Mitt Romney on Religion
UPDATE DECEMBER 16, 2007:
Two websites to help you analyze the Republican Party’s love affair with the Christian fundamentalist electorate:
And the online edition of Liberty Magazine, the news journal of the Religious Liberty department of my own Seventh-day Adventist denomination:
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UPDATE DECEMBER 15, 2007:
This is the feeling of more and more in the Republican Party: Christianity is better than other religions.
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In his recent speech clarifying his religious views, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said two things to which this teacher of religion and government must take exception:
- “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.”
- “But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning.”
First of all, it’s just simply foolish to assert that freedom requires religion, when you take into consideration even the most elementary reading of the history of Massachusetts, the state which Romney governs, and its most influential expatriate Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island colony, who famously coined the term “wall of separation” and stands to this day as the bravest defender of that principle enshrined in our U. S. Constitution. Romney refers to Williams later in his speech, without any hint of irony!
Secondly, that second statement shows that Romney is indeed pandering to the Christian right in this country who have been clamoring for years for an ever-closer blending of Christianity with our society, even if it takes legislation to get it. They re-write history in their sermons and speeches, and the brain-dead mainstream media just nod and yawn.
The religiously inclined citizens of this country really ought to shudder when they hear statements like the above from Romney. Even cursory readings of the history of Western Civilization lead any comprehending reader to the conclusion that persecution of a minority is always the result of a state taking to itself an “official” religion. There is likely an intoxicating attraction to the political power gained by a state’s government when it takes up religion as its hand maiden. O, the masses which will swoon as their leaders look to their gods for help in leading them! But the iron maiden is not far behind the first embrace of that hand maiden by the unsuspecting state.
Statements like Romney’s, whether meaning to or not, will always play to both sides of that dangerous scenario: the religious masses of the governed, who long to hear a leader agree with them that their god is great and leads them all, and the powerful classes who govern, who long to have that iron-fisted grasp which always results from the union of church and state.
Those in the ruling classes, the ideological descendants of Roger Williams, and those of us in the masses, who still acknowledge the power of our own consent, must wake up and take notice when candidates look askance at our first amendment like Romney does in his speech. We must refuse to give our consent to govern to any candidate who does not hold up as sacred to our country’s future that Wall of Separation so many today are longing to pull down.
We hope that former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, GOP candidate from Arkansas, will hold close to the “Wall of Separation” idea that the founder of the first Baptist church in America, Roger Williams, held dear. We hope that all the candidates, left, right, and centrist, religious or non, will take firm stands on religious liberty. And we hope that American voters, whether religious or non, will take the same care with how they exercise their hard-won right to vote.
From an excellent article online about Roger Williams’ intellectual exchanges with the Indigenous Americans of his day and his observations about Indians’ religious liberty, which he found so in step with the progress his colony of Rhode Island made toward true separation of church and state:
Williams died … March 15, 1683 in Providence, with the pain of the world bowing his creaking shoulders, likely realizing just how out of step he was with the temper of his time. He was a peacemaker in time of war, a tolerant man in a world full of ideologues; a democrat in a time of ecclesiastical and secular sovereigns, a dissenter wherever self-interest masqueraded as divinity. Williams had planted seeds in American soil which would not fully flower for more than another century. He would have relished the company of Thomas Jefferson, for example, at a time when his ideas were the common currency of revolution.
Williams also would have enjoyed meeting two Creek sachems who visited England in 1791, “where, as usual, they attracted great attention, and many flocked around them, as well to learn their ideas of certain things as to behold `the savages.’” Asked their opinion of European religion, one said that the Creeks had no priests, or established religion, and that people were not expected all to agree on mere matters of opinion. “It is best that everyone should paddle his own canoe in his own way,” the two Creeks told the assembled English.
