Inevitably, Harriet Miers’ religious views are going to get some scrutiny in the very near future, particularly since the initial reaction to her nomination from Christian Right leaders was significantly warmer than that of other conservatives. So far, all the press seems to have figured out is that she spent many years as a devoted member of a “conservative evangelical church” in suburban Dallas, and that she was raised as a (apparently nonobservant) Catholic.I did a little quick research last night on Valley View Christian Church, and also happen to know a bit about the tradition it comes from, so I thought I’d share this analysis for future reference. Keep in mind that I am at best an amateur Church historian, so this account may well include errors, though I profoundly hope it gets the big issues right.VVCC is an independent “Christian” church aligned with the conservative wing of the Campbell-Stone “Restorationist” tradition. It’s closely related to the conservative quasi-denomination, the Churches of Christ, and more distantly related to the mainline protestant Disciples of Christ.[IMPORTANT NOTES: the term “Restorationist” is occasionally applied to “Reconstructionism” or “Dominion Theology,” a scary theocratic movement of recent vintage. It has no connection whatsoever with historic “Restorationists,” or with Harriet Miers. And no one should confuse the conservative “Churches of Christ” with the “United Church of Christ,” a very liberal denomination created by the merger of the Congregationalists with German Reformed Churches in the 1940s].”Restorationism” is a distinctly American religious tradition, a product of the Second Great Awakening on the midwestern and southern frontier, largely under the leadership of Thomas Campbell and Barton Stone, both former Presbyterians who were troubled by denominational and intradenominational rivalries. The basic idea of “restorationism” was a systematic effort to return to what its adherents understood as the practices of the Primitive Church, rejecting “human” creeds, theological traditions (Protestant and well as Catholic), and sectarian denominations, with Scripture, and especially the New Testament, serving as the only source of authority in all matters.Ironically, under the leadership of Thomas Campbell’s son Alexander, the restorationists created their own denomination (albeit a loosely organized, congregationally-based denomination with a strong commitment to ecumenism), the Disciples of Christ, which grew most rapidly in the Midwest and Southwest. Their most distinctive feature was an insistence on weekly communion (most evangelical denominations, following the Calvinist practice, had long detached communion from regular Sunday worship and observed it irregularly) along with a continuing hostility to theological speculation or creeds.Eventually, and roughly at the same time that the Fundamentalist Controversy broke out in the larger Protestant denominations, a significant minority of conservative Disciples, especially in the South and Southwest, drifted out of the Disciples, most affiliating with the new Churches of Christ but others simply becoming “independent Christian” congregations like VVCC. While conservative Restorationists maintained the traditional Disciples belief in biblical inerrancy (echoing Thomas Campbell’s famous slogan: “Where Scripture speaks, we speak; where it is silent, we are silent”) other factors distinctive to restorationists were more important, particularly an insistence on adult baptism by full immersion and rejection of the Disciples’ gradual acceptance of musical instruments to accompany singing in church. But the most important contributor to the split was the conservatives’ belief that restorationists were the “one true church” replicating the Primitive Church, which, given their anti-credal and anti-denominational biases, paradoxically made them increasingly sectarian and preoccupied with “scripturally sound” doctrine, especially in matters of worship.Little has changed in the Churches of Christ and their “independent” satellites in the last century, aside from their rapid growth.Most conservative restorationists dislike the label “fundamentalist,” mainly because the fundamentalist movement in the larger denominations involved theological arguments alien to their own tradition. But they certainly share the fundamentalist position on biblical inerrancy, with an important twist: the tenet that “where [Scripture] is silent, we are silent” has made conservative restorationists much less likely to get involved, at least as a group, in battles over matters like abortion where there are virtually no direct Scriptural references, especially in the New Testament. Indeed, a 1998 article in Restoration Quarterly excoriated Churches of Christ for lagging behind other conservative evangelicals in full-throated commitment to the anti-abortion cause.What complicates this question is the conservative restorationist hostility to denominational order, formal doctrinal statements, and other “litmus tests.” These are not Southern Baptists who insist on examining their clergy and staff in search of heresy; they have few formal organs for pronouncing anathemas even if they wanted to; and much of their literature focuses on controversies like whether to use one or two cups at communion, not quasi-political topics.And this formal silence is characteristic even more of “independent” congregations like VVCC. Even if 90 to 100 precent of conservative restorationist clergy have convinced themselves the Bible does speak to the abortion issue, the gay rights issue, the school prayer issue, and other cultural matters that may come before the Supreme Court, few would know it outside their individual congregations.So: what does all of this mean in terms of “the religious question” as it relates to Harriet Miers nomination? The obvious answer is that like other aspects of her philosophy, the influence of her religious beliefs on her judicial thinking is ultimately a mystery so long as she and her friends and associates decide to keep it that way.A Washington Post profile on Miers reported that Valley View Christian Church occasionally screens Focus on the Family films, and has anti-abortion literature available in the vestibule. That kind of circumstantial evidence is probably the only kind that will turn up. Like Harriet Miers herself, her faith tradition doesn’t supply much in the way of “paper trails” on the subjects that may affect her confirmation or rejection.
TDS Strategy Memos
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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October 23: Four Fear Factors for Democrats
I figured this was as good a time as any to come clean about reasons Democrats are fretting the 2024 election results despite some quite positive signs for Kamala Harris, so I wrote them up at New York:
One of the most enduring of recent political trends is a sharp partisan divergence in confidence about each party’s electoral future. Democrats are forever “fretting” or even “bed-wetting;” they are in “disarray” and pointing fingers at each other over disasters yet to come. Republicans, reflecting the incessant bravado of their three-time presidential nominee, tend to project total, overwhelming victory in every election, future and sometimes even past. When you say, as Donald Trump often does, that “the only way we lose is if they cheat,” you are expressing the belief that you never ever actually lose.
