At a campaign event in Florida on Friday night, a heckler in the crowd called presidential candidate Mitt Romney “a pretender” because Romney is a Mormon and thus does “not know the Lord.” Romney responded thus:
“One of the great things about this land is that we have people of different faiths and different religions, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country,” he said, as the audience gave him a standing ovation.
He has used a variation of that line many times, usually saying “the American people want” in place of “we need.” In those cases, he is right. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans would be more comfortable with a gay, black, female, Jewish, thrice-divorced, or very old president than they would be with an atheist. In that list, only the atheist would start with a majority of respondents (53 percent) committed to opposing him.
Romney is a Republican, but his belief in this regard isn’t a partisan one; overt religiosity is an indispensable component of both the modern presidential campaign and the modern presidency.
Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? includes, in an explanation of the Penn State professor’s class on postmodernism, the best articulation I have ever read of what is wrong with this (pp. 244-246):
I begin with the famous proposition, more familiar to my students even than Pulp Fiction, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is, after all, one of the most important sentences ever written in the history of political philosophy, and it helped to change the course of the world. And so, begging my students’ pardon, I set about revising it. I suggest instead that all humans should be considered to have equal claim to basic human rights such as food, shelter, education, health care, and political representation; and that we should endow each other with these rights, knowing full well that they are alienable and that we must work to interpret and to sustain them. And, finally, that none of the above is self-evident. Then I go a bit further, and point out that it was actually not self-evident in 1776 that all men were created equal, since almost nobody on the planet believed such a thing. On the contrary, most people who considered the matter at all, even in the educated, Christianized West, believed in natural hierarchies deriving either from the great chain of being or from the divine right of kings, which is why we Americans had to fight a war for principles that were allegedly self-evident. (So yes, I’m saying that Jefferson, drawing on John Locke, among others, made this stuff up.) And I am hardly the first to point out that the new nation, upon winning that war, practiced slavery for another fourscore and nine years, or that we continue to debate today, as we must, the meaning of the word “equal” and the meaning of the word “rights.” As for the Creator: we are often tempted to think it would be easier to engage in political deliberation if we could simply appeal to the Almighty for sanction. But the events of the recent past, not to mention the past six millennia, have shown us that it is quite impossible to compel assent to notions of human rights and dignity by appealing to the authority of the divine. I am not denying that many people ground their beliefs and their lives in religion, and I am not saying that it is illegitimate or illiberal or wrong for people to do so. I am merely saying that appealing to the Creator doesn’t solve the problems it wants to solve; it merely displaces the question onto how one interprets the word of the Creator and how one vests authority in those interpreters. It thus leaves us once again with the problem of how to recognize, in concrete political practice, the human rights and the human dignity with which we are supposedly self-evidently endowed.
Sorry about the long excerpt. Here’s a slightly shorter section, in which Bérubé, who has a son with Down syndrome, makes the question more explicit (pp. 246-247):
Which way of thinking is more responsible, do you imagine, if you’re a parent of a child with a disability, whose disability has often been — and might again be — grounds for barring him from the rest of the human community? Do you (a) assert that there are objective, “intrinsic” moral grounds for your belief in his “innate” humanity, hoping to persuade others that your belief is founded on something other than your mere belief, or (b) assert that there are no “innate” criteria for inclusion in the human family and no “intrinsic” grounds for your advocacy of his inclusion, but that he should be included anyway because we should try to understand “equal rights” as broadly as possible?
Bérubé says that the vast majority of his students choose option (a). The same is true of the American population; choosing option (b) disqualifies a person from presidential eligibility.
The American people want leaders who look, uncritically, to centuries-old interpretations of millennia-old texts to solve the questions we have about how people should treat each other — questions that, after all that time, remain unanswered.
We need to move beyond that.
