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Mitt The True Believer

Here’s an interesting piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, exploring the connection between Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and his politics. Despite my theological incredulity over Mormonism’s claim, I find the communal dedication of the LDS faithful deeply admirable. And Romney was the epitome of this sort of thing. For example: Part of what makes Mormonism unique, even seductive, […]

Here’s an interesting piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, exploring the connection between Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and his politics. Despite my theological incredulity over Mormonism’s claim, I find the communal dedication of the LDS faithful deeply admirable. And Romney was the epitome of this sort of thing. For example:

Part of what makes Mormonism unique, even seductive, to Mormons is the communal ethic, the idea of an extended family that meets you wherever you move. In Cambridge, Romney was the hub. Even Mormons who are Democrats remember him fondly, in jeans more than in suits, lugging move-in ­boxes up the narrow stairs of student quarters. Though few of his church peers recall much of his spiritual testimony, they do remember his commitment. At the end of long bureaucratic meetings, he would lead a delegation to help fix an elderly parishioner’s roof: “I don’t know about you, brothers, but right now I’ve got nothing better to do than help with that roof.” Laurie Low, a friend of the Romneys, says, “You know Mitt. Needs were met.”

Romney was like a metronome for his church. On Tuesday evenings, as his Bain career was soaring, he scheduled counseling meetings with whichever teenagers in the congregation had a birthday that month. Often the conversations were witheringly dull—these were ninth-­graders: “How are you doing?” “Fine.” “How are things going with your parents?” “Fine.” But he kept at it.

And yet, there appears to have been this utilitarian side to the enterprise, one that seems to come from particular theological views:

His peers from church will often say that he was very good with teenagers, not as a confidant but as a cultural counterprogrammer, a promiser of the rewards the straight path might bring. The church’s program for teenagers includes instruction on work ethic, on modest ­attire, on personal finance, and Romney would have over for pancakes the dedicated groups that showed up to seminary lessons before school. He would invite teenagers from the church’s poorer wards to his house for dinner, let them swim in his pool, let the tangible connection between godliness and prosperity sink in.

This is a peculiarly American promise, the conviction that there is a connection between virtue and wealth. Romney would urge teenagers struggling in school not to give up, that great success was still possible; he would emphasize the practical applicability of spiritual lessons, saying, according to Bennett, “These values you are learning—empathy, honesty—will be a great aid to you in your careers.”

On a practical level, what’s wrong with that? There are worse things one could learn from one’s religion than how to be . I mean, from a traditional Christian point of view, one does not accept the faith and submit to its teachings because it brings one what the oily television divine Robert Tilton called “Success-N-Life.”

It’s unfair to compare Romney and his approach to faith to that crooked TV preacher. There’s something more subtle going on here, at least in Wallace-Wells’ telling. I keep trying to find excerpts from this profile to quote here, but it really does bear reading the whole thing. What emerges is a sense that Romney is a certain type, one familiar to both Catholics and Protestants: the organization man. It’s not that he isn’t a true believer, but rather that his beliefs are in the religion as a formula for a life of bourgeois integrity and success, with “success” defined as material prosperity and a thriving family life.

Here’s the key part of the Wallace-Wells piece:

The Democratic attacks on Romney have used his Mormonism to suggest that he is a paternalistic relic from the fifties. But Romney’s ideology was more flexible than that. The stronger strain is not traditionalism but a narrow defense of the rituals of an elite—what people should strive for, how they might get ahead. “He would say that you’ve got to work and work hard so you can get an education so you could get married and that’s the goal,” Low remembers about Romney’s work with teenagers. “To point them in a direction where we as a church believe ultimate happiness is found.”

Early this past summer, on the Jerusalem stop of a tour of Europe and Israel that presented an alarming portrait of his own purchase on global affairs, Romney began to muse to the audience at a fund-raiser at the King David Hotel about why certain countries were often much richer than their neighbors. He mentioned the “dramatic, stark” differences between the United States and Mexico, Israel and the Palestinian territories, and—a little mysteriously—Chile and Ecuador. Romney said he had been reading broadly in an effort to make sense of the differences. The way to explain the discrepancies ­between these countries’ economic ­performances, he said, was to study their cultures. “Culture,” he said, “makes all the difference.”

