Prof. Fox, long-time friend of Eunomia, has offered up what he would say in Romney’s place tomorrow, which I think will noticeably outshine Romney’s own address in thoughtfulness and intelligence.  Here is a smart, interesting excerpt:

“Secularism” is much broader and much more complicated than the reductive, simplistic antisectarianism that some atheists preach, an antisectarianism that assumes everything religious is ultimately sectarian, part of a program to move the world in the direction of some very specific God or dogma. This is not the case. The secularism that properly adheres to the American character–a secularism which involves civility, toleration, human decency and human rights–is not a secularism that ever did or ever should launch crusades against sects, whether they be Catholic or Presbyterian or Southern Baptist, assuming those organizations break no democratically-determined laws; it is a secularism that rather emerged alongside a broadly Christian understanding of what the plurality of sects means for a society.

I don’t see a former venture capitalist using such words as metaphysics and antisectarianism, but if Romney were to give Prof. Fox’s speech he would come out of this episode with a reputation for serious thought.  Politically, it could go well, when he says:

I want to emphasize that I think it is perfectly possible to legitimately vote against a candidate on the basis of their religion; I know that, even in the simple and straightforward ways in which my daily beliefs have shaped my life, there is ground for criticism and doubt.

By not denying legitimacy to such opposition, the candidate could appear at once gracious and thoughtful.  Then again, it could suddenly take a bad turn, especially when he says:

But I take the American people seriously enough to believe that they will recognize and respond to an expression of faith which is Christian first and foremost, and sectarian second. 

This is one of the major claims on which the entire controversy, such as it is, turns, this emphasis on “faith which is Christian first and foremost.”  Would Romney want to give the impression that supporting him implied an endorsement of Mormonism as Christianity?  If one of the principal reasons for evangelicals and other Christians’ anxiety about and hostility to a Mormon candidate is the fear that his nomination or election would promote Mormonism as “just another denomination,” or something of the kind, this line is almost guaranteed to confirm these voters in their opposition. 

My initial response is that a speech given in this register would satisfy only those history and divinity professors and the philosophy and religious studies majors who would really, fully grasp what he was saying.  (This is partly because I think an average voter who hears the word  “sectarian” thinks about “sectarian violence” in Iraq and elsewhere and will be made more anxious about talk of sectarians in America; I don’t assume the vast majority to be in possession of a deep and abiding understanding of post-Reformation European history, whether they are religious or secular.)  I think there are problems with Prof. Fox’s description of secularism above (a practical one being that it is embraced by a fairly small and, I would guess, shrinking constituency of humane secularists and scholarly believers), but these are problems that I don’t think a majority of the country would necessarily see or consider to be problems.

This predicament really is a trap for Romney, as I and others have observed before: if he stresses what he has in common with Christian voters, he will be criticised for not being forthright and honest enough about his own religion, and if he acknowledges difference he is probably dooming himself to electoral oblivion by alienating Christian voters.  Yet recent polling shows that he is damaged even more by his evasiveness and reluctance to speak on the matter, which fits into the narrative that he is inauthentic (some might even say fraudulent).  Perhaps if Romney himself were not such an obviously protean, shape-shifting sort of candidate on his policy views, his unwillingness to speak about his religion would have appeared as wisdom and discretion, instead of coming across as yet another example of his inability to give a straight answer to a question.  (The good news for him is that he has not yet said that he would consult “the lawyers” about whether he believes in God.)  

Update: Pew has new polling on public attitudes about Mormonism.  Pew’s polling shows a significantly higher percentage overall who would be less likely to vote for a candidate on account of Mormonism than the L.A. Times poll does.  The response is strongest, as we have seen previously, among white evangelicals (36% are less likely vs. the overall 25%) and weekly church-going evangelicals in particular (41%). 

Second Update: My Scene colleague Noah Millman offers a different kind of speech for Romney that is more likely to succeed politically, but which pretty carefully avoids saying anything definite about his religion.  I have to say that Noah actually captures Romney’s love of patriotic gushing quite well.  If you wanted to make it really sound like Romney (which I know Noah wasn’t trying to do), you would need to insert at least three or four “goshes” into the speech, as in, “Gosh, this country is the greatest.”  Or, as Romney actually said during one of the debates:

Gosh, I love America…. America for me is not just our rolling mountains and hills and streams and great cities. It’s the American people. And the American people are the greatest people in the world. What makes America the greatest nation in the world is the heart of the American people….It is that optimism about this great people that makes this the greatest nation on earth. 

