Romney and Religion

For me it was a bizarre moment in a presidential candidates' debate.  A Charleston audience huzzahed Newt Gingrich for being "appalled" at John King's opening question regarding a former wife's allegations.  She claimed that  Gingrich asked her for an "open marriage" so he could could continue an adulterous affair with the woman who subsequently became his third wife. In essence, Gingrich took King to task, implicating him as part of a "media elite" that is pro-Obama.

So an audience, surely strong on traditional family values and leaning toward conservative Christianity, resoundingly cheered  a thrice married, twice divorced, admitted adulterer.  Gingrich won the primary a couple of days later, decisively defeating Mitt Romney, whom the pundits, for weeks, had projected the likely winner.

In vivid contrast, Romney represents family values lived: a faithful husband in a long marriage to a high school sweetheart, a dedicated father, and a man of faith long-dedicated as lay-clergy and local leader to his birth church to which he tithes.  And there's the rub.  Romney is a Mormon.

In the wake of the South Carolina primary, a negative response to Romney's Mormon identity is being questioned.  The consensus concludes, it was less of an issue for South Carolina's Evangelicals than it was four years ago; but such a view doesn't dismiss it altogether as an issue.

The Protestant right and Catholics, too, don't find Mormonism to be Christian, despite Mormon contentions that they are.

There's an unspoken religious litmus test for political candidates that relates to belief in God--the God of the Jewish Christian tradition, preferably a conservative Christian take on that God. (It's been proven by reputable polls that the most reviled minority in America are atheists.)  For most Americans, Mormonism  stands outside the Christian pale.

The pundits are beginning to say that Romney must address his staunch Mormon identity, that it's the elephant in the room of his crumbling campaign.  It's not easy to pin down why Mitt Romney doesn't excite popular enthusiasm. On appearance, except for his Mormonism, he should.  He's what used to be called "four square."

So, a socially conservative audience, huzzahed a morally suspect Newt Gingrich when challenged on his character/behavior; and a conservative electorate made him the anti-Romney of the week.

Religion matters.
    

Imagine

January 1995

I originally proposed a sermon on the theme “ How Would Our World Be Different, If Dr. King Had Lived?”  I wanted to try my hand at counterfactual history, also known as alternate or “what if” history.

I did a little research and thought about a design.  However, I was overwhelmed by a retrospective sadness for the course of America since 1968, seen through a lens of possibility—how Dr. King’s moral arc would have affected our national moral arc.

You surely know, I’m referencing Dr. King’s quotation “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”  Perhaps you know that President Obama has a rug in the oval office with those words woven around the edge. You probably don’t know that Dr. King borrowed that now famous phrase from Unitarian minister Theodore Parker who said in 1853, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

As I reflected on what might have been, I realized how monumental Martin Luther King Jr. had already become as he entered his full maturity at age 39.  He’d inspired and contributed to the organization of the greatest political/cultural event of the 20th century: an astonishingly successful expansion of  civil rights largely won by the moral effort of the people oppressed by 400 hundred years of entrenched racism.  Dr. King had begun to campaign for economic justice (The Poor Peoples’ March and his reason for being in Memphis, a sanitation workers strike); and he had begun to oppose the Vietnam War.  He was dramatically transforming the notion of Love from neutered Christian sentiment to transformative action—the swift sword of Mrs. Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but without violence and blood.

He threatened a smug, self-serving economic and political establishment that, in his absence over the last four decades, has grown into a Plutocracy that has cynically abused national interest (of, by, and for the people—another Theodore Parker phrase) for selfish gain.

In my imagination, I injected Dr. King into the events of tumbling decades: the 70s, 80, 90s, the 2000s.  I was literally overwhelmed at the imagined gravitas of his presence, the difference he would have made.  His baseline, the transformative power of Love, would have at the very least been a constant goad, a reminder always to keep in mind the notion of a moral arc bending ever closer to Justice not for some but for all.  He would have pushed American Christianity away from Evangelicalism’s selfish prosperity theology, toward a generous social justice ethic of view true to Jesus’s own revolutionary ministry.

Seventeen years ago, I had the occasion to visit the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was shot.  Memphis was literally closed because of an ice storm that had passed through the area night before.  The motel was worn and tired, much like the decaying  industrial/transportation district surrounding it.  A single wreath on a balcony marked the 2nd floor where Dr. King was shot.  It was a bright, sunny mid-winter, Sunday afternoon. The sensations of the day mingling with my active imagination,--standing on holy ground,--made it one of the more memorable and poignant experiences of my life. 

