Politics, Religion, And The Nixon Covenant

In this post on some Christians' opposition to Mitt Romney on the basis of religion, I left off what I thought. This morning a couple of smart Facebook friends called me out. First, a buddy from Andover:

Half my ancestors are Mormon, going back to the beginning of the church. It is entirely legitimate to question the judgment of someone who enthusiastically participates in a fantasy based on an obvious fraud, concocted to feed the appetites for power and sex of the founders. And I don't just mean the GOP.

In reply, an Episcopal church friend:

I remember when I was a child and JFK was running for President. The “Protestant” fear was that if a Roman Catholic was elected, the Pope would rule America. Maybe the same people who are so critical about separation of church and state can now find some comfort in it.

I wrote:

You have [cogently] set the goalposts of a debate that will almost inevitably occur if Romney is nominated. I defer to [my first friend's] personal insights and confess to some concerns about the tenets of Mormonism. Of course [Christopher] Hitchens felt the same about orthodox Christianity. [The Episcopal] church has rightly been stressing comity among the three Abrahamic faiths. Any proponents of that view, who would naturally and correctly aver that there would be nothing wrong with electing a Jew or a Muslim, would, I assume, want to take the same view about a Mormon. In the end, the only way to avoid a descent into sheer chaos is to respect the covenant we've reached about a religion test that [my second friend] described.

As I wrote that, I imagined someone saying, "What covenant is that, and when did I sign it?" Hold onto your prayer books, because it was written by Richard Nixon, and it's stood all these years. The question is whether it will survive 2012.

Nixon's covenant was a promise he made to himself and the country and courageously kept throughout one of the closest campaigns in history. As the the GOP nominee in 1960, he said he wouldn't make John F. Kennedy's Roman Catholicism an issue. In Nixon's own words, from the third of their four debates:

[A]s far as religion is concerned, I have seen Communism abroad. I see what it does. Communism is the enemy of all religions; and we who do believe in God must join together. We must not be divided on this issue. The worst thing that I can think can happen in this campaign would be for it to be decided on religious issues. I obviously repudiate the Klan; I repudiate anybody who uses the religious issue; I will not tolerate it, I have ordered all of my people to have nothing to do with it and I say to this great audience, whoever may be listening, remember, if you believe in America, if you want America to set the right example to the world, that we cannot have religious or racial prejudice. We cannot have it in our hearts. But we certainly cannot have it in a presidential campaign.

Nixon was ideally positioned to enunciate and enforce this principle. A Yorba Linda and Whittier Quaker and a deep introvert besides, most of his theological inquiry and conversation with the divine was interior. He was a skeptic about the bodily Resurrection of Christ. He loved upbeat preachers such Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and Robert Schuller, but he wasn't a consistent churchgoer. In the White House, his interfaith services were a model that liberal seminaries would have been proud to borrow.

His faith may have deepened late in life. I worked for him from 1979 until his death in 1994. In the 1980s, when I was his chief of staff, he talked a lot about his philosophical reading. I regret that I never had a chance to ask what he thought about my call to ordained ministry. I couldn’t have, since it occurred in part because of professional and personal turmoil after he died. But he made a telling eschatological prediction not long after Mrs. Nixon’s funeral in 1993, when I was meeting with him and a potential library contributor in his New Jersey office. The man, from Japan, diplomatically mentioned a possible gift. Nixon said, “Mrs. Nixon would be pleased.” He paused and added quietly, “Is pleased.”

Still, the free-thinking Nixon probably wouldn't have been mainstream American Protestants' first choice to negotiate the terms of their political engagement with Roman Catholicism. And yet his rule has essentially been followed for a half-century. Outside of reporting about the narrative of the candidates' lives, religion rarely came up, for instance, when Mormon George Romney was preparing to run in 1968 or born-again Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter ran and won in 1976.

The boldest challenge to the Nixon covenant came from the right in 2008, when Fox News and others smeared Barack Obama with the extreme views of his United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I can understand those who said that Wright opened the door with his harsh denunciations of U.S. policy. But any systematic effort to load a religious leader's baggage onto a parishioner-candidate's back would shatter the Nixon covenant -- and more candidacies than one might at first think.

Many politicians, for instance, have sought the counsel of Billy Graham as well as the PR benefit of associating with him. He served as a gracious officiant at President and and Mrs. Nixon's funerals, which I oversaw at the Nixon library. In June 1993, as he and I waited alone in the lobby for the family to arrive with Mrs. Nixon's casket, I asked what he was up to. He said he had just decided to sell his memoirs to Rupert Murdoch's publishing company, though he’d been reluctant at first because of the risqué photos that appeared in some of Murdoch’s London tabloids. “But then I realized,” Graham said, “that those photographs are actually inducements so that his working class readers will have the opportunity to encounter a good conservative editorial message.”

I asked if he thought that anything would come along to reverse the general decline in cultural standards that had become so glaringly obvious.

“Why, yes,” he said.

“What will it be, in your opinion?” I said.

“Armageddon,” he said.

According to Fox News' Jeremiah Wright rule, a reporter would have the right to ask all candidates who are friendly with preachers who believe as Graham does whether they agree that the Almighty LORD was about to send his avenging angels to smite the world in its wickedness. "Will that be in your first or second term?" the reporter might ask. "Aren't those views indistinguishable from Ahmadinejad's? How will your belief in the imminent end times affect your decisions about how to use military power?"

