Making Sense of Mitt

The premise of aggressively secularist cultural/legal forces seems to be: Rid the public square of religion, and there will be peace in our time. As Jonathan points out, there are literally tens of millions of bodies buried in shallow graves to refute this claim. Nonetheless, the claim persists, and because of it, we get absurd efforts to expunge religion from the public square, whether it's sanitized "holiday" carols in our schools, "family" trees for sale at major retailers, or lawyers with with a Taliban-esque zeal to remove offending religious symbols from the public landscape.

This is an effort that distresses religious conservatives. And so Mitt, trying to make common cause with Christian voters, decided to take aim against it. He noted, too, that this movement is, ironically, "a religion" -- not in the sense that it is godly, but in the sense that its tenets are accepted by many as a matter of faith, and pursued with a rabid zeal by the more devoutly unfaithful. Surely a Michael Newdow wants to impose his "religion" on society at least as much as a Jerry Falwell.

The bigger point, I suspect, that Romney was trying to make is that we shouldn't assume that secularism is the default, or "neutral" position in public debate, as its proponents often assume it to be. It is one "religious" world view among many vying for influence in the marketplace of ideas. This doesn't mean we "can't tolerate" secularism; it just means that believers ought not be intimidated into thinking they have to renounce their faith in order to participate in public life. Moreover, Romney tried to take head-on the secularist notion that religion is the world's greatest threat to freedom, noting that the nation's liberties explicitly derive from the founders' belief that we are endowed by a Creator with certain inalienable rights.

Jonathan is spot-on when he writes that Romney is "aligning himself with the forces of fundamentalism in order to have a common enemy (secularism) and distract his religious opponents from their differences." True enough. But since when is building alliances a bad thing in politics? Would it be better if Romney were trying to inflame and exploit religious differences?

The "War on Christmas" types may indeed be a "small number of easily offended," but to leave the description of them at that is to grossly understate their cultural and legal influence. When they successfully agitate to dictate the marketing practices of major corporations, the curricula of major school districts, and the political agenda of major municipalities, it's hardly wrong for those who disagree to stand up in protest.

Nor is it wrong for religious believers of all kinds to observe that their values are less threatened by fellow believers of different faiths than by a subset of secularists who have proven themselves to be mightily intolerant. If Romney's point is that Christians have far more to fear from the likes of the ACLU than from a Mormon in the White House, he couldn't be more right.