Religious intolerance for Gov. Jindal?

Montana Headlines thought it a bit suspicious when a leftie dropped by on the last post, indicating agreement with our plug for Gov. Bobby Jindal as McCain's Veep choice.

But Wulfgar let the (black?) cat out of the bag: Dems apparently see Gov. Jindal, a devout convert to Catholicism, as being vulnerable because he witnessed an exorcism while in college and (gasp) prayed the "Hail Mary" while it was going on. He wrote an article about the experience in the New Oxford Review -- a journal that was started by Episcopalians of the Anglo-Catholic persuasion, but whose editors likewise converted to Catholicism subsequent to the theological and moral turmoil in their former denomination. And the article included a passage about the exorcism.

Whatever the phenomenon was that the youthful Jindal observed, the net effect was that it left him believing in "the reality of spirits, angels and other related phenomena..." Shocking, truly shocking, that any Christian might believe in the reality of the spirit world.

While the event Jindal relates appears to be from his early days of being a Catholic, and took place within the loose structure of a generic college Christian organization, it is worth noting that exorcisms are, unless things have changed recently, a standard part of every Catholic baptism. Pope John Paul II approved a specific rite for exorcisms in the late 1990's. A belief that there are demonic forces that can specifically oppress an individual, and that prayer has efficacy in dealing with it is not something that comes from the fringes of Christianity.

Anything that a politician has written in the past is, of course, fair game. What church a candidate chose to attend for decades is fair game. Pretty much everything is fair game in politics. Voters can and will decide whether something makes them more or less likely to support a candidate.

But what if Jindal were still a Hindu, and believed in reincarnation and karma? Or if he had dabbled in Buddhism in college rather than Catholicism? Or if he had smoked peyote as part of a spiritual search that included an exploration of Native American religion? Would he be just as scary and excrable as he apparently is for having been a part of an unusual prayer service held by a campus Christian organization at Brown University, back when Christianity was still a new thing for him? Would he be mocked for these experiences on leftie blogs?

But in a nation where 62% of Americans reportedly believe that there is such a thing as the devil, we're not sure how much ground will be gained by Democrats ridiculing Jindal about the fact that a very strange college experience convinced him that there is more to the spiritual world than meets the eye.

A recent Gallup poll indicates that nearly 3/4 of Americans believe in the reality of paranormal phenomenon (75% for Christians, 66% for non-Christians). For that matter, 64% of Americans believe that aliens have contacted humans and nearly half apparently believe that aliens have abducted humans... Now, just because 31% of Americans believe in telepathy doesn't mean that there is a 31% chance that it is true -- a majority of people can believe something and have it be wrong. But in America today, someone who doesn't believe that paranormal phenomena exist is actually the odd man out.

If Democrats decide to go down the road of religious ridicule toward Gov. Jindal, it will only reinforce the perception that their party is a hotbed of religious intolerance -- a party where it is acceptable (cool, even) to have dabbled in just about anything in college... other than Christianity.

More Montana Democrats throw Obama under the bus

In a Big Sky Cairn post, we recently pointed out that the governor was pretty anxious to throw his party's presumptive Presidential nominee under the bus.

To mix metaphors, the wheels are at the moment coming off Sen. Obama's own bus, thanks to his comments about bitter rural voters in Pennsylvania clinging to guns and religion because of hard economic times.

Now, folks from fly-over land do disproportionately cling to guns and religion -- the thing is, those of us who own more than our share of Bibles and rifles do so whether the economy is in a boom or a bust.

Obama's comment is hardly a surprise. If you are from a conservative rural background, just go off to the big city, add a few letters behind your name, make a little stack of money, learn to talk all polite-like and correct, and accept invitations to gatherings where the smart Democratic set mingles.

You'll hear that sort of thing, and more. Now, maybe we're just being a wee bit cynical, but we would imagine that perhaps... just maybe... derogatory things about gun-loving, Bible-toting hicks have been said by Sen. Clinton a time or two. Naw -- what are we thinking? She's one of us, now.

As part of burnishing her new NASCAR-mom image, Sen. Clinton's website features a press release from some Montana Democrats hastening to distance themselves from Obama. Led by former U.S. Rep. Pat Williams and Senate Maj. leader Carol Williams, this group of Clinton supporters had this to say:

We wish to express our sincere disappointment with comments made by Sen. Barack Obama at a private San Francisco fundraiser last week - comments which demean the heritage and values of working Montanans.


And even more cutting was this:

After seven years of a president who refused to talk to us, the last thing we need is a presidential candidate who talks down to us.

