I left home for the office this morning just before Mitt Romney started his speech about faith. I couldn’t find it on the radio (I was a bit surprised that NPR didn’t pick it up, and I mean that seriously rather than facetiously), and couldn’t get it to stream online. So I’ll have to content myself, for now, with reading excerpts from the speech that the Romney campaign released in advance.
I’m an evangelical who has spent almost his entire life in the secular academy. There are few other serious Christians in my department; most of the colleagues to whom I am closest are firm atheists. Indeed, I note that more and more folks I run into these days seem willing to call themselves atheists rather than agnostics. There seems to be more openness about unbelief, and I appreciate that we live in a climate where those who are genuinely convinced that there is no God at all don’t feel pressured to use the safer language of uncertainty and doubt.
Romney said this morning:
We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
Mitt’s got it right when he suggests that it is unreasonable to ask anyone to divorce their spiritual convictions from their politics. The post immediately below this one is a brief polemic against compartmentalization, albeit a very different kind of compartmentalization. But to a serious believer, a Sunday morning (or Saturday morning) faith is poor beer indeed. If the relationship I have with God is the transcendent Fact of my life, it’s absurd to suggest that that Fact shouldn’t inform and guide everything I do — including how I teach and how I vote.
But the parallel to teaching is important. My faith makes me, I’m certain, a better teacher. That doesn’t mean that folks who don’t share my faith can’t be good teachers (better than I in many cases). It doesn’t mean that folks who have no faith at all can’t be wonderful instructors and mentors. It is simply true that in my case, my faith has made me an infinitely kinder, more patient, and less self-absorbed person. (Whatever notable tendencies I still have towards self-absorption, are, of course, attributable to the obvious reality that I, like all converts, am still very much a work in progress.) If someone asks me, “Hugo, why do you do what you do the way you do it?”, faith is going to be part of my answer. But the fact that my teaching rests on a spiritual foundation doesn’t mean that I am entitled to inject my spiritual beliefs into the classroom. If I can be a fairly religious person, and work day in and day out without talking incessantly about how my faith undergirds everything I’m doing, then I’m quite confident that others can do the same. That’s not compartmentalization, because I’m not living at odds with my faith or hiding my faith. I’m just choosing not to bludgeon folks with the cross. I’d like it if my fellow believers in public life felt the same way.
(And for the record, the notion of a “religion of secularism” is silly. But suppose someone did want to start such a religion, committed to the notion that the Divine Being is Absent, Never Was, and Never Will Be? The America I want is an America where that “religion” would be able to take its place in the public square too.)
But I’m particularly troubled by the (admittedly eloquent) concluding lines of Romney’s speech, sure to be remembered longest:
In such a world, we can be deeply thankful that we live in a land where reason and religion are friends and allies in the cause of liberty, joined against the evils and dangers of the day. And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me. And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion — rather, we welcome our nation’s symphony of faith.
Bold emphasis mine.
Yikes. I hit my knees a lot, Mitt, and I worship the same Almighty you do. I’m heartened to hear you will be my friend and ally. Tell me, will you also be a friend and ally to my mother, who does not believe in God? (For that matter, will you be a friend and ally to many of my Anabaptist friends, who believe in God but don’t kneel?)
And I wince at the notion that faith is a symphony. Symphonies, as we understand them, are innovations of the Christian west. The image that pops into my head is of the Catholics in the string section, the Baptists blowin’ their horns, the Eastern Orthodox on their woodwinds and the Pentecostals on percussion. Perhaps they’ll play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and it will sound very pretty. But will there be Muslims? Will there be atheists? Will there be Buddhists and Hindus? Will there be animists and Wiccans?
Real diversity is not harmonious. Real diversity is African and Japanese drums, the throbbing of synthesized beats, the rich, challenging melodies of an Indonesian gamelan — and French horns. Put that all together, and it isn’t going to be a beautiful symphony. It’ll be beautiful yes, but it will be the beauty of a great big messy cacophony, like what happens when you put plastic musical instruments into the hands of second-graders on a sugar high. And that great big messy cacophany is my America, Mitt. It’s the rancheras I hear blasting as I drive through Highland Park, it’s the hip-hop bumping from the car stereos as I walk on Crenshaw. It’s the ululating of Sephardic Jewish women at a Kabbalistic wedding, and it’s the speaking in tongues of Pentecostals at a late night prayer meetin’. It’s noisy and it’s difficult to understand and it doesn’t all fit together.
Religion has a place in the public square. But it doesn’t get to define the boundaries of the public square. Public displays of faith have their place, indeed — but so too do public displays of humanistic secularism. The right to pray as one chooses is inextricably linked to the equally important right to scoff at those who pray. Real ecumenism, real diversity, is not simply making the case for common ground between Mormons and evangelical Protestants, arguing that each has a part to play in the grand symphony of faith. A real commitment to diversity is embracing not only all believers, but embracing all those who are in varying states of unbelief. I say this as a Christian who loves Jesus, and I say it on behalf of those whom I love who share my convictions — and those whom I love who don’t.
UPDATE: I wish I could say that the way I originally spelled “cacophony” was deliberate. When dealing with Greek suffixes, I’m better on manifestations than sounds, so “phany” always “looks right” to me. I’ve changed it to the right spelling now.
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