Replies

35 posted on Sat Sep 15 2012 23:37:08 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by katiedidit1: “Newt came down hard on Rove but he is one of the few.”

Good for Newt Gingrich! Can I get a link? I’d be interested.

What has happened with Akin goes beyond the surface issue of his stupid statement, which does deserve condemnation. The uproar is all out of proportion to the original offense and appears to be based on underlying issues.

I don’t have a problem with people like Sen. Scott Brown criticizing Akin — I believe in federalism and Sen. Brown needs to reflect the views of his Massachusetts constituents, where being conservative has a very different definition than Missouri conservatives — but it seems clear that the attacks on Akin by a lot of other Republicans are a smokescreen for discomfort with the Republican Party’s pro-life position.

Akin isn’t the issue, but he could easily become a symbol of a much more important fight. If we aren’t careful, the Akin race may get turned into a “test case” of whether social issues are a losing card for conservative Republicans. That would be a very, very bad development.

35 posted on Sat Sep 15 2012 23:37:08 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by katiedidit1: “It makes me wonder why they want to single out Akin. Rove’s comment on murder was given a green light by Fox News and Romney.”

The question of why Akin has been singled out is very significant. I’m responding to that as part of my comments about Thomas Jefferson below.

34 posted on Sat Sep 15 2012 23:23:12 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by little jeremiah: “You hit the bullseye. Except I think “Judeo-Christian values” are fine. In fact I agree with this: (Of course I leave Islam out of this quote!) ‘Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts ... in which all religions agree.’ —Thomas Jefferson”

I think we mostly agree, though I can’t agree with the universalist principles of religion that Jefferson intended behind his quote. His words have more meaning than their face value and while I might be able to agree with the actual text of what he said, Jefferson was an open opponent in his day of what we would call a Christian conservative position.

Jefferson was a brilliant man as well as being a skilled politician — traits that today are rarely seen in the same person, unfortunately. That means his words need to be evaluated in context; they were deliberately crafted to gain allies for an anti-religious cause which he knew reflected a small minority position in his day, and which even today is still more radical than what most modern Americans believe.

Jefferson used the issue of disestablishment of the Episcopalians in Virginia to gain the support of Baptists, Presbyterians, patriotic Americans who didn’t like England and viewed Episcopalians as being closet supporters of the Church of England, and others. Most of those people did not in any way support Jefferson’s broader anti-religious agenda which was considerably more serious than disestablishment of a state-supported church in Virginia, but his “triangulation politics” worked and won.

The irony is that while Jefferson won the disestablishment battle, he certainly could not have foreseen the results of massive growth of Baptists and Methodists (who were initially viewed as being a subset of Episcopalianism) that happened as a result of disestablishment. God has a way of turning the plans of wicked men around and using them for his own purposes. In the decades after Jefferson’s death, Virginia, along with its de facto “colonies” of Tennessee and Kentucky, and more broadly the rest of the South which followed the lead of Virginia, became much more religiously conservative than probably would have been the case if Episcopalianism had continued to be the state-supported church in the South.

I am not going to compare Karl Rove to Thomas Jefferson on issues of personal faith, but I will say that both are highly effective tacticians who do not apply Christian values to their political lives. I’m afraid Rove is trying to turn Akin into a wedge issue to divide Republicans and marginalize social issues conservatives. Maybe God will turn Rove’s efforts around; maybe not. As a Calvinist, obviously I believe in God’s sovereignty, and in a free republic, people generally get the government they deserve. We deserve some pretty bad governors based on our American sinfulness.

On a related issue, I do think I need to clarify something — my point was not to say that I have any problem with the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States but rather to say that European culture has a much more explicitly Christian history. We can’t say the Netherlands or most other European countries were founded on Judeo-Christian principles, Geert Wilders knows that, and our history in the United States of accepting help right from the days of the American Revolution from Roman Catholics and Jews is not the same as what happened in Europe.

Personally I happen to have certain views on Christian support for Israel and the Jewish people — views which were shared by Oliver Cromwell, by most of the Puritans, and by the majority of the Reformed Christian leaders of the Netherlands dating back to the 1600s. There are reasons why Cromwell fought hard to repeal laws forbidding Jewish people from living in England, and why the Dutch churches were encouraging study of Hebrew and helping rabbis get books published in the Netherlands at the same time that Jews were being harassed or even explicitly persecuted in much of the rest of Europe.

On this point — support for Israel — Geert Wilders has secular reasons for holding a political position that is largely the same as mine with regard to the state of Israel. While he is not himself a Christian (he’s a lapsed Roman Catholic), he believes that religious faith has been an important principle undergirding Western culture and respects the Christian and Jewish faith, even though he personally does not share those beliefs.