Ediitor and Publisher(via Sullivan) has a round-up of some of the more egregiously wrong statements on Iran’s nuclear program from various prominent pundits and think tank “experts.”  Somehow one of the most ridiculous of them all seems to have faded into obscurity.  It was such a gem of hysterical alarmism that it deserves to be brought to our attention again.  I mean, of course, Bernard Lewis’ warning of the coming Apocalypse (which, as you may have noticed, did not arrive).  He already took it as a given that Iran had or soon would have nuclear weapons:

It seems increasingly likely that the Iranians either have or very soon will have nuclear weapons at their disposal, thanks to their own researches (which began some 15 years ago), to some of their obliging neighbors, and to the ever-helpful rulers of North Korea. The language used by Iranian President Ahmadinejad would seem to indicate the reality and indeed the imminence of this threat.

You would think that no one would take what Ahmadinejad said as an indicator of the reality of anything.  Yet that was a significant part of the basis for Lewis’ speculation.  The rest of the article explained why the regime’s apocalypticism was so intense that traditional nuclear deterrents would not be enough to stop Iran from using its weapons…three years after Tehran had apparently yielded to the far more intimidating powers of the IAEA.

Back on the fateful day when nothing happened, I wrote:

Of course, in Iran’s case there is a real possibility of using a civil nuclear program to create a weapons program, and Iran has strategic interests that make acquiring these weapons understandable and even, in a sense, rational.  They might, like Pakistan did, be playing the world for fools, buying time and waiting for the moment to unveil their nuke program.  But what is so amazing about the entire debate going on in the West is that none of us–including the government that supposedly “knows more than we do” as the delightfully servile phrase has it–has any reliable information to confirm this theory, except that we think their President is looney, our government despises theirs and many of us actually believe that Iranians–and we’re talking about Iranians here–are some set of wild-eyed, suicidal maniacs who will just as soon annihilate themselves in some kamikaze nuclear war as look at us.  In just the same way that the government railroaded the country into a war in Iraq on premises that were always preposterous, the administration and a sizeable part of the population of this country are once again positive that they know what Iran intends, when we are merely supposing and guessing–just as we did with Iraq.  In fact, what is going on is the making of policy based in paranoia and fear, which is by definition not all together rational or well considered.

Of course, as long as we have an establishment preoccupied with the supposed “Iranian threat,” we will never have a rational Iran policy, because perceiving Iran as a threat to the United States is grossly mistaken and leads to all manner of wrong conclusions about what our policy should be.  So long as our government considers Iran our enemy, when it is not our natural enemy, we will keep pursuing the wrong course of action.  On the question of Iran’s nuclear program, Peter Hitchens made some appropriately skeptical comments for TAC after visiting Iran:

I am not equipped to judge such things technically. I could not tell uranium from plutonium or a centrifuge from a capacitor. But I have been subjected to enough state-sponsored panics about evil dictators and weapons of mass destruction to have become a little dubious when I am told that a Middle Eastern state is plotting my imminent death or a first strike on Tel Aviv. And I have become aware that many real, well-informed experts are highly skeptical about Iran’s ability in this field. The Tehran government appears to exaggerate the number of centrifuges it has in operation. Its capacity to enrich uranium is pitifully short of that needed to produce weapons-grade material. Its elderly nuclear reactor at Bushehr has yet to produce a watt of electricity after more than 30 years. Iran’s claim to need nuclear energy may not be false. This supposed energy superpower imposes frequent power blackouts, as I can confirm from personal experience.

The Iranian state is, in any case, famous among its own people for being very bad at delivering grand projects. Tehran’s new Khomeini Airport has just opened after 30 years under construction. A supposedly ultra-modern TV and telecommunications tower stands unfinished on the capital’s skyline after 20 years of work. Several cities, promised metro-rail systems years ago, have yet to see a single train run. Tehran’s metro, sorely needed in that traffic-strangled megalopolis, is operating a few lines, but they opened years late, and there are far too few of them.  

The latest news about the apparent suspension of any weapons program suggests that there may be a new opportunity for taking the first steps in rapprochement with Tehran, which could provide a way out of Iraq for us as well.

