On KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” political chat show last Friday, Tony Blankley, of all people — the former chief of staff for Newt Gingrich and editor of the Washington Times, the rightwing newspaper owned by cult leader Sun Yung Moon — joined Arianna Huffington and Matt Miller in tearing apart the speech on religion Mitt Romney delivered last week:
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: There was also something else, which was the statement in the speech — the statement that freedom requires religion and religion requires freedom.
(Laughter among the co-hosts.)
MATT MILLER: What about Christianity and the Romans?
HUFFINGTON: You wonder, how was that allowed to stay for the final draft. I mean, what does it even mean?
TONY BLANKLEY: It was a wonderfully drafted phrase, even though it was historical nonsense.
HUFFINGTON: Historic nonsense and current nonsense. Also the fact that he mentioned the name, the word “Mormon” once compared to the number of times JFK mentioned [Catholicism] was a real indicator that he was still not entirely clear that this was not going to have some definite public relations disadvantages for him.
BLANKLEY: I’ve just got to say that Arianna picked on exactly the right phrase. It was such ahistoric nonsense. Not only does Christianity thrive under the repression of the Roman emperors but the whole history of Judaism — you know, this little religion has thrived over, what, 5,000 and a half years, and they have rarely ever experienced any freedom. The idea that you can’t — that religion has to exist only in freedom is just historic nonsense. It’s just silly.
Exception should be taken to Romney’s corollary statement that freedom requires religion, as well. At least three of our Founding Fathers — Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine — were irreligious, and there is ample evidence they understood freedom fairly well (leaving aside the very large matter of Jefferson’s dependence on slavery). In any case, they and others did not “require” religion in order to lay the groundwork for America’s experiment with personal liberty.
Mainly, however, Huffington is right: How did an assertion as facile and easily disputed as “religion requires freedom and freedom requires religion” remain in the speech through the final draft? It appears to be more evidence that Romney’s political judgments are faulty in the extreme, as evidenced by a string of 180-degree flipflops, and a growing perception that he is possibly even less intelligent than George W. Bush.
On the other hand, it could well be that Romney meant to be deliberately anti-factual. His speech wasn’t directed at egghead elites like the co-hosts of “Left, Right and Center” (or especially at non-believing non-elites like yours truly). It was targeted at Christian nationalist voters, most of whom probably found profundity in Romney’s bizarre bumpersticker formulation.
Never mind that their own Old Testament is filled with stories of the Jews remaining devoted to their religion while they lived in slavery and oppression — or especially the fact that one of the most notable features of modern Christianity is that it has carefully preserved its persecution complex 1,900 years after Romans fed its forebears to the lions and 700 years or more after it became the predominant religious and political force on earth.
Very good observations. The only suggestion I have is that the author should read ‘Caesar’s Messiah’ by Joseph Atwill. It may seem to be preposterous, but there is ample evidence that the Roman emperors did not ‘persecute’ Christians. Instead, they literally created Christianity as the new Roman State Religion. This was done as part of a feud between the Flavians, who were descendants of Ptolemy, a pharaoh who was a general under Alexander the Great, and the Julians, who were descendants and supporters of the divine Julius Caesar. I know this is hard to understand, but please read the book before you judge.
Regards,
Nelson Johnson
Regardless of whether Christians were persecuted by the Romans or not, the fact is that, at some point, it was declared the “official, state” religion of the Roman Empire. And in the U.S. is predominates yet it’s followers continue to maintain that they are being persecuted. Perhaps they are confusing resistance to an overwhelming Christian influence, Christian prayer in public schools and Christian symbols in public buildings with “persecution”.
Christians are not persecuted in America, but Christians who take the Bible seriously are not liked by many people. There is a big difference between “cultural Christians” and Christians who are active adherents of Christianity. The majority of the self-identifying “Christians” are the former, not the later. So you can say that “Christians” are the biggest group in America, but in reality, they are not because the majority of Americans do not embrace the fundamental tenets of Christianity that all three major groups (Protestants, Roman Catholics and Orthodox) have in common. They may embrace some of them, but then gentile Christians embrace the Old Testament, but that doesn’t make us Jews.
There is a lot of very powerful hatred toward us from the irreligious, and atheists in particular. Doesn’t bother me personally because that was one of the rules that was explained to me when I “signed up.” Just don’t kid yourself into thinking that the hatred toward us is just “resistance to Christian influence” because there are a lot of secularists whose dream is to see every last trace of Christianity wiped clean from the West.
With only 11% of Americans holding to the basic orthodox Christian beliefs that underlay all of the major denominations, it’s pretty safe to say Christianity is really not that big of a political force today.