Well, one thing we won't need to worry about is Sen. Clinton talking down to us. What a relief! And then there's this, just in case someone might confuse them with ignorant gun-loving religion-tolerating people (i.e. Republicans.) --

We are intelligent, optimistic people who believe in a better America.

Of course, unless the superdelegates (like, say, Pat Williams) give the nomination to Clinton in spite of Obama's insurmountable lead in delegates and votes, these intelligent, optimistic people are trashing their own future nominee. In doing so, though, they are just following their governor's lead.

Sen. Clinton may be gleeful, but she should note that these Democrats criticized Sen. Obama, but did so without mentioning her own name. This would seem to indicate that they, like the governor, believe that neither Democrat has a shot at winning Montana, and that their choice would seem to be over whom they more want to distance themselves from in the fall.


Addendum: More Montana Headlines commentary on Big Sky Cairn: George Will and Liberal Condescension.

Latin Mass in Missoula -- and random thoughts on conservatism and religion

Carol over at Missoulopolis noted last month that the Latin mass had returned to her area.

While doing some routine browsing around, we noticed that the Missoulian has some nice video footage of St. John's in Frenchtown with clips of the traditional mass being said.

It's enough to warm any old-fashioned traditionalist's heart, whether one is Catholic or not. It's a cultural thing, and it's nice to see it happening.

The old American conservative movement was pretty heavily laced with Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic sensibilities (think Russell Kirk, Wm. F. Buckley, Thomas Molnar...) Through exposure to their keen minds and (for the most part) gentle souls, whole generations of conservative Protestants who were intellectually engaged with the conservative movement learned first not to be wary of Catholicism, and then learned to be friendly to it -- seeing the power of acknowledging the cultural commonality.

The success of this enterprise has led to Roman Catholics being consensus conservative nominees to the Supreme Court. All five "conservative" Justices appointed by Republican Presidents are Catholic -- Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito. None of the four "liberal" justices are -- Ginsberg, Breyer, Souter, Stevens. Which is quite something when one thinks about the fact that Catholics and the Democratic Party were once synonymous.

There is really no argument being made in these musings -- they are just random thoughts prompted by the beauty of the Missoulian footage.

Mitt Romney's religion

There was a recent major opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal online by John Fund regarding the effect that Mitt Romney's LDS religion is having on his campaign.

Fund lists a number of examples of lower-level Guiliani and McCain supporters trying to make an issue of it, but it is clear that it has been quashed and the subject ruled verboten -- at least at the overt level.

He has this quotation:

"In some ways, [Romney's candidacy] is the best test of whether Americans have really put some of the old religious differences aside," Alan Wolfe, director of Boston College's Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, told the Boston Globe. "And my guess is that they haven't."

Really? What a surprise. All one has to do is think back on how many times one sees things like "Christian fundamentalist fanatics," "Christian wingnuts," "fundamentalist nutjobs," (insert label of choice) when lurking on various websites. One discovers that religious bigotry is alive and well in the United States.

Granted, the progressive forces on the left who use such language or fail to condemn its use can point out that they aren't at all opposed to religion, pointing at their love for the Rev. Jesse Jackson, at the copious religious language in Sen. Obama's speeches, or at the progressive activists in many mainline Christian denominations. And after all, Bill Clinton is often moved to tears when he attends church. They are only opposed to certain kinds of objectionable religious expressions and ideas being inserted into American political life.

True enough. But that is pretty much a definition of religious discrimination: the belief that one kind of religion is more worthy of respect than another, that it is safe for certain kinds of religious belief to influence public life -- while other kinds are viruses in the body politic.

As stated earlier, religious discrimination and bigotry is alive and well, and anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a dreamworld.

It really is not realistic -- or even necessarily desirable -- to disallow religious prejudice (in the strict sense of the word) in the political realm. For a progressive, if someone believes in some version of the traditional Biblical creation account, it is, to be truthful, a fairly good indicator that the person in question won't likely vote for very many progressive candidates who support abortion rights.

Likewise, a conservative knows that if someone attends a church that blesses homosexual unions, the members of that particular religious body are unlikely to vote for his own candidates of choice.

More directly, if one religious expression believes that, say, gay marriage is a positive good while another believes that it is morally wrong and will have a corrosive effect on society -- those two religious expressions are on a political collision course. One can hardly expect either group to have neutral feelings about whether the other is good for the nation.

