The buzz of the day is Bill Keller's op-ed in this weekend's NYTimes Magazine, calling – in a way – for increased scrutiny of presidential candidates' religious beliefs. Are we being overly sensitive and squeamish about such things? Here is the key paragraph:
This year’s Republican primary season offers us an important opportunity to confront our scruples about the privacy of faith in public life — and to get over them. We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans. Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons, a faith that many conservative Christians have been taught is a “cult” and that many others think is just weird. (Huntsman says he is not “overly religious.”) Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann are both affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity — and Rick Santorum comes out of the most conservative wing of Catholicism — which has raised concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state, not to mention the separation of fact and fiction.
Notice how he switches at the end to an issue that surely is relevant to political discussion: a candidate's regard for the constitutional mandate of church-state separation. If only those concerns he mentions before – Mormonism, mysteriousness, evangelical Christianity, conservative Catholicism – really did in themselves "raise concerns about their respect for the separation of church and state," I would be squarely with him that these religious perspectives should be pursued.
But, where is the logic there? Why can't we simply ask the candidates their views of church-state separation. Surely those who have demeaned, diminished, or denied outright the validity of that legal doctrine have not been shy about it. Why must we travel through personal, deeply held religious beliefs to get to that essential question?
While I'm at it, why does it help to point – as Keller does – to past failures of media and politics on this score to justify this line of inquiry? When then-candidate Obama, and then-candidate McCain were raked over the coals for the views of their religious supporters, it was an overreach. Why does that experience justify an even more invasive look into the religious views of candidates today?
Am I missing something? Am I guilty of being too "squeamish," as Keller calls it? Or aren't there enough candidate policy statements, positions, and voting records to ask about?
Let me know what you think! Email me at don.byrd -at- comcast.net ; or try me at my brand new Twitter feed(!): @BJCBlog