This post makes an important point that has been lost in the back and forth over the NIE and the reaction, mine included, focused on who benefits from the news: the latest report simply confirms what reasonably well-informed citizens could have gleaned from basic news reports over the last several years, and so long as an interventionist mentality grips Washington and so long as Washington persists in portraying Iran as a threat to our national security no intelligence report, no matter how bluntly it contradicts the claims of those who want to promote conflict with Iran, will change the inclination of supporters of launching military strikes.  (Indeed, the President remains open to such strikes against Iran.)  Those of us who remember just how shoddy and wrong the 2002 NIE on Iraq was should be very cautious about waving around intelligence reports that happen to favour our view (though there is some reason to think that the latest report was more rigorously and responsibly sourced and checked than previous reports). 

Fundamentally, the question in 2002, like the question today, was not really one about what a weak government of a small state on the other side of the planet was able to build, but whether you believe that such a state posed a threat to the United States even if it had been able to build all of the things that interentionists claimed and had, in fact, built them.  Concerning Iraq, the answer was pretty transparently that it didn’t, and the answer about the “Iranian threat” should have been the same all along.  In the present political climate, conceding the claim that a given regime poses a threat to U.S. national security is to concede the entire argument about what should be done–it yields the initiative to those inclined to a military response and hamstrings the opposition, just as the pre-war opposition was hamstrung during the Iraq debate.  The opposition seemed trapped into beginning every sentence with the caveat, “Yes, Hussein is a monster and poses a grave threat to our country, but…”  Any debate on Iran policy that starts with the assumption that Iran is a threat and an enemy of our country will usually have just two possible ends: war or a punitive sanctions regime.     

Remember how the administration used uncertainty and lack of information about Iraq’s WMD programs to conjure up the worst possible scenarios and present these scenarios as if they were reasonable and plausible?  This was one of the most consequential arguments from silence made in recent times.  Then there was, of course, the technically correct and rhetorically unethical line from Rumsfeld, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”  Those who are intent on stirring up conflict with these states as a matter of policy and as a means of overthrowing their governments will take whatever information they may find and exaggerate its importance, or they will take a lack of information as proof that the other government is hiding something and “deceiving the world.”  Once it is taken as a given that the other government is a purely malevolent player on the world stage and one that cannot be checked by the creation of incentives and disincentives, every action or any lack of action on the part of the other government will be fitted into a story that portrays the other government as a danger.  Even when it is confirmed beyond a doubt that the weapons programs of a regime were dismantled or inactive, as we discovered them to be in Iraq, you will still have people who will invoke some vague, future potential danger from the regime.

There an idea out there that supporting Huckabee “really” lends support to Giuliani, but what this idea does is to boost Romney by advancing claims that aren’t necessarily true.  It tells you that the only person who can “stop Giuliani” is Romney, and it justifies this claim on the shaky ground that Romney, whose definite support in South Carolina is very limited (see page 11), is in a position to compete against Giuliani, who is supposedly in a position to dominate the race without a heroic Romney to stand in his way.  Don’t you believe any of it.  Huckabee today ties Giuliani in Rasmussen’s daily national tracking poll.  Now I don’t think much of national polls, but if they have justified labeling Giuliani a “frontrunner” for all these months, they now justify calling Huckabee a co-frontrunner.  (As of right now, it appears as if Romney peaked in early October and Giuliani peaked in mid-October, with the latter shedding five points in the last week and dropping below 20% for only the second time in the last two months.)

Also, South Carolina voting is strongly influenced by what happens in earlier contests, and on the Republican side the Iowa winner tends to win in South Carolina as well.  This has usually worked to the advantage of the party establishment’s favourite, but this cycle things are much more scrambled and divided than usual.  The profiles of the GOP electorates in Iowa and South Carolina are similar enough that a surging Huckabee could also do quite well in S.C. if he could win in Iowa, assuming Huckabee could get some money for advertising during late December and early January.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for pro-life voters to remember this guy named John McCain. ~Matt Yglesias

