Sociology 159

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Sociology 159

• Religion and American Political Culture

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Romney 2008

• Trouble capturing evangelical support
• This despite majority of Mormons evangelicals
  sharing nearly identical political agendas
• 54 of evangelicals said that they would be
  bothered by a Mormon president, compared to 18
  of non-evangelicals
• Importance of theological differences
• Mormonism frequently called a cult in
  evangelical circles
• LDS church evangelical Christianity both
  aggressively proselytizing faiths, may be in
  direct competition (Putnam Campbelll 500-502)

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• 65 of Mormons say that homosexuality should be
  discouraged by society, 26 say it should be
  accepted by society. Among the
• General public 58 say that homosexuality should
  be accepted by society, 33 say it should be
  discouraged.
• Mormons 74 say that having an abortion is
  morally wrong
• General public 52.
• Mormons 54 that drinking alcohol is morally
  problematic
• General public 15
• Mormons 75 say they prefer a smaller government
  providing fewer services to a bigger government
  providing more services
• General public 48

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• Pew poll

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Romney 2007

• 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 are 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' words 'We have no government armed with
  power capable of contending with human passions
  unbridled by morality and religion... Our
  constitution was made for a moral and religious
  people.
• Freedom requires religion just as religion
  requires freedom. Freedom 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.

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• Almost 50 years ago another candidate from
  Massachusetts explained that he was an American
  running for president, not a Catholic running for
  president. Like him, I am an American running for
  president. I do not define my candidacy by my
  religion. A person should not be elected because
  of his faith nor should he be rejected because of
  his faith.
• Let me assure you that no authorities of my
  church, or of any other church for that matter,
  will ever exert influence on presidential
  decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the
  province of church affairs, and it ends where the
  affairs of the nation begin.

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• As a young man, Lincoln described what he called
  America's 'political religion' - the commitment
  to defend the rule of law and the Constitution.
  When I place my hand on the Bible and take the
  oath of office, that oath becomes my highest
  promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your
  president, I will serve no one religion, no one
  group, no one cause, and no one interest. A
  president must serve only the common cause of the
  people of the United States.
• There are some for whom these commitments are not
  enough. They would prefer it if I would simply
  distance myself from my religion, say that it is
  more a tradition than my personal conviction, or
  disavow one or another of its precepts. That I
  will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I
  endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of
  my fathers - I will be true to them and to my
  beliefs.
• Sole use of word Mormon
• Some believe that such a confession of my faith
  will sink my candidacy. If they are right, so be
  it. But I think they underestimate the American
  people. Americans do not respect believers of
  convenience.

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• There is one fundamental question about which I
  often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus
  Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of
  God and the Savior of mankind. My church's
  beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as
  those of other faiths. Each religion has its own
  unique doctrines and history. These are not bases
  for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance.
  Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle
  indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with
  which we agree.
• There are some who would have a presidential
  candidate describe and explain his church's
  distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the
  very religious test the founders prohibited in
  the Constitution. No candidate should become the
  spokesman for his faith. For if he becomes
  president he will need the prayers of the people
  of all faiths.

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• I will take care to separate the affairs of
  government from any religion, but I will not
  separate us from 'the God who gave us liberty.
• Nor would I separate us from our religious
  heritage. Perhaps the most important question to
  ask a person of faith who seeks a political
  office, is this does he share these American
  values the equality of human kind, the
  obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast
  commitment to liberty?
• They are not unique to any one denomination. They
  belong to the great moral inheritance we hold in
  common. They are the firm ground on which
  Americans of different faiths meet and stand as a
  nation, united.

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• These American values, this great moral heritage,
  is shared and lived in my religion as it is in
  yours. I was taught in my home to honor God and
  love my neighbor. I saw my father march with
  Martin Luther King.
• I saw my parents provide compassionate care to
  others, in personal ways to people nearby, and in
  just as consequential ways in leading national
  volunteer movements. I am moved by the Lord's
  words 'For I was an hungered, and ye gave me
  meat I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink I was
  a stranger, and ye took me in naked, and ye
  clothed me...'
• My faith is grounded on these truths. You can
  witness them in Ann and my marriage and in our
  family. We are a long way from perfect and we
  have surely stumbled along the way, but our
  aspirations, our values, are the self-same as
  those from the other faiths that stand upon this
  common foundation. And these convictions will
  indeed inform my presidency.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright

• On September 11 attacks
• We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we
  nuked far more than the thousands in New York and
  the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... and
  now we are indignant, because the stuff we have
  done overseas is now brought back into our own
  front yards. America's chickens are coming home
  to roost.
• Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred.
  And terrorism begets terrorism. A white
  ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant.
  Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An
  ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is
  trying to get us to wake up and move away from
  this dangerous precipice upon which we are now
  poised.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright

• On race
• And the United States of America government,
  when it came to treating her citizens of Indian
  descent fairly, she failed. She put them on
  reservations. When it came to treating her
  citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed.
  She put them in internment prison camps.
• When it came to treating her citizens of African
  descent fairly, America failed. She put them in
  chains, the government put them on slave
  quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in
  cotton field, put them in inferior schools, put
  them in substandard housing, put them in
  scientific experiments, put them in the lowest
  paying jobs, put them outside the equal
  protection of the law, kept them out of their
  racist bastions of higher education and locked
  them into positions of hopelessness and
  helplessness.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright

• The government gives them the drugs, builds
  bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and
  then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No,
  no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America
  that's in the Bible for killing innocent
  people. God damn America, for treating our
  citizens as less than human. God damn America, as
  long as she tries to act like she is God, and she
  is supreme. The United States government has
  failed the vast majority of her citizens of
  African descent.

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Obama 2008

• It has only been in the last couple of weeks that
  the discussion of race in this campaign has taken
  a particularly divisive turn.
• On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the
  implication that my candidacy is somehow an
  exercise in affirmative action that it's based
  solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to
  purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On
  the other end, we've heard my former pastor,
  Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to
  express views that have the potential not only to
  widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate
  both the greatness and the goodness of our
  nation, and that rightly offend white and black
  alike.

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• I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms,
  the statements of Reverend Wright that have
  caused such controversy and, in some cases, pain.
  For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know
  him to be an occasionally fierce critic of
  American domestic and foreign policy? Of course.
  Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be
  considered controversial while I sat in the
  church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of
  his political views? Absolutely just as I'm
  sure many of you have heard remarks from your
  pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you
  strongly disagreed.
• But the remarks that have caused this recent
  firestorm weren't simply controversial. They
  weren't simply a religious leader's efforts to
  speak out against perceived injustice.
• Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted
  view of this country a view that sees white
  racism as endemic, and that elevates what is
  wrong with America above all that we know is
  right with America a view that sees the
  conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily
  in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel,
  instead of emanating from the perverse and
  hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

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• Given my background, my politics, and my
  professed values and ideals, there will no doubt
  be those for whom my statements of condemnation
  are not enough. Why associate myself with
  Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask?
  Why not join another church? And I confess that
  if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the
  snippets of those sermons that have run in an
  endless loop on the television sets and YouTube,
  or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed
  to the caricatures being peddled by some
  commentators, there is no doubt that I would
  react in much the same way.
• But the truth is, that isn't all that I know of
  the man. The man I met more than 20 years ago is
  a man who helped introduce me to my Christian
  faith, a man who spoke to me about our
  obligations to love one another, to care for the
  sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served
  his country as a United States Marine

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• In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I
  describe the experience of my first service at
  Trinity
• People began to shout, to rise from their seats
  and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying
  the reverend's voice up into the rafters. And in
  that single note hope! I heard something
  else At the foot of that cross, inside the
  thousands of churches across the city, I imagined
  the stories of ordinary black people merging with
  the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and
  Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den,
  Ezekiel's field of dry bones.
• Those stories of survival and freedom and hope
  became our stories, my story. The blood that
  spilled was our blood, the tears our tears, until
  this black church, on this bright day, seemed
  once more a vessel carrying the story of a people
  into future generations and into a larger world.
  Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and
  universal, black and more than black. In
  chronicling our journey, the stories and songs
  gave us a meaning to reclaim memories that we
  didn't need to feel shame about memories that
  all people might study and cherish, and with
  which we could start to rebuild.

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• And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship
  with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be,
  he has been like family to me. He strengthened my
  faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my
  children. Not once in my conversations with him
  have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in
  derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he
  interacted with anything but courtesy and
  respect. He contains within him the
  contradictions the good and the bad of the
  community that he has served diligently for so
  many years.
• I can no more disown him than I can disown the
  black community. I can no more disown him than I
  can disown my white grandmother a woman who
  helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and
  again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she
  loves anything in this world, but a woman who
  once confessed her fear of black men who passed
  her by on the street, and who on more than one
  occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes
  that made me cringe.
• These people are a part of me. And they are part
  of America, this country that I love.

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• The fact is that the comments that have been made
  and the issues that have surfaced over the last
  few weeks reflect the complexities of race in
  this country that we've never really worked
  through a part of our union that we have not
  yet made perfect. And if we walk away now, if we
  simply retreat into our respective corners, we
  will never be able to come together and solve
  challenges like health care or education or the
  need to find good jobs for every American.
• Understanding this reality requires a reminder of
  how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner
  once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In
  fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to
  recite here the history of racial injustice in
  this country. But we do need to remind ourselves
  that so many of the disparities that exist
  between the African-American community and the
  larger American community today can be traced
  directly to inequalities passed on from an
  earlier generation that suffered under the brutal
  legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

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• For the men and women of Reverend Wright's
  generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt
  and fear have not gone away nor has the anger
  and the bitterness of those years. That anger may
  not get expressed in public, in front of white
  co-workers or white friends. But it does find
  voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or
  around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is
  exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along
  racial lines, or to make up for a politician's
  own failings.
• And occasionally it finds voice in the church on
  Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews.
  The fact that so many people are surprised to
  hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's
  sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that
  the most segregated hour of American life occurs
  on Sunday morning.

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• That anger is not always productive indeed, all
  too often it distracts attention from solving
  real problems it keeps us from squarely facing
  our own complicity within the African-American
  community in our condition, and prevents the
  African-American community from forging the
  alliances it needs to bring about real change.
• But the anger is real it is powerful. And to
  simply wish it away, to condemn it without
  understanding its roots, only serves to widen the
  chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the
  races.

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• The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons
  is not that he spoke about racism in our society.
  It's that he spoke as if our society was static
  as if no progress had been made as if this
  country a country that has made it possible for
  one of his own members to run for the highest
  office in the land and build a coalition of white
  and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young
  and old is still irrevocably bound to a tragic
  past.
• But what we know what we have seen is that
  America can change. That is the true genius of
  this nation. What we have already achieved gives
  us hope the audacity to hope for what we can
  and must achieve tomorrow.