Mitt Emits and Omits

Hartford's own Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print," and I suppose an unkind person might say that Mitt Romney preserved and honored, at least, that tradition of his Mormon faith by delivering a fairly windy, boilerplate speech at the Bush library today. I happen to believe that Romney's problem is not that he is a Mormon politician but that he is just a bad policitian -- a stiff, cardboard, conservative android, easily reprogrammed to spout whatever seems most efficiacious at the moment. I suppose that, if you wanted to concoct the argument that he's some kind of Mormonchurian Candidate, determined to get elected and at all costs and much more attached to that goal than he is to any particular set of ideas about abortion or gun control, you could start to worry that his ultimate aim is to rule over all of us while imposing the tenets of the Book of Mormon. I don't worry about that.

(You know who should worry? The Mohegans and the Pequots.  The Book of Mormon states that Native Americans are, genealogically, Jewish, descendants of Laman, the bad brother of Nephi and the son of Lehi, who led a contingent of Jews to the New World in 600 B.C.  I'm not sure a Mormon theocracy would allow these people to have casinos.)

In today's speech, Romney managed not to do the one thing he said he would do -- explain what it means, for him, to be a Mormon. He talked a lot about liberty and tolerance, but those fine values are kind of beside the point. Most of us agree that wildly diverse religions have the right to exist and thrive in this nation.  Most of  us concede that the First Amendment does not require the expunging of all religious expression from public life.  I thought the question today was:  Do we want an adherent of THIS religion to get our most important job? Is there anything that an adherent of THIS religion might say or do that would make him an unsettling or unsatisfactory president?

I didn't feel any closer to the answer, at 11 a.m., than I did at 10:30.

I also care only in an abstract religious studies way.  Romney is such a dreadful candidate -- in fact, the politician he most resembles is the equally stiff, self-distancing fellow Bay State flatliner John Kerry -- that I expect him to fade pretty soon. Today, as usual, he was chloroform on stage.

Is Mormonism an odd creed? Yes but.

Yes, but most creeds are odd. There are all kinds of peculiar notions in the Book of Mormon, but they are not necessarily more odd than, just for example, the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which posits that communion wine and the wafer actually become the blood and flesh of Christ, and not in any symbolic or metaphorical sense. Eating one's god is a pretty strange notion all by itself, but a lot of us have done it or at least think we have.

I could walk you through some more of the actual notions contained in the Book of Mormon, and many of them would strike you as utterly preposterous; but I'm not going to do that. I don't think that's really the issue here. The issue here is: how does a president who believe these things act? I don't really know the answer.

I do think it's  fair to observe that, on paper, Mormonism is the kind of movement that overthrows the existing authorities and substitutes more recent, immediate experiences, texts and ideas. Joseph Smith did not regard the Book of Mormon as a compatible embellishment on Christianianity as it existed in 1830.  Smith believed that Christianity, as it then stood, was wrong, warped, malformed. The Book of Mormon, he would argue, was as legitimate as anything in the Bible and considerably more up to date. So were his experiences and those of his followers, when they were spoken to by God.

One question children sometimes ask is: Why did God speak directly to so many people in biblical time? Why did God reveal so much to them and then, utterly, stop?  Mormonism is hardly the only religion to answer: He didn't. He's still talking to his chosen among us, and the things he says now are every bit as important as what he said to Moses.

The current occupant of the White House seems to believe something similar. At least, piecing things together, some of us have concluded that he considers himself to be in a state of special communion with God. That state of communion apparently reassures him that he is right, even when he is not.

I would prefer that the next president have a much more situational, reality-based relationship with his religion. I don't care very much what that religion is. I would happily accept an Orthodox Jewish president who did not exhibit Joe Lieberman's smug indifference to truth, ravenous bellicosity and hypocritical moralism. And my own still small voice and passing acquaintances -- even one or two friendships -- with Mormons make me think there are probably some solid citizens in their ranks who would make acceptable presidents. Romney? Thanks but no thanks.

I don't want him as president, not because he's a Mormon but because he's the kind of person who could give a whole speech about his faith and barely mention Mormonism at all. To me, that's a symptom of a bigger disease -- the inability to talk plainly and meaningfully about anything.

But the Sam Adams thing at the end really worked. 

Comments

[mick]

You care a whole lot more about this stuff than I do. You actually listened to his whole speech from 10:30 to 11:00 am? Well, it sure beats listening to the Rush warm-up act. Romney would have to go pretty far off the deep end to be farther off the beam than good ol' Buddy.

[Dennis Paul Himes]

The thing that struck me most about the Romney speech is that he was very upfront about the fact that he plans to be the president of only about 85-90% of all Americans. The speech was all about accepting all faiths, and how "any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me". That leaves out about 30 million of us. The Sam Addams bit worked only in that it reassurred the Evangelicals that when he divides the nation into two they will be on the accepted side of the line.

There was a bit of unintentional humor, though. "Americans tire of those who would jettison their beliefs, even to gain the world." This from Mitt Romney, who has made a career of jettisoning his beliefs.