Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Voting, Religion, and Public Officials:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_13-2009_09_19.shtml#1253328959
Further to Chief Conspirator Eugene's post below on religion and
public officials, I tried my best to answer that question in an
article on Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee during the primary in the
Weekly Standard. The first part is pure snark - Andrew Sullivan called
it political essay of the year, fwiw - but the last part is a pretty
serious attempt to address Eugene's question. At risk of tooting my
own horn more than usual, I think it is one of the better thingss I've
written in the last few years - meaning by that the answer to the
question I gave in the second half of the piece. It touched some kind
of chord at the time, because besides Andrew Sullivan, I got
appreciative notes from Aryeh Neier and a conservative pastor who told
me that he was surprised to see in a secular magazine of any kind a
literal imprecation - and not, so far as he could tell, meant merely
ironically. As he said, was your editor at the WS aware that in its
pages you called down the wrath of heaven? Literally? Well, yes, my
editor was perfectly aware of it - that's why he didn't cut anything
out of the 6,000 words. The last half goes to Eugene's question, in
the form of a debate between Mitt Romney and his famous religion
speech (which I accuse of conservative multiculti relativism),
Huckabee, and Christopher Hitchens. [1]Mormons, Muslims, and
Multiculturalism. Abstract from SSRN:
This essay (6,000 words), which appeared in the Weekly Standard
ostensibly as a comment on Mitt Romney's religion speech of
December 2007, contains something to offend nearly everyone. It
bluntly attacks presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his
evangelical followers for their demand for a Christian president,
and calls them religious bigots.
The essay also rejects, however, a central claim of Romney's
religion speech, that all religious doctrines are beyond criticism
or political argument - asserting that Romney, in the attempt to
insulate himself from any questions of religion, has endorsed what
might be called conservative multiculturalism and moral relativism.
The essay argues that this is a disastrous move not just for
American conservatives, but for American politics more generally,
and urges that liberal toleration has to be understood not as a
form of relativism putting religious doctrine beyond scrutiny but
instead as a liberal suspension of public judgment on matters that
one might well believe one entitled to judge in private. In effect,
if the question is what parts of a candidate's religious beliefs
are properly subject to public political scrutiny, Huckabee and his
evangelical followers say all-in; Romney says, all-out. Neither of
those can be considered the answer of liberal toleration. The essay
then proposes, in its second half, three rough rules of thumb for
determining whether a proposition of religion believed by a
candidate for public office ought to be considered fairly open for
political discussion.
An enormously important reason why it matters that a liberal
democracy get these answers right, the essay concludes, is that it
matters today, in the world as it stands today, to be able to ask
these questions of Islam, and of Muslim candidates. The answers to
important questions - relations of church and state, apostasy, free
expression, the status of women and gays, etc. - cannot simply be
set aside. Either voters will not trust Muslim candidates and will
simply refuse to elect them, because they are not allowed, under
rules of multicultural political correctness (including Romney's
conservative multiculturalism), to ask these questions - or we can
put these questions properly on the table, while at the same time
having liberal grounds for ignoring questions of doctrine having no
substantial bearing on public policy. The former will save
everyone's delicate feelings; only the latter, however, will
provide the path for full participation in a democratic political
community. (This essay is an unabashed, unapologetic jeremiad and
it angered many readers when it first appeared.)
References
1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1078622
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