In a different cycle, this might have actually happened.  David Corn has made a similar proposal, arguing that McCain is in a good position because he is just marginal enough now that other candidates aren’t attacking him, but he has the credentials, at least “on paper,” to appeal to the party.  Corn makes the good point that McCain should have reserves of support based on his views on the war and the political support he has lent the war over the years.  I think he is grudgingly respected because of this among core Republican voters, but it doesn’t outweigh what they see as his flaws.  “The answer is right in front of your face!” Corn declared to Republican voters, but I don’t think they are going to go that route.  As Jim Pinkerton reminded Corn during that episode, immigration and campaign finance reform (important to the activists who have an outsized impact in Iowa) are the dealbreakers for McCain.  Unlike Huckabee, whose immigration views are probably still not widely known, and unlike Giuliani, who can pretend that he cares about border security, McCain has been the standard-bearer for deeply unpopular immigration legislation and his allies (such as Graham) pushed for that legislation by denouncing the party base as racists.  Being on the wrong side of the party on immigration is politically dangerous enough in the primaries this cycle, but McCain is prominently and inextricably linked with one of the most hated pieces of legislation of the last ten years.  He might turn in a decent result in New Hampshire, given the role of independents in the primary and his history of popularity in that state, but the virtual consensus at the end of summer that he was finished was probably right.

P.S.  Of course, I have had such a lousy track record this cycle of picking winners and losers that whenever I am ready to dismiss a candidate, he begins to make a comeback, and when I predict a candidate’s victory it is a sure sign of his impending doom.  For instance, the RCP national average shows McCain gaining.

Slightly related to our modern theologically-inflected political controversies, my copy of Nicaea and its Legacy by Lewis Ayres arrived today.  I haven’t looked at it before, but I’ve heard many good things about it.  The fourth century controversies are fairly intimidating in their complexity even to those of us who spend our waking hours contemplating the significance of monotheletism.  We who work on the seventh century have the luxury, so to speak, of a paucity of sources and limited prosopographical information, so we are not simply inundated with information, and the fourth century looms so large and has been the focus of so many works that it quite an undertaking to put forward another general interpretation.  I look forward to reading it during vacation this month.

Romney seems eager to tie himself to the administration position on Iran:

Acknowledging some good news in a recently released National Intelligence Estimate saying Iran stopped actively pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003, Mitt Romney said the country remains a threat, even with only a peaceful nuclear energy program. “They, of course, are continuing making the ingredients which would be used in a nuclear weapon,” Romney told Politics Nation today. “If they had stopped both I would feel a great deal more confident about their intentions. But their continuing to produce enriched uranium is of great concern to the world.”

Essentially, Romney’s position is that sanctions have worked, so he concludes that continuing to engage in punitive sanctions is obviously the thing to do.  In other words, Iran should be punished when we think they’re developing nuclear weapons, and Iran should be punished when we know with some confidence that they aren’t.  Apparently, Iran should always be punished.  That pretty well sums up Romney’s views.  You can imagine that he would say the same thing if Iran gave up the fuel cycle all together: “They might start up a program in the future, so they’re still a threat, if only in my mind.” 

Romney made clear that the NIE would not have too much influence on his thinking about Iran:

My perspective on matters of importance is that you don’t look for a homogenized view. You look for people who have different perspectives and you want to listen to the debate between them and see the basis of their thinking.

In short, he will listen to more accurate information as well as listening to nonsense as if they were equally valid sources.

Ralph Peters says something that doesn’t drive me up the wall (for a change):

Our instinctive response is to praise the results of Sunday’s balloting in Venezuela and question the same day’s results from Russia. But, dirty politics notwithstanding, democracy worked in both places: It just worked differently – because the two electorates wanted different things.

It’s a shocking idea, I know, but it might just catch on.  He then goes on to make this a vindication of a thesis of global democratisation, which I find less compelling.  This seems not to take account of the billions of people who are not living in functionally democratic states.  Further, it seems to take no account of the understanding that global democratisation is generally a very bad thing for political freedom.  Also, the willingness of authoritarians to ratify their policies with plebiscites and elections is hardly new, and represents the easy coexistence between democracy and despotism.  Democracy may or may not sweep the world, but if it does the chances for real political liberty in the world will have gone down dramatically.  This is one reason why I have never understood the enthusiasm for democratisation, and why those who have dubbed it the “freedom agenda” have always been on the wrong track (assuming, that is, that they were ever genuinely interested in promoting liberalism, which I don’t assume).  Even if democratisation “works,” liberty will typically be the loser.

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Monday that he would not focus on his Mormon beliefs in a major speech on religion this week and instead would discuss his concern that “faith has disappeared from the public square.” ~The Los Angeles Times

So, after all of our fevered speculation about why Romney was going to address questions about his religion at this politically sensitive time, “The Speech” is going to be “some speech on religion.”