Romney, Cults, and Presidents

There seems to be quite a lot of hubbub right now about Romney being a Mormon and whether or not it should automatically disqualify him from being president.  For me, the bottom line is what a person will do as president. As president, I am only concerned with a person's moral values in so far as it will manifest itself in his/her decisions.  As president, I am only concerned with a person's beliefs insofar as they will manifest themselves in his/her decisions.

Now these things do influence decisions, but most people have things backwards.  Our professed (or labelled) identities are no sure predictor of how we will act.  Humans are not primarily thinkers.  We are usually quite inconsistent.  Our real identities are revealed by our patterns of behavior and often have little to do with our professed identities (or the identities given us by the labels of others).

Is Mormonism a theological cult?  Certainly the official beliefs of the Mormons are unorthodox by historic Christian standards.  Jesus was not on equal footing with Satan when God presented his plan of salvation to them both.  It stretches the limits of the mind that The Book of Mormon is "another" testament revealed to some of the 10 lost tribes of Israel (read Native Americans) and delivered to a man who found golden plates in the 1800s on the frontier (that have now conveniently disappeared).

But sociologically, in terms of how how he behaves as an American, Romney seems within the normal spectrum of human weirdness.  It's unclear to me that the stranger elements of his Mormon background would have an effect on his decision making as a president.  It reminds me of how many were afraid of JFK's catholicism in the early 60s.  Romney makes no connection between his political positions and the eccentricities of Mormonism.  

The situation is quite different with someone like Michelle Bachmann, who explicitly indicates that her ideology is the central factor in her political positions.  Her ideas are a predictor of her decision making behavior because she so specifically connects her ideas with her intended decisions.  I personally think it is better for a president to be a pragmatist with good overall goals and a good working knowledge of how things work than to be an idealist.

This is not an endorsement of Romney.  I'm simply trying to present some perspectives that I find somewhat lacking right now among evangelicals in the public forum.

Labelism

I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:

labelism: The tendency to skew diverse particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by grouping them under overly generalized labels in the service of argument.

Examples:

• Those who favor women in ministry are liberals because radical feminists push for equal rights and pay for women.
• True conservatives are opposed to gun control because gun control is generally pushed by Democrats.
• Allowing the government to manage some area of its citizens' life shows that we are becoming socialist like China.
• Taxing us to support the health care of the elderly shows that we are becoming communist like the Soviet Union.
• Making decisions that are unpopular shows that President Obama is a Fascist like Hitler.
• You can't believe in the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke because that is an idea that comes from higher criticism.
• The students at Oberlin were transcendentalists like Emerson who didn't believe in a personal God because they put a high emphasis on religious feeling like the Romantics.

All these statements are logically fallacious, even though they are the stuff of common rhetoric. They take diverse realia and oversimplify them because the human mind has difficulty processing complexity.

Logical fallacies involved: 1) hasty generalization, where differences between one observation and a general conclusion are ignored in the midst of argument; 2) fallacy of composition, where a whole is assumed to have certain characteristics because some parts have certain characteristics; and 3) fallacy of division, where all parts of something are assumed to all have certain characteristics because of some characteristic of the whole.

Explanation: The human mind is generally unable to process large amounts of particular facts without grouping them together into schemata, as Piaget called them. In deductive reasoning, where all the data can be accounted for and where all the data is usually of a simple nature, universal groupings can be fully coherent.

In inductive thinking, however, which is the nature of our lives in the world, all the data can rarely be accounted for, and the data is almost never a simple nature. People, events, and various other particular data are extremely complex and interwoven together. Simple ideas thus can hardly represent them without skew of some kind.

Beware of generalizations bearing fallacies! The Devil is in the details.