, “I’m going to base my vote on religious belief.” To which Romney effectively replied, “We all should base our votes on religious belief.”
Now, I realize that Romney intended a different message. The loudmouth wanted to talk about a specific religion; the candidate wanted to talk about religion generally. But as a matter of principle, what the two were saying wasn’t terribly different. They both want religious beliefs at the fore.
The difference is, as a practical matter, theological. The loudmouth targeted Mormons, which is a form of bigotry. The candidate indirectly targeted nonbelievers, which is a different form of bigotry.
Romney, in this sense, wants to have it both ways. Being a person of faith, he says, is a vital quality in a president. In the next breath, he suggests there’s no reason to judge him on his specific faith.
It’s a complex issue, and I’m afraid I’m not being as clear as I’d like. Let me put it another way: I don’t care about Romney’s personal beliefs. His faith is his business, as is everyone else’s. My concern is that Romney apparently doesn’t feel the same way.
As Atrios put it in a different post:
Romney says only a “person of faith” can be president. Plenty of people are going to say they don’t want a Mormon to be president. Is this bigotry, an objection to belief (or lack), or both?
Want to make personal religious beliefs a central issue in politics? Fine, bring it on. You guys can fight it out.
“We need to have a person of faith lead the country.”
“We need to have a Christian to lead the country.”
“We need to have a member of the Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915 to lead this country.”
Where’s the line?
I don’t think Romney knows, and I get the sense he’d rather not talk about it.