Mitt Romney would not enlighten us

When it comes to the question I concluded by asking on Friday, How could belief in believing [that is, in faith as opposed to knowing based on evidence] have come to have such sway over Americans, we citizens of a nation born of Enlightenment political philosophy?, Mitt Romney pretty decisively identified himself as such a believer by this sentence from his religion speech:

Raised up over generations, long ago, so many of the cathedrals [of Europe] now stand as the postcard backdrop to societies just too busy or too 'enlightened' to venture inside and kneel in prayer.

Don't miss the significance of those quotation marks.

As Roger Cohen put it Thursday in his op-ed piece in The New York Times:

Europe’s cathedrals are indeed “so inspired, so grand, so empty,” as Mitt Romney, a Mormon, put it last week in charting his vision of a faith-based presidency. Some do not survive at all. The Continent has paid a heavy price in blood for religious fervor....

Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, was dismissive of European societies “too busy or too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer.” He thereby pointed to what has become the principal transatlantic cultural divide.

Europeans still take the Enlightenment seriously enough not to put it inside quote marks [emphasis mine]. They have long found an inspiring reflection of it in the first 16 words of the American Bill of Rights of 1791: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

...Bush is no transient phenomenon; he is the expression of a new American religiosity. Romney’s speech and the rapid emergence of the anti-Darwin Baptist minister Mike Huckabee as a rival suggest how estranged the American zeitgeist is from the European.

At a time when growing numbers of Americans identify themselves as born-again evangelicals, and creationism is no joke, Romney essentially pitted the faithful against the faithless while attempting to merge Mormonism in mainstream Christianity. Where Kennedy said he believed in a “president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Romney pledged not to “separate us from our religious heritage.”

...Religion informed America’s birth. But its distancing from politics was decisive to the republic’s success. Indeed, the devastating European experience of religious war influenced the founders’ thinking. That is why I find Romney’s speech and the society it reflects far more troubling than Europe’s vacant cathedrals.

Romney allows no place in the United States for atheists. He opines that, “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Yet secular Sweden is free while religious Iran is not....

Oh yeah, we sure do want some more unreality-based political leadership, don't we?