I was at a dinner party the other evening where the conversation moved swiftly through movies, the New York real estate market and plastic surgery before landing firmly on presidential politics. We started with possible candidate Michael Bloomberg (doesn't look presidential), and ended with Mitt Romney (If Mattel made a president doll it would be Mitt.) The question of whether Romney's religion was affecting his chances of getting the Republican nomination was raised and I idly mentioned I had read that Romney's grandfather had left the U.S. for Mexico in order to practice polygamy. A day later I got an email from the hostess correcting my information about Romney -- turns out it was his great-grandfather, not his grandfather who went to Mexico -- and mentioning she had heard the Romney grandfather rumor a number of times that week. She went on to remark she found it unfortunate that people in 2007 were having the same kind of discussion about a candidate's religion that they had had when Kennedy ran for president in 1960, sad proof of how little the country has changed since then.
I thought a lot about her comment, wondering if she were right and a discussion of a candidate's religious beliefs should be off-limits. I believe, as she does, that religion ought to be a private matter, so I admit I surprised myself when I discovered I disagreed with her, and myself, this time.
Of course it isn't polygamy in any generation that concerns me about Romney. And of course it's not just Romney. I simply don't like anybody's religion anywhere near politics and the closer a candidate is to a religion's orthodoxy, the more worried I become. In the case of Romney, it's not that he's a Mormon, it's the fact that he's a Mormon leader. He's been a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints and was later appointed president of the Boston LDS, a top church position which, according to Newsweek, is the equivalent of being the head of a large diocese. Now I admire people with deep religious convictions as long as those convictions allow compassion toward others with different religious convictions. But if those convictions have any place at all in politics, and that's a big "if," I prefer them to inform, rather than lead, political positions. Jimmy Carter, our first born-again president and perhaps the most Evangelical president in U.S. history, was willing to stand on personal principle against the Southern Baptist Convention on the issue of abortion, and he ultimately withdrew his membership from the organization in 2000 criticizing its "increasingly rigid creed." Given Romney's religious resume, it's the "rigid creed" I worry about.
Unfortunately, the same is true with most every candidate. As candidates rush toward religion (read, the Christian Right) in an epidemic of primary race conversions, it's hard to imagine any of them being able to separate the secular from the non-secular, the church from the State. My friend is correct when she says there's still a lot of rumoring going on in politics concerning a candidate's religion, but that is the natural by-product of candidates exploiting their belief in God by offering it up as a prime qualification for being president. That kind of thing turns true religious beliefs into campaign fodder, taking what ought to be personal and private and subjecting it to all kinds of public scrutiny and discussion, rumors included.
When Kennedy made his 1960 speech in Houston to Protestant ministers, he made it patently clear that he was firmly committed to the separation of church and State and would not allow any religious leader to dictate public policy. Now, in order to get elected president, we see candidates clambering over each another in a mad race to claim Jesus as Number One on their Buddy Lists. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who does that deserves to have their beliefs questioned, parsed, rumored about, scrutinized and questioned again. That includes Mitt Romney. And Barack Obama. And Rudy Giuliani. And Hillary. And the rest of them.
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Posted October 10, 2007 | 10:14 PM (EST)