I imagined the report of a rifle, the slumping body, the ooze of blood, but I knew couldn’t fully comprehended the full import of the tragic event.  Such a realization still exceeds my ability to order and hold it, relative to the course of events of the last 43 years.

Our world would have been a better place—a much better place—had Dr. King survived to walk with us at age 83.

I grieve for what might have been but never was.

Fruit of the Tree

[My favorite religious myth comes from Genesis.  The two trees, Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, haunt my religio-spiritual imagination.  A mystery of the human condition is a moral consciousness joined to a sense of mortality.  This is a consciousness that often comes to a relatively young child.  I sometime am asked to talk to a child as young as nine who has realized that s/he won't live forever.  Here's a vignette from my new book on Ecclesiastes, Wisdom for the Ages, that speaks to this fundamental human awareness, the proverbial loss of innocence.]

The Thisness of Being

I

’ve just listened to a Canadian Broadcast Corporation “Writers and Company” interview with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein, regarding her new book Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God.

You can’t judge a book by its cover‒at least by its title.  Ms. Goldstein’s new book is a novel‒a philosophical novel.  She is a professional philosopher, a professor at Brandeis University, who some years ago wearied of analytical philosophy’s restrictions and branched into the writing of fiction.  Her new book has garnered interest, in part, for the appendix that lists said thirty-six arguments and offers a brief critique of each.

The interview began with Ms. Goldstein remembering her youth, when she would lie in bed and think about the strangeness of her being.  In thinking of her existential self, she had an extraordinary, heightened awareness that was both terrifying and thrilling.  She wondered, why am I me? Do others perceive this me?  At a very early age, she was genuinely mystified by the thisness of her own existence.

A practicing Orthodox Jew by birth through the years of her first marriage, she now declares herself probably agnostic, though she admires the rich nuances of a religious outlook.  In the interview, she mused on the existential problem of death from a very ordinary point of view: how can all the aspects of personality, the complex world that each person is, simply cease to be?  This non-existence was easy for her to accept for herself, but she couldn’t so readily accept it for those she loved, such as her father.

As a child, she had pondered death. As a philosopher, she’s still mystified by what she called the thisness of being.  This blows her away.  In this regard, philosophizing seems an ordinary human activity to her, as she seeks to understand what she first experienced non-rationally as a child.

Her memories stirred mine.  I remember lying in bed as a child, the night dark and the room still.  I thought about the common stuff of childhood‒school, friends, sports and such.  But I also remembered that now and again, seeping in from where I didn’t know, came strange images of death, the thisness of my being falling into an abyss of nothingness.  If I remember the accompanying emotion accurately, it had a sense of awesome dread that was also compelling. Fascinating is the mystical term.  I didn’t want to think about non-being, but when I did, I had to take it to the edge of an abyss.  Much later, when I encountered Rudolph Otto’s concept of the mysterium tremendum, I had a phrase to describe these episodes of apprehension and fascination about death.  Later, Emily Dickinson’s haunting, “when I have fears that I may cease to be,” assured me that I wasn‘t alone in confronting this disturbing conclusion to being, the end of the thisness of my life and every life.

By no means a morbid child, I didn’t dwell on death.  Was I precocious?  Perhaps.  But probably more children spontaneously entertain such episodes than we imagine. 

Dying and death are important aspects of ministry, involving pastoral care and the rite of passage of either a funeral or memorial service.  When the compulsion to write and publish a book came upon me in my mid-thirties, I followed the advice to write what I knew about.  I fashioned a guide on crafting modern funeral and memorial services called In Memoriam.  It’s been in print since 1993, reissued in 2000 in a second edition, and has become a standard resource even beyond the confines of my liberal religious tradition.

Considering this, my affinity for Ecclesiastes pops into focus.  Though Ecclesiastes offers a litany of observations and aphorism about death, I’ve never found it morbid.  It’s Realistic and it’s philosophical in a commonsense, everyman’s way. 

A number of verses might be cited to highlight Ecclesiastes sensibility regarding mortality and the human response to it.  In light of my own scheme of Natural Religion, I cite this selection:

I said in my heart, with regards to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts.  For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other.  They will all have the breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity.  All go to one place; all are from dust, all turn to dust again.  Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth?  So I saw that there is nothing better than a man should enjoy his work, for that is his lot; who can bring him to see what will be after him?  [3:18-22]

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