First, a caveat: The following post is NOT intended, primarily, to advocate or oppose any particular Presidential candidate.
A couple of days ago, NPR correspondent Robert Seigel interviewed Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (You can read the transcript of the interview here.) Initially, it seemed like the main focus of Seigel’s questions was Romney’s health care plans… but, then, Seigel questioned one of Romney’s statements in the CNN/YouTube Republican debate. In that debate, an audience member had asked the candidates whether or not they believed in “every word of the Bible.” Two of the candidates, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee, said that although they do believe in the Bible, they recognized that some parts of it were allegorical and needed to be interpreted. Romney, on the other hand, included no such qualifications, saying instead that the Bible is “the word of God” and “well, I’ll just stick with that.”
So, Seigel asked the obvious follow-up question to Romeny’s (apparent) literalist position on the Bible. The last part of the Seigel interview went as such:
Seigel: [That] left the impression — and I want to ask you — do you hold a literal belief, say, in the Genesis version of creation?
Romney: You know, I find it hard to believe that NPR is going to inquire on people’s beliefs about various parts of the Bible in evaluating presidential candidates, and actually, I don’t know that that’s where America has come to — that you want to have us describing our particular beliefs with regards to Genesis and the Book of Revelations, so —
Seigel: I raise Genesis only because creationism is a national issue in a variety of ways, and —
Romney: Well, but then you could ask me a question and say, “Do you believe that we should teach creationism in our schools, in our science classes and so forth?” and I’m happy to give you an answer to that. But I don’t know that going through books of the Bible and asking, “Well, do you believe this book? And do you believe these words?”, that that’s terribly productive. Particularly when we face global jihad, when we have 47 million people without health insurance, when we have runaway costs in our entitlements, to be asking presidential candidates about their specific beliefs of books of the Bible is, in my view, something which really isn’t part of the process which we should be using to select presidents.
My point is the Bible is the word of God, and I try and live by it. I don’t accept some commandments and reject others. I accept the commandments of the Bible as being applicable and do my best to try and live by them, although frankly, there’s a big gap here and there. There are a lot of things I need to improve.
I’m particular interested in Romney’s claim that “to be asking presidential candidates about their specific beliefs of books of the Bible is, in my view, something which really isn’t part of the process which we should be using to select presidents.” This seems to be to be a terrible misjudgment on the part of Romney. Now, I certainly believe in the separation of church and state, and I don’t think that Romney ought to be excluded from consideration simply because he’s a Mormon anymore than I think that JFK should have been excluded simply because he was Catholic. However, I am of the opinion that the “process we should be using to select presidents” includes evaluating the merits and demerits of the candidates as “statesmen” (and women), which must include above all evaluating their powers of judgment.
Adherence to a literalist reading of the Bible is, manifestly, a demonstration of bad judgment. I would question, on the same basis, any cadidate who claimed to believe in Santa Claus, or aliens, or in some essentialist rendering of sexual difference. The point is that such beliefs represent a commitment (or lack thereof) to all sorts of other criteria for making good judgments that are unsuitable, in my mind, for someone whose charge it is to care for the polis.
I understand–and am sympathetic with–Romney’s obvious exasperation in this interview and his frustration with the more general obsession with his Mormonism. But he did not help his case at all, in my view, by claiming that such questions are “not a part of the process which we should be using to select presidents.” How else are we to measure the candidates’ potential suitability for governance except by reference to their actual judgments? Here, Romney only compounded his problem by laying a bad meta-judgment (“such questions are not a part of the process of determining good candidtes”) on top of a bad particular-judgment (“I believe the Bible is the literal Word of God”).
Q.E.D.