Ross Douthat taqiyya watch

Detail from the Seven Sacraments altarpiece of Rogier van der Weyden, 1445-50, in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. Wikimedia Commons.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, explains what Wisconsin governor Scott Walker ought to have said:

The simplest approach is just a big-tent approach to whom the term “Christian” covers, but if for some reason of deep theological principle you don’t want to use the word itself then you need another way to finesse things. Maybe something like: “President Obama and I would have some big theological differences, but we share a faith in Jesus.” Or something else, artfully constructed, that acknowledges the president’s professed faith rather than acting as though that faith doesn’t matter much and what the nation’s chief executive professes is mostly irrelevant. Because that’s what Walker’s non-response pretty explicitly suggested...

Uh, well, I guess I would like to know what Walker would say if you asked him whether Pope Francis was a Christian, given that they probably have some serious doctrinal disagreements too, not only on such issues as the Immaculate Conception and the Real Presence of the Lord's flesh in the Host and the practice of infant baptism, which the governor's denomination are known to be traditionally pretty iffy about (and the president's presumed theology would be a lot closer to it than the Pope's), but also labor unions, you know, or capital punishment.

But we do know for a fact that Obama has deliberately dissembled about his theological convictions on at least one rather important issue in the past.

Let the record show that Obama's most frequently cited dissembling was in 2004, when he said,

"What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman when they get married are performing something before God, and it's not simply the two persons who are meeting,"

That is, when his official faith, the United Church of Christ, held exactly that, since they didn't adopt the advocacy of marriage equality in General Synod until July 2005, and the next time he talked about it, with Pastor Rick Warren, was after the media had basically unchurched him, hounding him out of his Chicago UCC congregation with its orgy of denunciations of the unfortunate Reverend Jeremiah Wright, so that he might not quite have known for the moment what was "in his faith" and what wasn't. While we can assume that in his brain, you know, he had the same feelings on the subject that he had held, and publicly, for many years. (In the same way Monsignor Douthat is required under the terms of the Tridentine Creed to believe "in his faith" that those who die unbaptized are doomed to eternal damnation unless they have experienced the "Baptism of Desire" or the "Baptism of Blood"—the martyrdom which works as well on Catholics as on Muslims—but may in his person feel the same doubts on the subject as those expressed by the Pontiff).

Today, the Monsignor is upset about a suggestion from Ezra Klein that both sides may not do it and specifically that Bush hatred could be somewhat less irrational than Obama hatred, or, as Klein put it:

Bush Derangement Syndrome was, in other words, a function of 9/11 and the Iraq War: it was an effort, often misguided, to explain how the worst terrorist attack in American history happened, and why the most puzzling war in American history was launched.

Obama Derangement Syndrome is different. It isn’t so much paranoia about President Obama’s policies as it is paranoia about the man himself — that he is, in some fundamental way, different, foreign, untrustworthy, even traitorous. What’s odd is that it is attached to a president whose presidency has been, in almost every respect, conventionally liberal.

No, says Ross, because of the fact that

Bush hatred percolated well before 9/11, and that it, too, was about “the man himself” — about Bush as the “slow-talkin’ Texan … who appealed to the lowest common denominator and spoke with a moral certitude that divides the world into black and white,” and who was representative of the worst of “flyover country and red state America,” complete with the alleged low IQ and mangled syntax you’d expected from those benighted parts. But my own memories of the Bush administration would bring this to a sharper point: Bush was “otherized,” like Obama the unpatriotic anti-colonial alien from Ayers-Alinsky-Wright country, not just as a generic Red American but specifically as the embodiment of Jesusland, with his evangelical/born-again Christianity...

Personally my feelings about Bush crystallized "well before 9/11" during the presidential campaign and had a lot to do with policy, namely when the economy began tanking and George, who had been talking about the need to cut taxes because the government was running a surplus, kept on talking about the need to cut taxes because the government was falling into deficit, and I realized that it wasn't a policy idea at all, but a mission to cut taxes for himself and his class without any concern one way or the other for the national economy, and that he wasn't just a conservative, compassionate or otherwise, but a genuinely ruthless class warrior.

He "otherized" himself, with his accent and his phony, animal-free "ranch" (long abandoned, now that he can't drag the press along to camp out outside the grounds), and Jesus being his favorite philosopher. I knew very well, and so did the other opponents, that he was a patrician from Greenwich, Greenwich Country Day, and Yale, and cared no more about abortion or same-sexers than Mr. Ronald Reagan of Hollywood had cared before him, and that it was all an act staged for the benefit of the redneck voters.

Nobody ever suggested that Bush used a fake birth certificate or speculated on the identity of his real father or accused him of practicing a different religion in secret while he conspired to install its laws throughout the land, or hypothesized that he was a sleeper agent from another country. They did make up irrational theories about the reasons for the Iraq War, but only because he and his adherents never offered a reason for the war that made any sense, any more than they did for the tax cutting mania. Nobody said the taxes were going up when they were going down, or accused him of hating Israel when his people complained about the illegal West Bank settlements. Nobody ever said, "We just don't know who George W. Bush is," or lamented that he didn't love me, or you, or his country. Douthat's memories, from a period when he was a fully engaged wingnut warrior himself, before Dr. Kristol's flameout opened up the gig at the Times, are not quite accurate. Indeed, they might represent some of that there "deliberate dissembling", such as the Jesuit fathers (like Twelver Shi'ites and their taqiyya) are said to be permitted to use in defense of the faith.