In many ways, Romney is a poor fit for the Republican Party right now, but in this—the certainty that American ­culture is fixed and exceptional—he matches it precisely. The party’s politics have narrowed since the evangelism of George W. Bush (“The desire for freedom resides in every human heart”). Today, its perspective is more like Romney’s: less universal, more tribal, as if a vast nation could be described as a single people with a single culture, as if material success could replicated anywhere by anyone, as if we had a script.

“Alarming”? Romney’s broad point in Jerusalem — that the culture of a nation and its people has an enormous amount to do with its material success or failure — is so obvious as to be almost unremarkable. Is it really the case, for example, that the poverty and immiseration of the Arab Muslim world has nothing to do with their culture — that is, with their way of thinking about religion, social roles, shame and honor, and so forth? It’s true in our own country as well. A culture that devalues education, hard work, and self-discipline — especially sexual self-discipline (e.g., no having or making babies outside of marriage) — is not going to be as successful as one that teaches its people to value these things. It’s simply not true that all cultures do all things equally well. As Romney put it yesterday in a speech in New York:

When I was in business, I traveled to many other countries.  I was often struck by the vast difference in wealth among nations.  True, some of that was due to geography.  Rich countries often had natural resources like mineral deposits or ample waterways.  But in some cases, all that separated a rich country from a poor one was a faint line on a map.  Countries that were physically right next to each other were economically worlds apart.  Just think of North and South Korea.

I became convinced that the crucial difference between these countries wasn’t geography.  I noticed the most successful countries shared something in common.  They were the freest.  They protected the rights of the individual.  They enforced the rule of law.  And they encouraged free enterprise.  They understood that economic freedom is the only force in history that has consistently lifted people out of poverty – and kept people out of poverty.

A temporary aid package can jolt an economy.  It can fund some projects.  It can pay some bills.  It can employ some people some of the time.  But it can’t sustain an economy—not for long.  It can’t pull the whole cart—because at some point, the money runs out.

That said, the problem with this, at least from a Christian point of view, is the idea that bourgeois success is the goal of the religious life. In fact, Christianity teaches something rather different. The central event in Christianity — the execution of God, and His resurrection — puts the fundamental injustice of life, and the ability to overcome it spiritually, at the center of the faith. The most honored men and women in the Christian faith aren’t its kings and merchants, but those who lost everything, even their lives, for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.

And yet, to the extent Wallace-Wells’s portrait of Romney accurately reflects the man’s relationship to his faith, it seems to me a pretty accurate description of the way many conservative American Christians live: Christianity as what successful bourgeois people do. Follow the rules, conform, and you will have success in life. The thing is, there’s some truth in that. If your religion helps you to learn self-discipline, the habits of good stewardship, modesty, and communal devotion, then whether it’s true or not, it will leave you and your children better off. Note well that this is a sociological point, not a theological one. Despite the strange theology of the Mormon religion, it seems to me in practice to be close to how conservative American Christians of all churches live.

I consider it a critical lack of vision for a religious leader to reduce the religious life to How To Be A Better Bourgeois. I’m not at all sure, though, that this is a fatal quality in a political leader of a middle-class liberal democracy. The thing about Romney — and this comes through in the Wallace-Wells piece — is that he appears to believe that prosperity is a sign of one’s status as elect. There is, of course, an old tradition of that in modern Christianity, predating Mormonism. One may question, though, the wisdom of this philosophical orientation in a time of great economic suffering in the country, and of the enormous accumulation of riches at the top of the social pyramid.

What does Romney think about those who have been life’s losers? What is the community’s obligation to them? How is a president of a diverse people and the leader of the most powerful nation in a fractious world, to exercise his responsibilities? Has Romney’s religion helped him develop a more comprehensive social vision, or hindered him?

More to the point: What happens when the formula fails? The foreign policy and economic ideology of the Republican Party failed during the Bush presidency. Something went wrong, badly wrong — and the Republican Party has not recovered from it. It has doubled down on true-believing, and in that, the GOP has the nominee it deserves. Wallace-Wells:

In many ways, Romney is a poor fit for the Republican Party right now, but in this—the certainty that American ­culture is fixed and exceptional—he matches it precisely. The party’s politics have narrowed since the evangelism of George W. Bush (“The desire for freedom resides in every human heart”). Today, its perspective is more like Romney’s: less universal, more tribal, as if a vast nation could be described as a single people with a single culture, as if material success could replicated anywhere by anyone, as if we had a script.

Romney’s problem is peculiar: GOP true believers think he doesn’t really hold the conservative faith in his heart, but many outsiders think he’s an unreflective apostle for a failed ideology.

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