There are always exceptions, but many of the generalities about religion and politics actually do hold true. They are not, to be sure, excuses for name-calling and slurs -- but we should realize that it took a long time for various racial slurs to become taboo, and we can't expect slurs against traditional Christianity to disappear overnight, either.

So where does Romney's LDS faith come in to all of this?

Just this: Romney's supporters aren't really doing him or his co-religionists any favors by attempting to shame into silence anyone in the GOP who raises questions about how his religion might affect how he would govern.

After all, while the emphasis in this primary campaign has been on evangelical Christians who are wary of Mormonism, this emphasis is precisely because it is a GOP primary. Weekly church attendance (of any kind -- Catholic, Protestant, LDS) has been found in the last few election cycles to be one of the strongest predictors of Republican voting patterns. So these are the kinds of things that will crop up. Before Vatican II, the same would have been true of Catholicism v. Protestantism, but huge amounts of previous differences have been swept away in recent decades -- and Protestants and Catholics always did use the same Apostles' Creed.

While Montana Headlines has been critical of Romney's social policy flips, many observers (ourselves included) have noticed that evangelical Christians are among the fastest to discount the importance of those changes in position. It is as though they have confidence in the inherent conservatism of his Mormon faith, meaning that Romney's current socially conservative positions are the real ones -- back then he said what he had to say to get elected in Massachusetts, but now he's come home and is saying what he really, at core, believes. It is not an unreasonable prejudice to have, and the argument is a fairly convincing one.

If Romney is the GOP nominee (not entirely unlikely if he wins striking victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, as may easily be the case,) then the Romney campaign can expect to deal with the issue of his religion. Not overtly -- but through internet sites, e-mails, blog comments, and other things not traceable to the Democratic campaign. That's politics.

If Romney wants to be the GOP nominee, he is going to have to prove to his party that he is going to be able to take that head-on and win a general election in spite of it. And does anyone really doubt that if the election is on the line, those who don't hesitate to deride fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity -- more likely to be adhered to by one's next-door neighbor than LDS -- will have any qualms about circulating pictures of temple garments and descriptions of some less familiar Mormon beliefs or unsavory bits of Mormon history?

And does anyone doubt that if the election is going to be a close one (for the sake of argument,) the Clinton camp will "condemn" slurs while tacitly appreciating their usefulness-- slurs that might sway enough votes in a given battleground state to turn the election?

And there, in a nutshell, is the contribution that Romney's religion makes to the question of whether he should be the GOP nominee: is it capable of swaying enough votes away from Romney to make what already promises to be an uphill general election battle into a hopeless one?

Only Romney can answer that question -- but he won't be able to answer it if his campaign only uses the technique of shaming GOP critics into silence. In the privacy of a voting booth, a very large number of people vote for the candidate they trust to hold the office in question.

It isn't enough for a candidate to create a climate where no-one will dare say anything negative in public about that candidate's faith, color, sex, marital status, or profession.

Romney has to convince a majority of voters to go into the privacy of that voting booth and choose him. Many of those voters (both religious and non-religious types) will in Romney's case have started out with a basic level of ignorance and/or distrust about LDS -- whether based on its beliefs, its history, its purported tribalism, whatever... it really doesn't matter.

His job isn't the relatively easy one of convincing Americans not to be openly bigoted toward him and his religion -- it is to convince the GOP base to come out in large numbers to crawl over broken glass to vote for him and for a majority of independents to choose him over the Democratic nominee.

Republicans have to be convinced that he can do that. Right now, we're not fully getting the opportunity to find out.

Hippies and fundies unite?

The cover story of the July issue of Reason magazine has an interesting title: The Aquarians & the Evangelicals (How left-wing hippies and right-wing fundamentalists created a libertarian America.)

Yes, as per usual with this libertarian magazine that seems to get wackier as the years go by, the article is tucked between a review of mushroom use and a sidebar piece that on the cover is labelled "Defending 'Prostitots,'" (the author explains why third-graders in thongs are just engaging in business as usual, so to speak -- nothing to worry about.)

But with a title like that, it's hard not to pull the issue off the shelf and give the rag a read. Brink Lindsey starts his article with two events held 3 days apart in the spring of 1967 -- the declaration of the "Summer of Love" in Haight-Ashbury and the dedication of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Lindsey calls each of these events "coming out parties," with 18,000 attending the Tulsa event (4000 were expected) including Oklahoma's most prominent elected officials, and an unspecified attendance at the press conference in San Fransisco for the Aquarians.

Lindsey correctly states that the two events "revealed an America [where] the postwar liberal consensus had shattered."

