Ross Douthat on Romney’s Mormonism
Start with Romney the man, so often dismissed as hollow, cynical and inauthentic. His various political reinventions notwithstanding, Romney clearly does have deep convictions: the evidence is in his intense commitment to his church, as a local leader and as a philanthropist. Between the endless hours of unpaid, “love thy neighbor” efforts required of a Mormon bishop and the scope of his private generosity, the caricature of the Republican candidate as a conviction-free mannequin mostly collapses.
If Romney were a Presbyterian, Methodist or Jew, this would be an obvious part of his campaign narrative. Like George W. Bush’s midlife conversion or Barack Obama’s tale of “race and inheritance,” Romney’s years as a bishop would be woven into a biography that emphasized his piety and decency, introducing Americans to the Romney who shut down his business to hunt for a colleague’s missing daughter, the Romney who helped build a memorial park when a friend’s son died of cystic fibrosis, the Romney who lent money to renters to help them buy a house he owned, and so on down a list of generous gestures and good deeds. […]
Conservatism sometimes makes an idol of the rugged individual, but at its richest and deepest it valorizes local community instead — defending the family and the neighborhood, the civic association and the church. And there is no population in America that lives out this vision of the good society quite like the Latter-day Saints. […]
To spend some time in Salt Lake City and its environs, as I did earlier this summer, is to enter a world where faith, family and neighborliness really do seem to fill the role that liberals usually assign to the state. There you can tour the church-run welfare centers, with supermarkets filled with (Mormon-brand) products available to the poor of any faith and assembly lines where Mormon neurosurgeons and lawyers volunteer to can goods or run a bread machine. You can visit inner-city congregations where bank vice presidents from the suburbs spend their weekends helping drifters find steady work, and tour the missionary training center where Mormons from every background share a small-d democratic coming-of-age experience.
Disclosure: My late paternal grandmother was LDS and I’ve grown up with LDS neighbors and friends.
There really is no contradiction between rugged individualism and volunteerism at local levels. For whatever reason a community is distant from some over-weaning, centralized bureaucracy, they need to depend on themselves. And they do so by mutual, and voluntary cooperation.
At the core of such cooperation is an individual’s sense of duty and virtue. Unfortunately, individual virtue is a dirty concept, replaced with the Left’s dogma of civic duty — elevating The State as the primary relationship, above self, family and faith — and explains why Obama and his fellow travelers reveal so much about their State-centered ethos with the phrase “You didn’t build that.”
Whether it’s scaring the Romney campaign with nasty invective about “magic underwear” or rolling out the attacks on Paul Ryan based on his receiving Social Security payments as a minor due to his dad’s death, therefore making him a “hypocrite” with his insistence on reforming the program, the acolytes wanting to keep Obama in the White House by any means necessary will continue to slander, libel and obfuscate the basic good character of any one that does not want to be in thrall to the Nanny State and is vocal about it.
This really is an election about ideas. And if the massive emails I’m receiving from the Obama campaign on a daily basis are any indication, they really don’t want you to examine that any further than Romney/Ryan will starve you and kill your grandmother while Obama/Biden will feed you, wrap you in a comfy blanket and make sure you have free birth control.
Just give them four more years to complete what they started.
Your choice.
<i<Democrats' scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners campaign is not a sign they're desperate; it's who they are. They're the most subversive, dirtiest enemy America has, and they must be stopped.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/08/the_real_danger_of_the_obama_campaign_strategy.html
Talk about impractical.
This post answers the question, “Who took care of my neighbor before the government did?” In days of yore, people helped their own neighbors, people as individuals or collectively as a church or local organization. Of course, there’s less opportunity for graft if you do it that way.
I’m currently on my way back from East Asia on the USNS Mercy, completing a five-month long humanitarian medical mission (i’m Navy). We have had a few really good NGO’s onboard (and a few really lame ones), but the LDS Charities group stands out as the hardest working and most generous of them all.
Their donations to the host countries have been impressive to say the least. Tons and tons of useful stuff.
They work very hard on the medical missions and make a serious contribution. On board, they help with cleaning, working shifts in the wards and even spend a considerable amount of time helping in the galley, giving needed breaks to the military folks who have had to work there full-time.
All of this is done on their own dime.
Yeah, they are good people. Annoying at times, but very good people.
People like to call us insular and naive, but all it takes is to serve a mission—where you get to see the dirty laundry of hundreds of households, or if you go to a third-world country, to see some real poverty—to lose any residual naivete pretty fast.
Furthermore, Romney did five years as a bishop and seven as a stake president (presiding over a local congregation and then a group of congregations), which doesn’t involve calling the shots but rather tending to everyone’s needs, whether it be a family who lost a job or whose husband landed in jail or porn/drug/alcohol addictions or wayward children or gossip or abusive relationships or whatever other ailments are common to mankind.
Nobody envies bishops or stake presidents: they come to know all the rotten things that happen in their neighbors’ houses, and they have to deal with them, offering counsel or assistance at all hours of the day.
Oh, and they do it while holding down a full-time job.
So anyone who says that Romney doesn’t have a clue how real people live is stupider than they look.
Oh good. I was hoping you’d chime in di.
I grew up around a lot of LDS in California. They are really good people. Hard-working to a fault, they take care of their members in times of need, run food pantries, are patriotic and make good soldiers and officers. Indeed, a majority of Secret Service agents are Mormons.
Douthat touchs on life expectancy, general health and quality of life in Utah. He doesn’t seem to get it that LDS are everywhere and that while the Temple is in SLC, it isn’t like Mecca. As for “outsiders” not being able to gawk at the interiors, so what? I can’t waltz into the recesses of Vatican City, either.
Same here, along with RLDS–they’re headquartered in Independence–and I honestly can’t say a bad thing about Mormons at all.
Thinking historically, Ben Franklin might have been an atheist or at least strongly agnostic, and he recognized the value of encouraging churches as civic organizations for precisely the reasons you mention, Darleen.
To run true to form we should declare that we’re all Mormons now….
As for “outsiders” not being able to gawk at the interiors, so what?
It’s hard to believe people gripe about things like that. Then again, it’s not–people are nosy.
Furthermore, Romney did five years as a bishop and seven as a stake president (presiding over a local congregation and then a group of congregations), which doesn’t involve calling the shots but rather tending to everyone’s needs, whether it be a family who lost a job or whose husband landed in jail or porn/drug/alcohol addictions or wayward children or gossip or abusive relationships or whatever other ailments are common to mankind.
That’s interesting. And, yes, it would be tough, thankless work.
Dale, wait until Ross finds out you can’t take pictures of the Mormon Tabernacle Chior, either. He’ll raise heck, by golly.