‘I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians,” Michele Bachmann joked at a Florida campaign stop Sunday. “We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ ”
That popping noise you just heard is the sound of liberal heads exploding. Because, to the secularists on the left, there’s nothing humorous about religion — it’s the most dangerous force on earth.
The Constitution explicitly states, “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Yet some “progressives” are keen to take down Republican presidential candidates for the crime of being Christian.
The Obama campaign is already planning to attack Mitt Romney’s “weirdness” — translation: He’s a Mormon! But the Daily Beast web site really got the ball rolling with a recent piece wondering about “A Christian Plot for Domination.”
The article questioned Bachmann’s and Rick Perry’s “ties” to something called Dominionism. Never heard of it? Me neither, but according to cheap-shot author Michelle Goldberg, “Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions… Think of it like political Islamism, which shapes the activism of a number of antagonistic fundamentalist movements, from Sunni Wahabis in the Arab world to Shiite fundamentalists in Iran.”
Meanwhile, departing New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller lobbed a stink bomb at the GOP field. Citing the Daily Beast story, he posed a series of loaded, opposition-research inquiries to Bachmann, Perry, Romney, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum that essentially demanded assurances their faith would play no role in any decision made as president.
Sample: “If you encounter a conflict between your faith and the Constitution and laws of the United States, how would you resolve it?” Since the Constitution is a product of the Judeo-Christian Enlightenment, it’s hard to envision such a case, unless the president’s religion was Satanism.
The proper answer to all such reverse-Inquisition questions is, of course: None of your business. Religious faith is the norm, not the exception, when it comes to both US politicians and plain old American citizens. The country remains overwhelmingly Christian, with 92 percent of the population expressing belief in God.
But then, these questions really aren’t really about faith at all — they’re scare tactics, designed to paint the Republicans as too kooky to be trusted with the reins of power.
More than half a century after the election of John Kennedy as the nation’s first and so far only Catholic president, you’d think we would have put such fear-mongering behind us. JFK was never going to take order directly from the Pope via a secret hotline to the Vatican, and the GOP field is hardly likely to take political advice from professors at Oral Roberts University or the elders of the Mormon Church.
But what kind of a country have we become in which Christianity is even controversial? We’ve had presidents, like the Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter, who wore their faith on their sleeves, and we’ve had men unaffiliated with any sect (Jefferson, Lincoln and Andrew Johnson) who still spoke comfortably of God — in Lincoln’s case, most eloquently in the Second Inaugural.
President Obama, having resigned from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in 2008, is still searching for a church three years later. And that, too, is his right. Someday we will elect a Jewish president, and an atheist president — and each will be no less the president for his religious beliefs, or lack of them.
Watch for things to get worse. The left has created an imaginary world in which we’re always just a short step away from a Christian theocracy, and the only answer is to drive Christianity out of the public square.
But if bigotry is wrong, then it’s wrong in any instance. The candidates should tell the nosy Parkers of the media what to do with their questions and get back to the real challenges facing the country.
An incipient theocracy isn’t one of them.