Romney, Secularism, and the Presidency

 Of the forty-three Presidents of the United States, only two have held any sort of religious office: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both deists, were vestrymen in the Anglican/Episcopal church, prior to the Revolution when it was the established church in Virginia, and a vestryman was as much as civil and a religious office. (Jefferson would go on to author the legislation which disestablished it.) Americans may be on the verge of breaking their two-century-old streak of electing laypeople to the White House, however, as the former Stake President of the Boston Stake (the equivalent of a bishop, with jurisdiction over the eastern half of Massachusetts) wraps up the Republican nomination.

Whenever Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is discussed, the focus is always on his religion itself and not the position he held within the LDS Church hierarchy. During his 2008 and 2012 campaigns for the Republican nomination, we have heard endless comparisons between evangelical Protestants’ alleged intolerance of Mormons today and the bigotry faced by John F. Kennedy. There is one crucial difference that is overlooked in all of this: Kennedy wasn’t the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Boston. He was a layman, and indeed had a strong record of voting against measures supported by his church’s hierarchy (such as federal funding for parochial schools, and nominating pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court). If Romney is elected in November, he will be the first President to have held any religious office after the adoption of the First Amendment, and the President who has held the most senior office within any church. The comparisons with Kennedy are convenient for him, as they are meant to imply that any discussion of his religion is tantamount to the sort of bigotry and misrepresentation that Kennedy was subjected to in 1960.

Secularism in the United States has an interesting and misunderstood history. The state-level declarations of religious freedom expounded in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, such as Jefferson’s in Virginia, inspired the ‘no religious test’ provision in Article Six of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and prohibition of a federal established church. The last states to disestablish their official churches did so in the 1830s, and Americans elected Presidents of various flavours of Protestantism without much commentary on their religious beliefs. After the Second World War and the dispersal of inner-city ethnic populations to the suburbs, the tolerance accorded to minority Protestant sects was extended to Catholics and Jews, something which made it possible for John F. Kennedy to do what Al Smith couldn’t do in 1928 – be elected President as a Catholic, and which makes it possible for record numbers of Catholics and Jews to hold high federal office today without comment. Slowly, religious tolerance has extended beyond the Judeo-Christian realm – there are two Muslims and one Buddhist in Congress, and George W. Bush visited a mosque only six days after 9/11.

Americans’ religious tolerance, however, has two negative counterparts. One is the intolerance accorded to atheists. On various statistical measures of tolerance, atheists rank below most categories of religious believers – the most striking example, since we’re discussing the presidential nomination, is that fewer Americans would vote for an atheist candidate for the White House than a Muslim, only a decade after 9/11. The second dark side to religious tolerance in the United States is that because criticising other peoples’ religions, and therefore their religions’ hierarchies, is off limits, American politics lacks the tradition of anti-clericalism which is still relevant in parts of Europe – most notably in France, the middle third of Italy, and European Turkey. The regular interference in public affairs by the likes of Falwell, Robertson, Graham, and Sharpton would be met with derision in Britain or Australia, and hostility in France, but is tolerated by Americans as a normal part of political discourse.

Thus, we have a situation in the United States today where Mitt Romney can immunise himself attacks on his religion by referring to a secular tradition which was largely the work of Thomas Jefferson, while overlooking Jefferson’s thoughts on clerical interference in politics. “History, I believe,” the Third President wrote in 1813, “furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.” One wonders what Jefferson would have thought of such a senior religious figure being nominated by a major party for the presidency.

In recent decades, the Enlightenment-influenced secularism of the Founding Fathers has come under attack from religious conservatives. After organised Protestant chauvinism made its last stand in the underground anti-Kennedy pamphleteering campaign in 1960, moderate Protestants made their peace with liberalism while their conservative counterparts joined forces with Catholics to oppose legalised abortion. Together, this unholy alliance has redefined the role of religion in public life. In America today, there are federally-funded ‘faith-based initiatives’, the words ‘under god’ in the Pledge of Allegiance have been given the Supreme Court’s sanction, and it is unthinkable that any President would be inaugurated the way John Quincy Adams was in 1825 – swearing the oath of office on a book of law and omitting the now-customary ‘so help me god’. After striking blow after blow against Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’, the theocrats squeal that they are being persecuted whenever their delicate ears hear ‘happy holidays’ instead of ‘merry Christmas’. So much for the Squire of Monticello’s prediction that everyone alive in the 1820s would die a Unitarian.

It is for these reasons that it is scary to hear Romney peppering his speeches with phrases such as “saving the soul of America”, a formulation he has used after a few recent primary and caucus victories. Someone who was once the most powerful Mormon cleric in New England, and whose shameless pandering to the theocrats of the Evangelical-Catholic axis knows no limits, is not someone who can be trusted with the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – especially given his unsavoury record in dealing with the issues of abortion, adoption, and women’s rights within the LDS Church. Talking about saving America’s soul is not the rhetoric of a ‘Massachusetts moderate’ running on his record as a CEO – it is the rhetoric of a reactionary cleric embarking on a jihad against what remains of the spirit of 1776 and 1789.