The contrast between the fretting donkey and the trumpeting elephant is sometimes interpreted as a matter of character. Dating back to the early days of the progressive blogosphere, many activists have claimed that Democrats (particularly centrists) simply lack “spine,” or the remorseless willingness put aside doubts or any other compunctions in order to fight for victory in contests large and small. In this Nietzschean view of politics, as determined by sheer will-to-power (rather than the quality of ideas or the impact of real-world conditions), Democrats are forever bringing a knife to a gun fight or a gun to a nuclear war.
Those of us who are offended by this anti-intellectual view of political competition, much less its implicit suggestion that Democrats become as vicious and demagogic as the opposition often is, have an obligation to offer an alternative explanation for this asymmetric warfare of partisan self-confidence. I won’t offer a general theory dating back to past elections, but in 2024, the most important reasons for inordinate Democratic fear are past painful experience and a disproportionate understanding of the stakes of this election.
Democrats remember 2016 and 2020
It’s very safe to say very few Democrats expected Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump in 2016, or that Joe Biden would come so close to losing to Donald Trump in 2020. No lead in the polls looks safe because in previous elections involving Trump, they weren’t.
To be clear, the national polls weren’t far off in 2016; the problem was that sparse public polling of key states didn’t alert Democrats to the possibility Trump might pull an Electoral College inside straight by winning three states that hadn’t gone Republican in many years (since 1984 in Wisconsin, and since 1988 in Michigan and Pennsylvania). 2020 was just a bad year for pollsters. In both cases, it was Trump who benefitted from polling errors. So of course Democrats don’t view any polling lead as safe. Yes, the pollsters claim they’ve compensated for the problems that affect their accuracy in 2016 and 2020, and it’s even possible they over-compensated, meaning that Harris could do better than expected. But the painful memories remain fresh.
Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris
If you believe the maximum Trump ‘24 message about Kamala Harris’s intentions as president, it’s a scary prospect: she’s a Marxist (or Communist) who wants to replace white American citizens with the scum of the earth, which her administration is eagerly inviting across open borders with government benefits to illegally vote Democratic. It’s true that polls show a hard kernel — perhaps close to half — of self-identified Republicans believe some version of the Great Replacement Theory that has migrated from the right-wing fringes to the heart of the Trump campaign’s messaging, and that’s terrifying since there’s no evidence whatsoever for it. But best we can tell, the Trump voting base is a more-or-less equally divided coalition of people who actually believe some if not all of what their candidate says about the consequences of defeat, and people who just think Trump offers better economic and tougher immigration policies. While the election may be an existential crisis for Trump himself, since his own personal liberty could depend on the outcome, there’s not much evidence that all-or-nothing attitude is shared beyond the MAGA core of his coalition.
By contrast, Democrats don’t have to exercise a lurid sense of imagination to feel fear about Trump 2.0. They have Trump 1.0 as a precedent, with the added consideration that the disorganization and poor planning that curbed many of the 45th president’s authoritarian tendencies will almost certainly be reduced in 2025. Then there’s the escalation in his extremist rhetoric. In 2016 he promised a Muslim travel ban and a southern border wall. Now he’s talking about mass deportation program for undocumented immigrants and overt ideological vetting of legal immigrants. In 2016 he inveighed against the “deep state” and accused Democrats of actively working against the interests of the country. Now he’s pledging to carry out a virtual suspension of civil service protections and promising to unleash the machinery of law enforcement on his political enemies, including the press. As the furor over Project 2025 suggests, there’s a general sense that the scarier elements in Trump’s circle of advisors are planning to hit the ground running with radical changes in policies and personnel that can’t be reversed.
Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results
An important psychological factor feeding Democratic fears of a close election is the unavoidable fact that Trump has virtually promised to repeat or even surpass his 2020 effort to overturn the results if he loses. So anything other than a landslide victory for Harris will be fragile and potentially reversible. This is a deeply demoralizing prospect. It’s one thing to keep people focused on maximum engagement with politics through November 5. It’s another thing altogether to plan for a long frantic slog that won’t be completed until January 20.
Trump has been working hard to perfect the flaws in his 2020 post-election campaign that led to the failed January 6 insurrection, devoting a lot of resources to pre-election litigation and the compilation of post-election fraud allegations.
Though if you look hard you can find scattered examples of Democrats talking about denying a victorious Trump re-inauguration on January 20, none of that chatter is coming from the Democratic Party, the Harris-Walz campaign, or a critical mass of the many, many players who would be necessary to challenge an election defeat. Election denial in 2024 is strictly a Republican show.
If Harris wins, she’ll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he’ll have a shot at total power
As my colleague Jonathan Chait recently explained, the odds of Republicans winning control of the Senate in November are extremely high. That means that barring a political miracle, a President Harris would be constrained both legislatively and administratively, in terms of the vast number of executive-branch and judicial appointments the Senate has the power to confirm, reject, or simply ignore.
If Trump wins, however, he will have a better-than-even chance at a governing trifecta. This would not only open up the floodgates for extremist appointments aimed at remaking the federal government and adding to the Trumpification of the judiciary, but would unlock the budget reconciliation process whereby the trifecta party can make massive policy changes on up-or-down party-line votes without having to worry about a Senate filibuster.
Overall, Democrats have more reason to fear this election, and putting on some fake bravado and braying like MAGA folk won’t change the underlying reasons for that fear. The only thing that can is a second Trump defeat which sticks.