Washblog

Mitt did that.

As does every candidate who throws their hat in the ring, Mitt is saying "Here I am. Send me."

... which means literally in the tradition of Job, "consider your servant Mitt. There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil."

It does not take Satan to be the single sceptic to open the door into Mitt's private world.

It takes civic-minded citizens who know that one  who thrusts himself into the civic scene is automatically subject to scrutiny.

Mitt is right in that the many who consider themselves "conservative" Christians but who are in effect fundamentalist evangelical literalists are absolutely and foolishly wrong when they - like the late Jerry Falwell declared that "you are a failure as a human being if you are not a born again Christian."

The five or six people who know me well will confirm to you that I am no longer a member who was an LDS literalist guided by religious assumptions about reality, spiritual warfare, who sat on the fence in the pre-existence and therebye earned a lesser quality of birth for being a fence-sitter.

They will also tell you that I am still without equivocation a cultural and spiritually-defined Mormon. This in the same sense that a Native American raised within his culture by a family and community that holds to its traditions does  remain Native American while also engaged in the broader culture of his country.

In this case, when it comes to a "broader culture," that culture can be and usually is "wiser" about what's best for country than someone defined from within a sub-culture.

Someone from within a sub-culture - and Romney is an excellent and classic example - takes upon one's self an obligation to demonstrate a credible blend of the positive attributes of the  sub-culture as it relates to, connects with and influences the broader culture.

Romney has failed in that regard.

His most recent attempt to mimic the 1960 Kennedy speech was a dismal attempt and broad failure at mimicry. That because you can mimic the speech but not the context.

What MADE Kennedy's speech was the second half of what was said, not his putting in place his Catholicism and relationship to the Vatican. What struck the country in an exceedling wise and teaching way was his public and unchallenged assertion of the separation between church and state.

Romney could not do that in today's social/political context.

Worse, Romney has an even more difficult problem in asserting the positive civic nature of Mormonism while at the same time presenting an honest advocy of his religion.

Mitt needs to create honest and open apologetic discourse about himself as a loyal, wise and civic-minded American citizen who is in fact as much American and he is Mormon.

In the early months of Romney's candidacy I toyed with supporting Mitt and  connecting with his state campaign to get involved. But I didn't because it did not take long before I saw Mitt  demonstrate the same self-serving behavior that more resembled Bill Fritts, Tom Delay, Bill O'Reilly and Flush Limbaugh. His candidacy is  giving us a supposedly more competitive "religious" version of Giuliani than he is Kennedy, Bob Dole or even the patriarchal image of Eisenhower.

Mitt's Mormon patriarchal male "presidingship" image would hav been more consistent with Eisenhower's "presiding elder" image than his toadying to religious right foolishness and its end-times literalness that belongs in Halloween-night scary movies and nowhere else.

Instead, what we've gotten - whether Mormons like it or not - is ultimately one of the most transparently shallow promise-anything-to-anyone candidates this country has seen.

Spiritually, in attempting to be wise as a serpent yet gentle as a dove, Mitt has been neither. He's behaved in a slick and slimy way that suggests something more toady than serpent and more vulture than dove.

I think America could benefit from a genuine faith-based religious president who would be president first and foremost;

who would demonstrate serpent wisdom and cunning while at the same time dove-like understanding he/she presides over a multi-cultural and multi-spiritual nation ...

that citizens of the nation are not equivocators about their religions beliefs and do not need an equivicator to preside.

The last three of the Joseph Smith's 13 Articles  of Faith read like this:

We claim the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.

We believe in being honest, true, chaste,benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul--We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things.

If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.

In his previous life prior to politics Mitt was a Mormon Bishop who later was called to be a Mormon Stake President. These are patriarchal callings at the most significant and influential local levels. They include a mantle of all that is deemed worthy of Biblical, Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenant portrayals of God-inspired leadership.