Vying to take its place were two sides of an enormous false dichotomy, both animated by outbursts of spiritual energy. Those two eruptions of millenarian enthusiasm, the hippies and the evangelical revival, would inspire a left/right division that persists to this day.

Lindsey writes that one set of half-truths were pitted against each other. The left, he writes, was "alive to the new possibilities created by the unprecedented mass affluence of the postwar years" but hostile to what had created the affluence that made the left's counter-culture possible.

By contrast, the right defended the institutions that created the affluence but "shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing."

One side denounced capitalism but gobbled its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.

What follows is a familiar recounting of the 1960s (perhaps useful for those who don't remember them, but otherwise nondescript) followed by the less-familiar history of the "counter-counterculture" of the evangelical revival.

There are some stylish passages, such as his concluding paragraph about the counterculture and its quasi-spiritual nexus between psychedelic drug use and political radicalism directed toward the civil-rights movement:

Guided into those transcendent realms, many young and impressionable minds were set aflame with visions of radical change. One assault after another on conventional wisdom and authority gained momentum.

Anti-war protesters, feminists, student rebels, environmentalists, and gays all took their turns marching to the solemn strains of "We Shall Overcome"; all portrayed themselves as inheritors of the legacy of Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma.

And the scent of marijuana wafted around all their efforts.

Meanwhile, in spite of the turn of the century beating it had taken, "the old-time religion did not die. In the South, in small towns and rural areas, among the less educated, the flame still burned."

The flame was directly fanned by the counterculture, to be sure, just as Lindsey says. But even more than this, evangelicals (and increasingly, traditionally-minded Christians in mainline Protestant denominations and in the American Catholic Church) watched as the old liberal social, political, journalistic, entertainment, and religious establishment crumbled before the onslaught of that counterculture, waving the white flag at every turn.

This was the same establishment that had banished "fundamentalists" to the backroads of America, and suddenly, that establishment didn't look quite so intimidating anymore.

Other factors also played a role, such as the infusion of oil wealth into families in the Southwest who saw no reason to give up the old-time religion just because they were now millionaires.

In spite of the flourishing of Christian colleges and universities during the decades that ensued, Lindsey has harsh words for evangelicals:

There is no point in mincing words: The stunning advance of evangelicalism marked a dismal intellectual regress in American religion.

...resurgent conservative Protestantism entailed a widespread surrender of believers' critical faculties. The celebration of unreason on the left had met its match on the right.

He gives a little back by acknowledging that evangelicals "summoned up the fortitude to defend a cultural position that was... worth defending." Things like family life, self-restraint, a work ethic and patriotism. He also acknowledges that most leading evangelicals were far from reactionary when it came to race -- their crusades and para-church gatherings were racially integrated long before the official church organizations were.

Lindsey sees the "Jesus Freak" movement as the beginnings of a sort of synthesis, and in the process of telling the story of the very odd Arthur Blessitt, recounts the story that it was Blessitt who led George W. Bush to become "born again" in 1984.

All interesting, but a strained analysis -- the Jesus People movement inexorably moved into mainstream evangelicalism, and had only used the language and look of the counterculture ("getting high on Jesus" and all that sort of thing) as a way of trying to attract converts from that counterculture.

Lindsey misses the fundamentally derivative character of evangelical popular culture in general -- the modern mega-church has taken this process of "Christianizing" pop-culture to an art form.

The final conclusions are equally strained -- Lindsey writes that the revival of traditional Christianity played a crucial role in the reinvigoration of capitalism in America. True enough, but then he goes on to say that this capitalism had an unintended consequence:

[It] brought with it a blooming, buzzing economic and cultural ferment that bore scant resemblance to any nostalgic vision of the good old days.

This was conservatism' curious accomplishment: Marching under the banner of old time religion, it made the world safe for the secular, hedonistic values of Aquarius.

The resulting mix is a victory for (not surprisingly) libertarianism, the only creed that encompasses fully free markets and fully hedonistic morals.

There are a few major flaws in Lindsey's conclusions, starting with the fact that a nation where most Americans labor at least a third of the year to pay their tax bill is hardly libertarian in any sense that the founders of modern libertarianism would recognize.

Lindsey's conclusions are a reflection of modern American libertarianism, which knows a lot about hemp and very little about Hayek. Everything is great because we have a mouthful of mushrooms and third-graders in thongs, but somehow the idea of resistance to the explosive and intrusive growth of government has taken a decisive back seat in libertarian circles.

