Where does Dean stand on religion?

[PurpHaze69]

I'm not sure, but I don't remember hearing a lot of "God bless America" this and that from Dean. He's a doctor, which means he's a little better educated and probably more enlightened, than most of your MBA (Bush) types. I'd be interested to hear his true beliefs on the whole god thing. I'm an atheist by the way.

[Zynx]

1. He's a Congregationalist

He's generally fairly quiet on religion much like myself.

[izzie]

13. Well I am also so I would say he wants to keep out of it and for....

you to keep out of his. Yes to keeping the state and church apart. Congregationalist know all about that. We have John Winthrop and the 'City on the Hill' in our history. We could not make a church state work and really did try.

[Rose Siding]

24. He quoted Winthrop in his announcement speech

"We shall be as one. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together."

[Padraig18]

2. As long as it doesn't involve small animals, virgins or children...

... being subjected to blood sacrifice, Dean is your basic 'you do your thing and I'll do mine' on religion.

[w13rd0]

3. Is something wrong...

...with virgins? Oh wait, you said subjected to blood sacrifice...never mind...

[Padraig18]

7. Hehe

:evilgrin:

[elfwitch]

4. Id imagine...

He's probably pretty cool about the whole thing. His wife and kids are Jewish and he isn't. Gotta be pretty tolerant to live in a mixed household. When he is president and puts on a kippah for the Chaunakkah lighting, I'll at least feel like he has probably lit the menorah once or twice before. Hell, he probably has his very own yaumulke.

[CBHagman]

8. That would bring a refreshing diversity to the White House

Yes, I know there have been Menorah lightings there (I'm sure even the Big Dawg put on the yarmulke) and that Bush made a point of visiting the Islamic Center after 9/11 (one of the few things he's done that I'd congratulate him for).

But this -- an interfaith marriage of a Christian and a Jew -- would be a first for the White House. After my dreams of klezmer music at the inauguration in 2001 and articles about Hadassah Lieberman in the women's magazines ("Chanukkah at our house" in Good Housekeeping, maybe?), it's at least a start.

Well, we also have actual Catholics in this race, too, one of whom has Jewish ancestry on his father's side (Clark), was brought up Protestant, and converted as a young man.

[DeathvadeR]

12. Think the Jewish Coumninity frowns upon this relationship? n/t

[LeahMira]

29. Nope.

Think the Jewish Coumninity frowns upon this relationship?

Which? Dean being married to a Jewish woman? Nope.

[mlawson]

5. I suspect he believes in strict separation of church and state.

Thus, he probably believes it inappropriate to make comments on religion. That is how I would behave, if I were a candidate.

[denverbill]

6. His wife is Jewish.

So he obviously isn't an uber-Christian who is so worried about religion that he has to marry within his religion.

[DrFunkenstein]

10. So Are His Children (And The Co-Chair Of His Campaign)

WASHINGTON -- On a recent trek around the capital seeking support from pro-Israel lobbyists and Reform movement activists, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean may have been the only non-Jew in the room.

But Dean, the former governor of Vermont, should be used to that. It's the same way in his own home.

Dean, a Congregationalist, has a Jewish wife, and both his children, 17-year-old Paul and 18-year-old Anne, have chosen to identify as Jews.

Dean's wife, Judith Steinberg, is the granddaughter of a Conservative rabbi from Winnipeg, Manitoba, but the governor's children were not given any formal religious education, and they did not become bar or bat mitzvah.

He has been aided by a key figure in Democratic and Jewish politics, Steve Grossman, the former president of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and national chairman of Democratic National Committee.

Dean believes the Bush administration should be giving Israel $4 billion in military aid to fight terrorism, not the $1 billion it proposed last month.

http://www.jewishsf.com/bk030418/us02.shtml

[killbotfactory]

9. I think he's slightly religious

He's just very respectful in treating everyone like an American first and foremost, and not putting on some phony pious act, unlike Bush or Holy Joe.

I've only seen him mention religion a few times, and always in a respectful manner to people of other or no faith.

As an atheist, I find it refreshing to not be ignored or talked down to.

