English Quiz 207

(English Quiz 207)

1. Conservative Christians don't much like the idea that the Bible is corrupted or that its truths could be updated. The conflicts run deep enough that in 2001 the Vatican ruled Mormon baptisms invalid, and even the more liberal Presbyterians and United Methodists require that Mormons looking to convert be rebaptized. Southern Baptists have called Utah "a stronghold of Satan," and there are many bookshelves' worth of anti-Mormon literature in circulation. The church's aggressive missionary work is a particular challenge to other professing churches, which believe that converts to Mormonism are not truly saved. But old traditions of theological hostility conflict with constitutional traditions of religious tolerance and a modern trend toward political detente. When Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979, he was happy to welcome conservative Catholics and Mormons and Jews to increase his organization's throw weight on social issues. The fact that Romney personally emphasizes family, service and sobriety and opposes abortion and gay marriage has led some evangelical leaders to adopt a kind of "Don't ask, don't tell" policy when it comes to details of his faith. Romney has held quiet meetings around the country, and they have come away, by and large, impressed. "Southern Baptists understand they are voting for a Commander in Chief, not a Theologian in Chief," says Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's public-policy arm. "But he's gotta close the deal. Only Romney can make voters comfortable with his Mormonism. Others cannot do it for him."
Q: 試翻 "But old traditions ... toward political detente."

2. They're certainly willing to help, however. Pat Robertson invited Romney to give the commencement address at his Regent University, and the group Evangelicals for Mitt argues that religious conservatives are just as capable of separating faith and politics as liberal Democrats were when they elevated the highest-ranking Mormon in politics: Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Romney's strategists are well aware that the deadliest campaigns in Republican primaries are often the ones waged below the radar. But in this age it is impossible to track every scurrilous e-mail or answer every blog assault. "There are caricatures that pick some obscure aspect of your faith that you never even think about and assume that it was the central element of the church," Romney says, noting that Mormon leaders past and present "said all sorts of things, but they're not church doctrine." Both Romney and wife Ann regularly make a punch line of the fact that he's the only leading Republican contender who is still on his first marriage. And for the record, Romney's great-grandfather, who had five wives, was the last polygamist in the family line.
Q: 試翻 "Romney's strategists are well aware that ... below the radar."

3. That still leaves the concerns of more secular voters. Weisberg observes that modern political discourse seems to permit the exploration of candidates' every secret except their most basic philosophical beliefs: "The crucial distinction is between someone's background and heritage, which they don't choose, and their views, which they do choose and which are central to the question of whether someone has the capacity to serve in the highest office in the country." He would raise the same concerns, he notes, about a Jew or a Methodist who believed the earth is less than 6,000 years old. Weisberg's characterization of Mormonism as "Scientology plus 125 years" did not stop Romney from naming L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth a favorite novel. "Someone who believes, seriously believes, in a modern hoax is someone we should think hard about," Weisberg argues, "whether they have the skepticism and intellectual seriousness to take on this job." Hewitt counters that Romney is facing a double standard, born of a barely hidden bias. "It is unreasonable to demand that a Mormon candidate expose and defend his deepest beliefs in rational terms in order to reassure voters that he is of sound mind," he says. He warns Evangelicals hostile to Romney's religion against colluding with those he sees as hostile to all religions. "The secular left that does not like people of faith in the public square is very happy to have a group of Fundamentalists raise this issue and be a battering ram," Hewitt argues. But if purely theological challenge becomes acceptable, he says, your own theology will be next: Which miracles do you believe in; what about this contradiction in Scripture?
Q: 試翻 "Hewitt counters that ... a barel hidden bias."

4. Romney's inspiration going forward may come less from Kennedy than from Dwight Eisenhower, whom Romney reveres to such an extent, he told the Atlantic Monthly, that he asked his grandchildren to call him "Ike" and Ann "Mamie." It was Eisenhower who presided over the first National Prayer Breakfast, saw the addition of "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and IN GOD WE TRUST to dollar bills, and declared that "our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." There has always been a certain virtue in vagueness when it comes to presidential piety, and Eisenhower, a Presbyterian convert raised by Jehovah's Witnesses, benefited from discussing spirituality in the most general terms. Romney has repeatedly said that "I think the American people want a person of faith to lead the country. I don't think Americans care what brand of faith someone has." "Romney has a bigger problem and a smaller problem than Kennedy," argues Richard N. Ostling, co-author of Mormon America: The Power and the Promise. "Bigger because the distance between the Mormon faith and conventional Judeo-Christian faith is wider. On the other hand, I think Americans are more tolerant than they once were." There are now two Buddhists and a Muslim in the House of Representatives. Is the U.S. open to electing someone from a new, different or marginal religious group? To Romney's disciples, it's an article of faith that the answer is yes.
Q: 試翻 "it was Eisenhower who presided over ... what it is."