Lindsey, unlike most libertarians, acknowledges the critical role that traditional thought and culture has played in defending and preserving the economic freedoms that are linked inextricably with our political liberties. But he has no explanation for why the 19th c. liberal tradition (the intellectual forbear of classical economic libertarianism) was unable to preserve the institutions that made that development of liberal (again, in the 19th c. sense) thought possible.

One recalls Paul Elmer More's biting summary of that old self-destructive liberal world: "There is something at once comical and vicious in the spectacle of those men of property who take advantage of their leisure to dream out vast benevolent schemes which would render their own self-satisfied career impossible."

As the old Liberal party in England dissolved before a surging Labour Party, a resurgent Tory/Conservative Party came to the realization that 19th c. liberalism was an anomaly that had only been rendered possible because it was perched atop a steady mass of tradition in that country. Disraeli more than perhaps anyone came to an understanding that those traditions were the possession of all Englishmen -- not just the landed or privileged classes.

Putting this in an American context, libertarians like Lindsey grasp the fact that widespread hedonism is only made possible by widespread affluence, and widespread affluence is only made possible by widespread economic freedoms.

Lindsey seems to be saying to adherents of traditional Christianity, "thanks for saving capitalism -- now hither to the backwoods where you belong!" This will leave him with his synthesis, with economic freedoms and a lack of the burdensome moral restraints of traditional Christianity.

All of this seems vaguely familiar -- a liberal consensus in politics, economics, religion... And just as the old liberal consensus crumbled in a crisis of uncertainty in the face of socialism, one suspects that this new liberal/libertarian consensus will do the same, since the dollar is not the center that holds.

If Lindsey is right, there will be another counterculture hostile to the institutions that create affluence, even though that affluence creates the leisure necessary for such a hedonistic counterculture to arise.

And then, the hillbillies with their old-time religion will need to come riding to capitalism's rescue once again.

Religion and neo-atheism

Leading into this weekend when billions of Christians around the world are commemorating the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, it was interesting to have E.J. Dionne, Jr. write an editorial about the "new vogue for what you might call neo-atheism."

In it he makes reference to an excellent essay in National Review (sorry, no link -- we had read it in the dead-tree edition) by Michael Novak called "Lonely Atheists of the Global Village." Novak reviews recent books by three self-avowed neo-atheists.

Among Novak's comments is the observation that Christians find it fairly easy to step inside the atheistic point-of-view and understand it (and have been doing so since the earliest days of Christianity,) whereas atheists seem to have little capacity for understanding or empathizing with the point-of-view of those who hold religious beliefs.

Indeed, both in Novak's review and in Hal Johnson's excellent review in the New Criterion (again, sorry, dead-tree stuff) of one of the books in question -- Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, the reviewers are struck by the condescending and dogmatic approach of this particular strain of atheism.

While they lacerate believers in general and Christians in particular (traditional Judaism is also singled out for some very harsh words in at least one of the books as well) for a supposed inability to ask themselves hard questions, it seems that atheists of this sort exhibit at least as much lack of self-examination, if not more.

Dionne agrees with this point: "But what's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions."

It is true that atheists ask hard questions of Christians -- but that's not really the point of being open-minded is it? The question is whether someone who rejects Christian belief is capable of asking hard questions of themselves. Those who reject Christian belief are every bit as capable of engaging in self-congratulatory circular reasoning (and of smugly preaching to the choir) as are the religious.

Speaking specifically of Christianity and the hard questions and struggles with doubt involved, it was certainly no more easy for an educated (or even uneducated) 1st century Jew, a 4th century Roman, or medieval Christian scholar to believe that a body dead for 3 days came back to life again than it is for a 21st century scientist.

And regarding the history of instances of inhumanity by those professing a Christian creed, Novak points out that none of the neo-atheists in question do any self-searching about the extreme brutalities and genocides carried out by avowedly atheistic regimes. Atheists would argue that those genocides were not carried out by "real atheists" like themselves, but by crazy men.

Of course, critics of Christianity do not give any credence to the Christian assertion that acts of inhumanity toward man are evidence that one is not following Christian teaching -- Christians are expected to take responsibility for brutalities committed in its name a millennium ago, while atheists feel no need to take responsibility for brutalities committed in the name of their unbelief even a few short decades ago (even when said atheists hold specifically Marxist views.)

During this weekend of commemorating the Resurrection of Christ, we would hope that even those who do not share Christian beliefs would take the time to step inside the world of thoughtful traditional Christian belief -- or back into it -- and give it the same sympathetic and open-minded hearing that Christians are urged to give to positions of skeptical unbelief.