Religion, Obama And Romney
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
Having followed Obama’s campaign pretty closely for over a year, I am probably not gauging public reaction to this Wright controversy very accurately. Except for some of the specific videos, there is literally no new information about Wright that wasn’t available last year, and presumably these videos were available back then as well. The controversy is even less remarkable to me, since TAC has covered some related matters in the past.
Of course, I should know that having these statements on camera makes all the difference in a mass media age, and it will probably come as a shock to some people, but none of this stuff–the conspiracy theories, berating the U.S. for supporting the apartheid regime, and so on–really comes as any surprise to me. Take the typical far left rant, throw in some racial animus, mix, and you will get something like this. Why is it all that shocking at this point that Obama, who has clearly always been pretty far to the left, is connected to people who are also pretty far to the left? Because until this point most pundits and journalists had bought into the myth of Obama the Reasonable, the Transcendent World Healer?
Neither does the “Black Value System” come as a revelation, so to speak, as it seems to be for so many who have just started paying attention to Obama. I find it particularly remarkable that a leading Romney booster, who went out of her way for months to minimise and downplay Romney’s religion, should be willing to take exception to what Wright has said or what Obama’s church says. In this conventional view, it should make no difference whether a candidate adheres to doctrines that tens of millions of Americans would regard as blasphemy, but it should matter to us deeply that Obama’s pastor holds some loopy views about the origin of AIDS or expresses radical political views that the candidate at least claims that he does not share. In other words, if Romney believes in theological falsehoods that are deeply offensive to Christians, it’s not supposed to be relevant to the political process (even though it inevitably was), but if Obama doesn’t believe in appalling things his pastor said it is supposed to be a major political liability for him. If Wright is ”hijacking” Christianity, shouldn’t her response to a Mormon candidate have been even more vehement?
Scrutinising what Obama believes is fair and proper, but continuing to treat his pastor’s views as if they were his or as if they must have influenced him seems strange, and it imposes a related demand on Obama to distance himself from his church to a degree that was never demanded of Romney or any other candidate. Frankly, I see this as a kind of bias against a religious convert–Obama is being held more accountable because he chose to join this particular church, while Romney was born into his (and, of course, chose to remain in it), which somehow immunised his beliefs from the same kind of media scrutiny.
Of course, voters are free to take Obama’s church and its beliefs into account when assessing the candidate, and I would defend the legitimacy of doing that just as I have in previous cases, but the people who were lecturing us just a few months ago about how inappropriate and “un-American” this sort of thing was had best keep quiet on this score if they want to have any credibility.
Daniel,
I do think that part of what’s going on here is that you’ve simply been following all of this much more closely, and for a longer time, than most Americans have been. I had read Dreher’s prediction that Rev. Wright would be Obama’s undoing, but didn’t encounter much of anyone else talking about it and so didn’t think much of it at the time. And so to see those videos, and learn about all of this in so much more detail did come as something of a shock to me – and I imagine the same goes in spades for those who are even less politically informed.
As to the differences between the ways Obama and Romney have been treated, I do think it’s worth nothing that there’s nothing that seems to be especially politically dangerous about Romney’s theological views. And so while I, for one, don’t see anything wrong with voters who wish to use religious orthodoxy as a litmus test but myself was entirely untroubled by Romney’s Mormonism, there is something importantly different in the present situation: namely, that understanding the world in the way Rev. Wright apparently does can lead quite quickly to some highly objectionable views on matters of policy. (There are, of course, plenty of matters of policy on which Romney’s positions made him utterly unpalatable as well; again, though, the key point is just that they had nothing to do with his Mormonism.) And so while I don’t in fact think that Senator Obama shares his pastor’s views on such things as, for instance, the origin of AIDS or the crack epidemic, if I did think that he shared them, I would be massively disinclined to vote in his favor, and would probably be willing to swallow hard and vote for whomever his viable opponent happened to be, even if it were McCain, Romney, or … well, perhaps not Giuliani.
