On the private and the official

Mitt Romney recently said that asking a candidate to explain his church’s distinctive theology “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” And Governor Romney is certainly not alone in making the equivocation between the Constitution prohibiting a religious test oath and it being somehow un-American for citizen voters to ask such questions. But the only way to make sense of this line of reasoning is to assert that whatever the Constitution prevents Congress from doing must also therefore be unacceptable for individuals to do.

But such a view is supremely confused about the very nature of the Constitution. The entire point of preventing the federal government (or other governments) from making certain requirements is to preserve and protect that same power somewhere else. If people want to vote against Romney because he’s a Mormon or against Rick Perry because he’s an Evangelical, that is their unassailable right as a voter. And if they use those standards to urge other voters in the same direction, that is part of their unalienable right to free political speech. That’s because there is a vast difference between an official religious requirement for office and private religious judgment by a voter. In fact, one say that using a Constitutional limitation to try to marginalize people for expressing their religious convictions regarding candidates is itself un-American, or at least more so than them holding those convictions in the first place.

Consider similar cases. The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion. Does that mean it is un-American to support building a church? The First Amendment prohibits Congress from censoring the press. Does that mean it is un-American for a privately owned newspaper to reject essays it considers unworthy or unfitting for its periodical? And the First Amendment prohibits Congress from interfering with the right of people to assemble. But does this mean it is un-American for people to exclude anyone from their group?

For my own part, I’m not sure how much I care that Romeny is a Mormon. I might even try to persuade someone else who is adamantly against him for that reason to care less about it if the particular electoral circumstances were right. But I would never dare mangle the Constitution so badly as to imply that him persisting in his rejection on those grounds is somehow un-American. If anything, the fact that he made that argument might put me off of Romney more than his religious loyalties ever could.