[DrFunkenstein]

11. Kerry On Religion

Spirituality is a fundamental for us. I mean, it's the-it is the overpowering, driving foundation of most of the struggles that we go through here on earth, in my judgement. I am a believer in the Supreme Being, in God. I believe, without any question in this force that is so much larger and more powerful than anything human beings can conceivably define.

I think the more we learn about the universe, the more we learn about black holes and the expansion of the universe and the more we learn what we don't know about: our beginnings and-not just of us, but the universe itself, the more I find that people believe in this supreme being. I'm a Catholic and I practice but at the same time I have an open-mindedness to many other expressions of spirituality that come through different religions. I'm very respectful and am interested-I find it intriguing.

I went to Jerusalem a number of years ago on an official journey to Israel and I was absolutely fascinated by the 32 or so different branches of Catholicism that were there. That's before you even get to the conflict between Arabs and Jews. I have spent a lot of time since then trying to understand these fundamental differences between religions in order to really better understand the politics that grow out of them. So much of the conflict on the face of this planet is rooted in religions and the belief systems they give rise to. The fundamentalism of one entity or another.

So I really wanted to try to learn more. I've spent some time reading and thinking about it and trying to study it and I've arrived at not so much a sense of the differences but a sense of the similarities in so many ways; the value system roots and the linkages between the Torah, the Koran and the Bible and the fundamental story that runs through all of this, that connects us-and really connects all of us.

And so I've also always been fascinated by the Transcendentalists and the Pantheists and others who found these great connections just in nature, in trees, the ponds, the ripples of the wind on the pond, the great feast of nature itself. I think it's all an expression that grows out of this profound respect people have for those forces that human beings struggle to define and to explain. It's all a matter of spirituality. I find that even - even atheists and agnostics wind up with some kind of spirituality, maybe begrudgingly acknowledging it here and there, but it's there.

http://www.americanwindsurfer.com/mag/back/issue5.5c.html

[Upfront]

14. Who Asked

Who asked about Kerry?

[DrFunkenstein]

17. Who Said Anything About Kerry?

Sorry. Just messing with ya.

[killbotfactory]

15. Oh good

I find that even - even atheists and agnostics wind up with some kind of spirituality, maybe begrudgingly acknowledging it here and there, but it's there.

I forgot he's a bit arrogant when it comes to atheists. Thanks of the reminder.

[DrFunkenstein]

16. Wherefore Arrogant?

I think Kerry's sense of spirituality is very much like that of Bill Moyers.

[killbotfactory]

18. It would be like me saying

"even religious people wind up with a disbelief in God, maybe begrudgingly, but it's there"

sounds arrogant, no?

[youngred]

19. well there's a difference between spirtuality and belief in a diety

but your comment isn't that arrogant considering most (thinking) believers would acknowledge that there is no true way of knowing for certain (therefore a little disbelief), but many accept on Faith.

[Eloriel]

23. I don't. n/t

[janekat]

20. Saw an interesting article about how liberalism/Congregationalism/Vermont

are kind of connected (that Vermont is a big "Congregational" state) and that they are an influence in the Dean campaign. I'll try to dig it up.

[KaraokeKarlton]

34. Vermont isn't a highly religious state

and it certainly isn't an influence in politics here. If it were, we wouldn't have Civil Unions.

[mzmolly]

21. I know he said he doesn't attend church regularilly.

Guess he's much like myself in that way ;)

[janekat]

22. Article on Dean & Congregationalism

BTW - as a kid my family went to a "Congregational Church" for a few years - I don't know if I totally agree with the authors view of Congregationalsim...

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/10/franke-ruta-g.html

But Stone, I learned as I listened to Dean supporters around the country, was not so unusual after all. In Austin, Texas, Melissa Sternberg told me she'd gotten so excited after she caught Dean on the Charlie Rose Show in June that she'd become "born-again Dean." On popular political blogs like Daily Kos, readers routinely discuss Dean supporters' "messianic" zeal. Backers of retired Gen. Wesley Clark accuse the Deanies of promoting a "Church of Dean." In each case, the choice of words is instructive, and probably not accidental.

The mainstream media suggest that Dean has roused the Democratic Party's base through his opposition to the Iraq War and straight-ahead criticisms of President Bush. But comments like the ones above suggest that Dean has tapped into something much deeper -- and older in American political history -- than mere Bush hatred. Irrespective of whether he ends up winning the Democratic nomination, Dean has already accomplished something valuable for liberalism: He has reconnected it to a strain of religiously inflected American history it typically ignores.

