With Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s motley crew of Cabinet-level nominees, one issue Democrats will need to confront right away is when and whether the appointees’ often-exotic religious views are an appropriate subject for discussion. I offered some simple guidelines at New York:
Amid all the hotly disputed allegations that he has a history of excessive drinking and inappropriate (or even abusive) behavior toward women, Donald Trump’s defense-secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, has another potential problem that’s just now coming into view: His religious beliefs are a tad scary.
Early reports on Hegseth’s belligerent brand of Christianity focused on a tattoo he acquired that sported a Latin slogan associated with the medieval Crusaders (which led to him being flagged as a potential security problem by the National Guard, in which he served with distinction for over a decade). But as the New York Times reports, the tattoo is the tip of an iceberg that appears to descend into the depths of Christian nationalism:
“’Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough,’ [Hegseth] wrote in a book, American Crusade, published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must …’
“In his book, Mr. Hegseth also offered a nod to the prospect of future violence: ‘Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.’”
His words aside, Hegseth has chosen to associate himself closely with Doug Wilson, an Idaho-based Christian-nationalist minister with a growing educational mission, notes the Times:
“[After moving to Tennessee two years ago] the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network, and multiple churches, among other entities …
“In his writings, Mr. Wilson has argued that slavery ‘produced in the South a genuine affection between the races,’ that homosexuality should be a crime, and that the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was a mistake. He has written that women should not ordinarily hold political office because ‘the Bible does say that when feminine leadership is common, it should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse …’
“Mr. Hegseth told [a] Christian magazine in Nashville that he was studying a book by Mr. Wilson; on a podcast Mr. Hegseth said that he would not send his children to Harvard but would send them to Mr. Wilson’s college in Idaho.”
All this Christian-nationalist smoke leads to the fiery question of whether Hegseth’s religious views are fair game for potential confirmation hearings. Would exploration of his connections with a wildly reactionary religious figure like Doug Wilson constitute the sort of “religious test … as a qualification to any office or public trust” that is explicitly banned by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution? It’s a good and important question that could come up with respect to other Trump nominees, given the MAGA movement’s cozy relationship with theocratic tendencies in both conservative-evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic communities.
Actually, the question of the boundary between a “religious test” and maintenance of church-state separation came up conspicuously during the first year of Trump’s earlier presidency in confirmation hearings for the then-obscure Russell Vought, whom Trump nominated to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (he later became director of OMB, the position to which Trump has again nominated him for the second term). Bernie Sanders seized upon a Vought comment defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for sanctions against a professor who said that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Sanders suggested that showed Vought was an Islamophobic bigot, while Vought and his defenders (included yours truly) argued that the man’s opinion of the credentials of Muslims for eternal life had nothing to do with his duties as a prospective public servant.
This does not, to be clear, mean that religious expressions when they actually do have a bearing on secular governance should be off-limits in confirmation hearings or Senate votes. If, for example, it becomes clear that Hegseth believes his Christian faith means echoing his mentor Doug Wilson’s hostility to women serving in leadership positions anywhere or anytime, that’s a real problem and raising it does not represent a “religious test.” If this misogyny was limited to restrictions on women serving in positions of religious leadership, that would be another matter entirely.
More generally, if nominees for high executive office follow their faith in adjudging homosexuality or abortion as wicked, it’s only germane to their fitness for government offices if they insist upon imposing those views as a matter of public policy. Yes, there is a conservative point of view that considers any limitation on faith-based political activism in any arena as a violation of First Amendment religious-liberty rights. But those who think this way also tend to disregard the very idea of church-state separation as a First Amendment guarantee.
Critics of Christian nationalism in the Trump administration need to keep essential distinctions straight and avoid exploring the religious views of nominees if they are truly private articles of faith directed to matters of the spirit, not secular laws. It’s likely there will be plenty of examples of theocratic excesses among Trump nominees as Senate confirmation hearings unfold. But where potential holders of high offices respect the lines between church and state, their self-restraint commands respect as well.
A couple of points on this from Wm. Saletan during the 2000 election:
“On its Web site, Gallup makes clear that its poll seeks to maximize daily change: “Our objective is to pick up movements up and down in reaction to the day-to-day events of the campaign.” ”
— also —
“CNN and USA Today are in the news business. They’re paying Gallup for new numbers every day. If Gallup’s numbers don’t change, where’s the news? So Gallup has an incentive to keep its filter loose, allowing the winds of shifting partisan intensity to blow its numbers back and forth.”
Today (Oct 25) Prez Track , Rasmussen’s
site , shows Kerry ahead for the first time
since late August.
Mr. Abramowitz:
I don’t think these results necessarily indicate random fluctuations. Maybe the likely voter screens are working as might be expected: screening out the less intense, less informed late-to-tune-in crowd 3 or more weeks out from the election, and then screening them in as the election nears and their attention sharpens.
I disagree, in part. Some, but not all, of the fluctuations in the tracking polls are simply statistical noise.
Polls that fix the number of Democrats and Republicans in the sample should have less sampling error. Zogby and Rasmussen do so, and they have smaller day-to-day fluctuations. The sampling error MOE with fixed party ID for 3000 respondents (Rasmussen) is around 1.2% and for 1200 respondents (Zogby) it’s around 1.9%. The range of fluctuations for both of these polls since a few days after the last debate has been slightly larger than these numbers. (There is random error due to estimation of weighting coefficients, and there were no doubt oscillations in actual voter preference that were too small to pull out of the statistical noise.)
However, Rasmussen’s result today of 48.4% for Kerry exceeds the average of the preceding 15 days by 2.3%. This is almost 4 standard deviations and seems to represent real movement.
The statistical significance of Zogby’s move in the opposite direction over the last few days is harder to judge, partly because Zogby doesn’t give results in tenth of a percent.
Polls that don’t fix party ID have bigger sampling error. The Wash. Post’s poll oscillations seem to be just slightly larger than the sampling error, although I can’t calculate exactly because they partially adjust for party ID and because they sometimes average over 3 days and sometimes over 4. (Their RV MOE would be about 2.1% if there were no party ID weighting at all.)
When polls move together, of course, it has statistical meaning even if the polls taken one-at-a-time could be random movements. If Zogby jumps more Democratic over the next couple of days (as is likely, because two very pro-Bush days will fall out of the sample), and the Post and Rasmussen stay more or less the same, or if Zogby and Rasmussen stay the same and the Post trends more Kerry (which would bring it out of the sampling error range), we will have a clear trend.
Oct. 25, Rassmussen has Kerry ahead of Bush for the first time since August.
Relax, have faith, we are not alone, ignore all polls if your nerves can’t take it and GOTV!!!
I hate to say this, but if everyone had a hunch their polls were not making sense then fudging (er… fine tuning) the methods in ways that eventually overcompensates would also create the described effect.