You see where that leads. Here are more examples of what could happen to conservatives and progressives alike if we hold each other accountable for our religious views. Mitt Romney may well believe he'll get a planet when he dies, maybe two if he's really good. But we still need the Nixon covenant, now more than ever.

The Price Of A Nuclear-Free Iran

It's easy to make fun of Glenn Beck for associating Shi'ite Muslims' longed-for messianic 12th imam with the Antichrist. Indeed it's easy to make fun of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad for longing for the 12th imam.

Theology aside, it's not so funny if Iran really is embarked on an apocalyptic project that involves using a nuclear weapon against Israel or anyone else. And yet there's also evidence that, Iran's fanatical-sounding front man notwithstanding, the Iranian government is engaged in rational decision-making about whether to build nukes at all.

As Richard Nixon used to say about the U.S. and Soviets, we have irreconcilable ide0logical differences with Iran. But that doesn't mean we can't make a deal. Because of the uncertainty Iran sows about its ultimate aims, we obviously can't permit it to have nuclear weapons. I'd rather be open for business now than at war in five years.

Joker Of The Week

Criticizing Iran's bozo president's way too easy. His critique of western capitalism doesn't withstand a moment's contemplation of the generations of angry, desperate men twisted toward terrorism by the miserably run and in some cases woman-hating regimes of the Arab and Muslim worlds. And then this:

Ahmadinejad proposed that the United Nations name the coming 10 years "the decade for the joint global governance."

Agreed. We vote no bomb for Iran. Moved, seconded, passed.

It's All About The Imam, Ma'am

At the annual Quds Day rally called by Iran's regime to express solidarity with Palestinians, thousands instead protested the tainted presidential elections. In the run-up to Oct. 1 talks which will include the U.S., President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again denied that the Holocaust occurred. Andrew Sullivan has details from Iran of apparent attacks on reformist and opposition leaders by pro-regime thugs. Meanwhile NBC's Ann Curry got an hour-long interview with Ahmadinejad yesterday. Watch the whole thing and decide whether he is a menace or whether we can do business with him. I fear we can't.

Before he answers the first question, Ahmadinejad prays for the return of the hidden 12th imam, which, in the light of his previously reported expectation that this moment would occur in his lifetime, sounded like an invocation of the end times. Not an encouraging start. He then says grandiosely that Iran's decision to participate in talks with the Security Council powers had actually inaugurated a new dispensation. "The movement around the world," he says, "is moving in the direction of our ideals." So right off the bat you're dealing with a fellow with a healthy self-image who seems to imagine himself as a character in an Islamic Left Behind, which is the essence, of course, of U.S. and Israeli concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran.

Curry spends several minutes trying to get Ahmadinejad to say that Iran would never under any circumstances develop nuclear weapons, as though Iran's weapons program were not already well underway. You get the feeling she thinks that his refusal to make a blanket disavowal will be deemed significant in Jerusalem and Washington. Actually, a leader, whether governed by reason or not, should never answer such an open-ended hypothetical question. Although Curry presses him pretty effectively on nukes and the possibility of Iran provoking an Middle East arms race, if a yes or no answer was so important to her, she might have said bluntly, "Are you developing a nuke right now?"

She asked him twice if he'd stolen the recent election. A clear "no" again evaded him. Given the mortal risks Iranians are taking to challenge the results, his stonewalling and ritualistic denunciations of British and U.S. devils were sickening. When he asked if Obama had stolen the 2008 election, Curry didn't say anything. Perhaps she shook her head; the editor didn't cut to her at that point. I wish she had said, "President Obama didn't steal his election, and the whole world knows it. But the world thinks you stole yours." Curry's best moment: "The question has to be asked: Where was your compassion for your people?"

This was no Dan Rather-Saddam Hussein lapdog interview. A tough reporter with a relentlessly gracious mien, Curry was rarely derailed. But I wish that in 63 minutes she had found time to confront Ahmadinejad about denying the Holocaust and about his anti-Semitism. Israel, he said, is an "illegal, murderous regime [which is] being influenced by parties which are in Europe and in the U.S. in political corners." Isn't there something in Mein Kampf about rats scurrying in corners? For more on the whole range of durable vermin metaphors, see the first scene of "Inglorious Basterds." These Jews and Jew-lovers, Ahmadinejad implied, are "connected with the arms-industrial complex" and "certain U.S. capitalists... certain officials." (One can't tell whether the unmistakable "I'm talking about Jews" emphasis was added by the translator.) Another golden oldie: As for the "Zionists which are lobbying inside the U.S....If conflict continues, their pockets will be lined." Does anyone seriously wonder why his having a nuclear weapon is an impossible scenario for Israel?

As for whether Ahmadinejad plans to use his bomb to ignite Armageddon, he strictly ruled that out. He denies ever having said that the 12th imam would return in his lifetime; more lies by his international enemies. Besides, he added, all that will happen whenever the imam arrives is that peace and tranquility will reign -- which made me wonder about his opening claim that he had personally inaugurated a new global movement toward peace and disarmament just by planning to sit down with the great powers.

Perhaps he really does think he's the agent of the divine. And yet don't all people of faith think that way? When Curry asked about his personal conversations with the still-hidden imam, he turned the tables:

"[I]t's roughly the same as the relationship which exists between Christians and Christ. They speak with Jesus Christ, and they are sure that Christ hears them and responds...

I hope so. One of my prayers is that the international community, acting as one, will encircle and deter Iran until it has the leadership it deserves (and perhaps elected in June).

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy