It seems that a lot of people are misunderstanding a specific moment in Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” speech today. In a speech nearly devoid of intellectual content, he did say one substantive thing; but unfortunately, rather that paying attention what his words meant, the blogosphere and also the talking heads on TV are completely misconstruing it, indeed flipping its meaning around 180 degrees.
I’m refering to this assertion:
Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.
Person after person seems to be taking this to mean that, according to Romney, Atheists can’t be free. But that’s not what Romeny meant; in fact it’s nearly the opposite of what he meant. Romney was here interpreting a previously-offered quote from John Adams and asserting a specific thesis on the nature of humanity and political liberty.
Romney’s point was that people, on their own, can’t be trusted with political liberty. People are too chaotic, too libidinous, too unpredictable, to be granted full autonomy in the absence of an outside religious check on their actions. A government that does not impose its will upon the desires of a population requires another institution that will, in order to keep things from spinning out of control.
Let me explain. Here’s what Romney said.
Minute 2:50 of the “Faith in America speech:
There are some who may feel that religion is not a matter to be seriously considered in the context of the weighty threats that face us. If so, they’re at odds with the nation’s founders, for they, when our nation faced its greatest peril, sought the blessings of the creator, and further they discovered the essential connection between the survival of a free land and the protection of religious freedom.
In John Adams’s words, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution,” he said, “was made for a moral and religious people.”
Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom. Religion opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone.
Now, I’m not familiar with John Adams, particularly, but it seems like I ought to say at least this much. Here is what Adams said, more fully:
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Keeping with this aside for the moment, Adams also said that the US governments were not religiously inspired.
Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses . . .
So much for the aside. What’s pertinent here is not Adams but Romney, and the claim that this Presidential candidate was making, when he used Adams’s words.
When Romney said “freedom requires religion” he was asserting that human freedom is too unruly to be left alone; humanity too unpredictable to be left to its own devices. A system of government must either impose restrictions on its population or else rely on another institution which does. Any government relying on merely human spiritual and philosophical resources will surely fall into a ruinous and chaotic decadence.
No other “freedom” is sustainable for our benighted species.
We can’t be trusted with ourselves; much less can we trust other people. In a similar vein, we are told that “radical Islamists” “hate us for our freedom”. Romney, I assume, doesn’t hate us for it, but he assuredly thinks something needs to be done about it.
That’s what Romney meant. It was a substantive, philosophical point about humanity. That it was utterly disgusting and wrong-headed is no reason not to attend to it, or take it seriously.
I realize that political speeches, especially speeches not directly concerning policy, and especially coming from Republicans, make one’s eyes glaze over. But this moment was worth noticing, and worth debate. It’s too bad that everyone has misconstrued it.
25 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
it seems to me free societies are best equipped to tolerate freedom of religion. or religious freedom. or freedom from religion. it’s not easy to let people you don’t understand paint outside the lines. say or do things that you think are sins. it requires faith in the basic need, right, and goodness of freedom to live in peace with those who are so different from you.
although i admit it. bush makes me wish it meant free from religion….
struggled the last five years or so with actually wishing to be free from religion, specifically Christianity. Because I live in the south, I have a very regrettable tendency to focus exclusively on the negative aspects of popular expressions of it. I am working on it. I don’t want to piss on my Christian friends or their right to express themselves but I have concluded at this time in my life I am not a Christian. My goal is to be less defensive when people freely express their faith to me. I think it might end up being a long term goal.
this. We were reading quotes from the speech and I was really surprised by some of the more thoughtful and interesting points he made. Impressive considering the messenger.
I guess you can’t be wrong all the time…..
Very important to highlight the idea that the Constitution is supposedly not strong enough to contend with a people who are not religious and moral. There is also an ideological reason encrypted in this appeal to morality, because, of course, particular persons–landed white males–had a monopoly on morality. The idea you focus on is the basic form that was used in general in a variety of ways to keep all sorts of persons in check–namely women and slaves and other unfree persons, who were said to be less than fully developed or capable of being fully developed moral agents.
makes me think about the theories on stages of moral development. Like so many authoritarians in this culture – he projects that we’re all at the same low level of moral development that he is – we need a “big daddy” (god for many folks) to tell us what to do.
Romney basically says whatever he needs to say at any given moment to lead enough voters to believe he agrees with them in order to get elected. That is what he does. He will tweak the statement, and then down the road say he was flat wrong if need be. Why are we giving Romney’s speech so much attention? On the other hand, I think you are right. If we’re going to pay attention to his speech, we should really pay attention, and not just say how much it was like or not like John Kennedy’s speech in 1960.
of the establishment political industry left and right appear to be doing their Project Mockingbird thing in hailing this piece of crap as a historical moment in history. Free advertizing for the New World Order designated presidential “selectee”.
I am from mAssashusetts and thus know better than to put any stock in what Mitt says. I said I wasn’t even going to read it but from the amount of punditry it may be useful in determining the exact date of the Apocalypse.