Consumption Rules

In response to this article on realclearpolitics.com, I sent the author, Mark Davis the following email:

I appreciate your respectful article, “Romney Can’t Ignore Questions About Mormonism,” and think your analysis is intriguing. I think your article from February 14, 2007, “Romney’s Mormonism & the GOP Primary” painted an even clearer picture for me, although I disagree with your thesis.

We hope for candidates who are thoughtful, careful, and considerate in promoting and implementing viable policies that are truly for the good of the people. The realm of politics is constantly battling this “Rewarding A while hoping for B” phenomenon, while we actually favor the best sloganeerists and the candidates who promise the most (while everyone knows it won’t be delivered). We would do well to better research all candidates we hope to elect for the highest position in the nation (the world?).

To scrutinize the religious beliefs of candidates, while an important standard that should be held high for all candidates, requires, I think, a little more care and consideration. I think you would be hard pressed to find any religion that didn’t contain some doctrines or beliefs that, when held under the microscope, didn’t seem entirely ridiculous when taken at its face value, entirely because religion deals with all truth, while science and “objective history” have yet to hit those fringes. Some religions have become so familiar that we now accept their “ridiculous” explanations for the dealings of the cosmos.

While I agree with you that we will have to wait and see how the voting public reacts to their newfound exposure to Mormonism, I disagree with your assertion that Mr. Romney has to defend the finer points of his faith. Like you said, “A candidate’s faith is of no consequence to me unless it harbors the possibility of guiding his or her actions in a way I would disapprove of.” Romney’s strategy of deferring questions about the beliefs of the church that don’t influence him on specific public policy to the church itself is a wise one, and is the strategy essentially held by all candidates — the issue just doesn’t come up with candidates who belong to older, more familiar, religions. Let the religion address the politically-benign policies itself, or let Americans find out about the religion from people they know personally, the way you did.

If Romney were to open the debate about each fine point of his religion, it would open him up to criticism that would break down his logic and make him look like a fool for believing such “ridiculous” things, the same way it would if any candidate was stupid enough to do that. The same thing happens when a candidate proposes an overly-detailed plan to correct an important and distressed public policy. The 20 percent that will “blast right past Mr. Romney’s message to evaluate the attributes of his rivals” is a small percentage compared to the potential windfall of a candidate over-explaining, or over-justifying him or herself, and is probably comparable to the groups that will “blast right past” the messages of every other candidate.

We’ll wait and see if America is ready for a Mormon President, but Mitt Romney doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, explain the finer points of his religious beliefs as a candidate for President.

Share This

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

(Somewhat) Similar Posts: