Romney: Any religion can seem strange
DALLAS — If you could have seen a thought balloon circling out of Mitt Romney's head during his "JFK speech" last week, it might have said: "Mormons aren't weird."
But if you could have seen a balloon above some of his conservative Christian critics, it might have said: "Maybe not, but your religion sure is."
And from the perspective of a Southern Baptist or a Catholic, some of the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a bit of a stretch: Three kinds of heaven, God's wife as the spiritual mother of all souls, Jesus visits America after his resurrection.
Or as Mike Huckabee, who, like Romney, is a Republican presidential candidate, asks in a piece scheduled for Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"
But weird? Compared to what?
Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, delivered his speech at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas.
He consciously echoed a speech given more than four decades earlier by then-candidate John Kennedy. Kennedy had sought to allay suspicion among Protestants about his Catholic faith. Mr. Romney was trying to make a point about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
During more than a decade of religion coverage, I've come up with an unofficial law that handles the weirdness question. Weiss' First Law of Religious Relativism is: Any religion is, by definition, crazy to a nonbeliever.
By which I do not mean that every aspect of another's faith will seem nuts. Romney made that point in his speech:
"I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims."
But none of those examples depend on faith. And that's my point: Any part of a religion that depends on faith would seem crazy in another context.
For example:
The creator of the universe chooses a small, seemingly unremarkable tribe of nomads in one corner of the earth to deliver the true meaning of life.
Or, the creator of the universe, having delivered the rules and the meaning of life to that small band of nomads, later finds it necessary to painfully sacrifice his only son to save his creations from the rules that he, the creator, set up.
Or the creator of the universe sends his angel to an apparently minor leader with larger and honorable ambitions. That angel dictates the eternal truths about this world and the world to come.
Or the universe never really started or ended. This world repeats, as precisely as a movie, every 5,000 years. You will be reading this same line in this same column, for instance, in 5,000 years. The only free will people have is deciding how to internally respond to the infinitely repeating events.
I assume you recognized the first three examples as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And I assume you did not recognize the fourth. It's a real religion called Brahma Kumaris, born in India in the 1930s.
Each of those descriptions seems perfectly logical to those who believe it — and totally not for those who do not.
Think of each system of religious beliefs as a tapestry. On one side is a beautiful image, a picture that is instantly meaningful to any who sees it. But on the other side — there's nothing but tangled threads.
Now imagine two people, one on either side. One says: "Look at the beautiful image." The other says: "Are you crazy? What image?"
Leave aside for a moment the question of whether in some absolute sense the Mormons or the Baptists or the Brahma Kumaris are right about the eternal nature of the universe.
For some voters, anyway, Romney has to deal with the "tapestry" problem. And his recent speech on his views about religion and the presidency may have been an attempt to convince them that he really does see a picture, and not just threads.