This, then, is why, given the content of Rev. Wright’s sermons, it seems entirely reasonable that Obama’s religious convictions should be coming under more scrutiny than Romney’s were: while most people don’t think of Mormonism itself as entailing any especially problematic political commitments, the same clearly cannot be said for Rev. Wright’s “theology”. It is of course true that there are other ways in which Romney’s flawed policies got a “free pass” from the kinds of people who are now jumping all over Obama – but this seems to be a distinct phenomenon from their willingness to overlook Romney’s heterodoxy on matters divine.
I would add to John’s comments the fact that Romney was born into Mormonism and has probably not given it’s theology much thought, while Obama speicfically chose Wright’s church as an adult and stayed there for 20 years. Unlike for you, for most people religion is a mostly cultural and communitarian matter. Ross Douthat has repeatedly made the argument that a Mormon convert would be much more objectionable than someone born into the faith. I would agree. It is Obama’s status as convert that ties him more closely to his church’s beliefs.
Mormons have long understood that because they have a weird theology they have to act like very normal Americans in other ways. Indeed, part of Romney’s problem was that he was such a traditional normal American that many Americans found him weird.
Nobody is terribly concerned about Rev. Dr. Wright’s theology, but they are concerned about his politics, which makes up a big part of his act, and which was important in bringing Obama to his church in the 1980s when Obama was church-shopping because he had been advised that his political career required him to belong to a church.
If Obama had been running as a leftist, Wright wouldn’t be important, but Obama has been running as a non-partisan uniter and the press has been playing along. Many Americans are getting their first unfiltered glimpse of where Obama is coming from, and they are shocked by what they see.
The traditional literary archetype of the tragic mulatto involved a person of mixed heritage seeking a position in white society, but the mismatch ultimately fell apart because of the burden of concealing one’s black heritage and the “hot blooded” passions supposedly unleashed by the combination of white brains and ambition and black sexual energy.
Obama is the new tragic mulatto. While he can relate to whites, blacks demand he puts them first. He must constantly prove his loyalty to the black race, and today that loyalty is rooted in politics, a Marxist view of racial relations, hostility to whites and their welath, resentment at black underperformance in the economy and in life, and other traditional areas of criticism. Of course, if Obama did this openly, whites who have embraced his racial healer rhetoric would reject him. They want a political Sidney Poirtier who exemplifies the best in American and black society, not a hateful Al Sharpton figure. If it turns out his vagueness is just a charade to conceal the underlying hate-driven, Marxist, black nationalist reality, his support will evaporate because, even in their current state of degradation and self-hatred, even whites will not endorse their own destruction knowingly.
[...] Of course, Mr. Henley is also free to critique my posts and claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about. That’s also something that bloggers do. But I am quite sure that I said nothing of the kind. If anything, I have consistently underestimated the importance of the Wright controversy, because I didn’t think it was that new or shocking; I freely admitted that I had been following the Obama campaign more closely than a lot of “ordinary people” and so wasn’t gauging reaction to it very well. When polling started showing that damage had been done, at least temporarily, I took note of that, but prior to that I made no such bold claims about “the end of Obama.” I have been tracking state polls that show Obama falling behind McCain all over the country, but that may prove to be temporary. I have assumed that as Obama became better known to the general electorate, his numbers would decline, and I think the last two months have supported that assumption. I don’t think anyone could claim that my response to his Philadelphia speech belonged to the “Obama is doomed!” genre; it was, at most, a claim that Obama had some serious potential problems on his hands. The controversy really was damaging to Obama, but I am having difficulty finding the place where I expressed confidence that Obama was finished. Of course, it could be that I have no idea what “ordinary people” think, but that doesn’t mean that these remarks aren’t going to be politically damaging. They would be irrelevant if they did not appear to undermine one of the principal claims of the campaign (i.e., Obama’s supposed respect for opposing views) and confirm previous statements by the candidate about these kinds of questions. [...]