Romney's Faith in America Speech

The much ballyhooed speech has been delivered and no doubt pundits are feverishly at it. In the meantime, Romney is exulting in a false sense that somehow he is a statesman for having delivered a "history lesson" about religious tolerance and "liberty" to the nation.

Unfortunately, Romney is neither a statesman nor historian. He might be religious but he also gets some basics pretty wrong, and to top it off, he relies on such cliche, trite, and bogus appeals about mysterious others kicking religion out of the public square that his speech is but a tired invocation of political piety, not even personal piety. As such it is but part of the eternal return of more of the same.

His message in a nutshell? "I'm one of you." The message was clearly directed at religious conservative voters that question whether a Mormon is fit for such office. In short, the speech was a traditional articulation of some basic religious conservative themes:

1) Our nation was founded on religious notions, hence we are a nation "Under God,"
2) We should uphold those notions as formative of our basic moral inheritance (and thus we should celebrate them and make them part of our public [read official] life, including having judges respect that tradition,
3) Secularism is growing, is itself a religion, and threatens our moral foundation. Religion is besieged.
4) We are a people called by God to greatness -- we are God's agents in history (at least since the founding of the nation),
5) We've gotten the separation of church and state wrong - and religion has been kicked out of the public square,
6) Reaffirmation of an American Civil Religion through a constant and persistent association of religious values with "American" values. The conservative strain of civil religion takes civil government to be based on universal religious values. Hence, Romney's move translates less into a civil religion and more into a political theology, a theo-politics grounded on the belief that being a good citizen is in essence being a good religionist because ultimately our freedoms, our form of government, what we do here, is for the greater kingdom: "When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, that oath becomes my highest promise to God."

There is great detail in the speech about how religion ought to be lived in public, but very little detail about how we are to keep government and religion separated. I've noticed that this is a classic move with religious conservatives. In Romney's case, much is made of how religion has to be inserted back into public life, but only token mention of the issue of how to avoid the inescapable conflicts sure to emerge.

I'll post comments on excerpts of the speech tomorrow.