The LDS President of mine and Mitt's generation was David O. McKay. One of his repeated memes came out of his own missionary experience where he came across a statement chiseled over a doorway or archway in a castle somewhere in England, Ireland or Scotland. It reads,

"What e're thou art, act well thy part."

In my previous lifetime as an active and  practicing Mormon patriarch, I remember many bishops and stake presidents who acted well their part

• from the grandfatherly first bishop I can actually remember,

• to a much younger Bishop who - when I was about to turn 19 - called me out of my teenage rebellion against the church and helped persuade me to accept a mission call that changed my life

• to the sophisticated bishop my own age who - when I presided over my own growing family in Houston - demonstrated an integrated spirituality that effectively portrayed what it means to be "in this world but not of this world."

As I perceived them, none of those Mormon patriarchs would have said the things Mitt has said in the name of political expediency.

None of them would have sought political support from the radical religious sources that in fact preach a morality that does not belong in the same paragraph with the Sermon on the Mount, The Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.

None of them would have advocated tripling Guantanamo with a slick half-smile using words meant for a very limited listening audience.

From the literalist point of view Mormons need to understand that the scriptural leadership roles and preaching models in the Book of Mormon do not demonstrate the lack of political courage demonstrated by Romney who has repeatedly slipped-up and revealed a shallow willingness to be all things to all people and none to himself and his own people.

Mitt does not seem to want to be elected because he stands for something, but because he has a compromised and conditional political support from too many civically diluted sources.

The blindly literalist religious "conservatives" who foolishly placed a politically incompentent and religiously hypocritical candidate in the White House in 2000 and 2004 aren't there anymore.

They are not going to make the same mistake three times regardless of what Mike Huckabee - who is more in tune with the politically-religious breeze than is Mitt - manages to accomplish.

If Republican literalist Christians again choose to vote as a block with a candidate who reflects their limited world view, it is not Mitt who represents that view, but Huckabee. It would also have been Brownback, but not Romney.

That leaves Mitt in an image and style contest with Giuliani, but not with McCain who is far more presidential material than either of them,

or Fred Thompson who has done nothing but come across as the sleepy, ancient and lazy pontificator who would wake up to his reponsibilities only after the crisis had passed and someone else had saved the country.

Which - by the way - suggests a comment about the old-timers who are the Lord's appointed leaders of the LDS church.

They are left in circumstance that does not mesh well with the political ambitions of their more prominent or notorious members.

The primary reason being that in most areas of Mormon life (exemplified by the teachings and sermons of Apostle Packer), independence and critical thinking are not encouraged. Members who do so are likely to discover the hole in the corral fence and wander off into the real world where they might discover equally green pastures out there.

These critical thinkers then become a danger to shallowly literalist Mormons in their own  congregations who would be tempted by reason and logic to start thinking critically themselves - and maybe start doubting.

The old Apostle patriarchs are not the commanders nor demanders of lock-step behavior that Mormon critics make them out to be. They are not going to tell Mitt what to do and when to do it.

They don't have to. Lock step thinking is enforced at the local level with far greater power and influence than anything coming out of Salt Lake City. There is nothing like social conformity to get folks to act or even move against there own self interest.

Kansas?
Doesn't compare at all to the Wasatch Front, particulary Provo and Orem.

Romney's speech was not misleading when he declared his independence from Salt Lake.

The question that remains would be what would Mitt do if an LDS prophet/president were to announce an event much more politically dramatic and demanding than even that of (1978) giving equal opportunity and membership to all races?

Would Mormons behave like political Republican Catholics who advocated no communion for John Kerry because he was liberal and Democrat?

Would they do that?

What would rank and file literalist Mormon supporters of Romney do to exert political pressure on their Brother president?

In such a scenario, a moment would come when a President Romney might have to turn his back on his most devout block of support.

Would Mitt be forced to choose between the LDS patriarchal version of God and the multi-layered diversity of his native country?

Could he do that?
Would he do that?

Hell, I don't know.

Mitt doesn't seem to have made a legitimately firm and truthful declaration of importance since he opened his public mouth.