Madison Shockley on Romney's Mormonism: Let's Talk

Madison Shockley gets it right, I think, in his commentary at Truthdig today, asking why Mitt Romney's religious views ought to be off the table as we discuss his viability as a presidential candidate.  The beltway media want to draw a . . . sacred? . . . line around the issue of a candidate's religious views, arguing that questions about what a presidential candidate believes and what her religious body maintains are intrusive and irrelevant.

This maneuver strikes me as both fatuous and dishonest in a nation with the soul of a church, where religious themes imbue every aspect of political thinking, and where a large percentage of voters report to pollsters that they make up their minds about how to vote on the basis of what they believe as religious adherents.  Or what their church or religious organization tells them to think.

Shockley: 

A candidate’s faith does in fact matter, especially when the religious institution to which he or she belongs is involved in explicit political campaigns that affect millions of lives. Such issues as civil rights for women, immigrants and the LGBT community come immediately to mind. Roman Catholic candidates have an important clarification to make if they disagree with their church’s campaign against reproductive rights for women or to providing medical care to women in reproductive distress. They will also have to defend the position of their church favoring comprehensive immigration reform to voters opposed to such a policy. Mormon candidates have an important clarification to make if they disagree with their church’s campaign against marriage equality for LGBT folks. Southern Baptist candidates will have to explain why a secular voter should support them if they belong to a church that has a history of being racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-science.

There are times when I think mainstream media folks are simply very badly educated when it comes to matters religious and theological.  There are times when I wonder, for instance, how many reporters who babble about religion and politics could even identify Will Herberg or discuss his classic thesis about civil religion in American culture intelligently.

And there are times--the brouhaha several weeks ago about the sudden "discovery" of dominionism by the mainstream media is a case in point--when I think the "ignorance" is willful.  And it's not ignorance at all: it's a refusal on the part of the media to do the work work we expect them to do: digging, exposing, and truth-telling.  It's a way of placing sacred screens around religious beliefs that don't stand up to critical scrutiny.  And it's ultimately a way of colluding in anti-democratic, anti-progressive agendas promoted by religious bodies that many media types understand perfectly well, but on which they don't intend to blow the whistle, because they don't want to speak truth to the considerable economic and political power of organized religious groups in American culture.