....No, Dean is something altogether different. He is more a product of geography -- and his was a chosen geography, as he was born in New York City -- than ideology. The more one watches him on the stump (and watches his admirers watching him), the more it becomes apparent that he comes out of, and is reviving, a tradition of small-town, New England civic and religious fervor that is all but forgotten in American politics today. He is something the country has not seen in a very long time. He is, essentially, a northern evangelist.

......Indeed, Vermont demands a retail politics of just the sort the Iowa and New Hampshire contests also favor. And, for the first year and a half Dean was running for president, that's just the sort of politics he practiced.

......Dean is, without a doubt, an odd vessel for the quasi-religious fervor he has inspired. He almost never mentions God in his stump speeches and he rarely goes to church himself. Nevertheless, his rhetoric -- like his campaign structure -- is deeply grounded in the social practices of a branch of radical Protestantism whose tenets still wield power in the structures of Vermont's government. The Pilgrims who gave America its foundational governing documents and ideas -- ideas that Dean now routinely references -- created a society based partly on the anti-authoritarian religious principles of Congregationalism, their religion (and, since the early '80s, Dean's).

Congregationalism, the dominant religion of colonial and early federal life, had by the 20th century become an obscure New England denomination about as relevant to modern life as covered bridges. Yet the legacy of the Congregationalists -- and their Unitarian descendants -- is one of the most powerful forces in the history of the American North. It was Congregationalists who landed the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Their descendants founded America's elite colleges, such as Harvard and Yale, and some of its most liberal ones, such as Oberlin and Amherst. Where the South bred agrarian populists and Baptist revivals, the North churned out Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers.

Dean's own conversion to Congregationalism was a more mundane political affair. He'd been christened as a Catholic and was raised Episcopalian. But he converted to the local Vermont religion as a consequence of his battle to make over the shoreline.

-snip-

[Woodstock]

25. I found a really interesting article today

it explains why he switched (born Catholic -> raised Episcopalian -> switched to Congregationalist) - apparently the Episcopalian church gave him holy hell over building a bike path/restoring some coastline

I'll find the link...

[Woodstock]

26. oops, I see you found it

I always reply first, read the thread second, maybe I ought to reverse that order!

It's a cool article. I actually subscribed to the Prospect today, and saw it there (I can't wait to read that article on Clinton.)

[jsw_81]

27. Dean and religion

Dean was baptized Catholic, converted to Congregationalist, married a Jew, and raised his children as Jews.

And from what I've read about him, Dean feels that religion is a private matter and strongly supports church/state separation. Plus, he's had the guts to attack right-wing fundy nutballs like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and General Boykin who claim that this is a "Christian" nation.

He's got my vote.

[bobbieinok]

28. religious right would say

1) congregationalist = not 'born again', not religious right .... therefore not 'christian'

2) supports civil unions ... therefore anti-god, anti-bible

If Dean is on the ticket, there will a massive, constant homosexual=democratic party message on talk radio. It will drown out any message the democrats will try to present.

Please note: Attitudes on DU are NOT those of much of middle America and of many in states the dem party MUST win.

[LeahMira]

30. True, but...

Please note: Attitudes on DU are NOT those of much of middle America and of many in states the dem party MUST win.

... that's why we have a message board here. Sometimes "middle America" is wrong. Sometimes "the majority" is wrong.

I certainly don't have the magic words that are going to wake up "middle America" and make "the majority" see that the U.S. is headed on the wrong course, but the more we talk to one another the better the chances are that we will come up with those magic words.

The founders of this nation did not intend that we impose our way of life by force and everlasting war on the rest of the world. I suspect they intended that we persuade by example.

[JackRiddler]

31. Let them make this the main issue...

They will lose. It will be impeachment redux. I am certain middle America does not give this issue a higher priority than economy, war and terror.

(To all such posts I must add: they can always win by stealing, of course.)

[KaraokeKarlton]

32. Well, he did leave one church over a bike trail

I'm not sure why, but it's something I heard him say in an interview.

[VermontDem2004]

33. He is a congretianolist.

If that is how you spell it.