On Conversion and Flip-Flopping

"Why Are American Politicians Always Switching Religions?" really annoys me, mostly for asking "how we can gauge the authenticity of any politician’s conversion at all."

The article concludes by paralleling flip-flopping on public policies to converting: "Romney is known for changing his mind, but he has had two fewer wives, and two fewer religions, than Newt Gingrich. So who’s the flip-flopper?" I don't know that I have any particular problem with flip-flopping on public policy (as the situation can change or the candidate can gain more information about a particular policy), but I'm offended by the insinuation that converting to another church is a sort of flip-flopping that is primarily politically motivated. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't think you can tell, so you've got to give the person the benefit of the doubt.

(My comments here have nothing to do with Gingrich's Catholicism, about which I know nothing. If he didn't get annulments for the first two marriages, then that's a serious problem.)

It's so nice of Oppenheimer to admit that "[o]f course, when considering why people convert, genuine belief is always a possibility."

I think that the problem of the article is that he considers politician's conversions as if they're quite separate from whatever converting goes on in society as a whole. I have no idea what percentage of people do not practice in the denomination in which they are raised, but I bet it's pretty high. And I'd be surprised if politicians' percentages were very different from the percentages of Americans as a whole. (Update: Pew says that 44% of Americans do not currently belong to their childhood faith.)

And what in the world does Oppenheimer mean when he writes, "Gingrich and Obama are hardly unique in the annals of contemporary politics. Major American politicians seem unusually promiscuous in their religious affinities, not just switching houses of worship but totally altering the substance of their worship" (emphasis is mine)?! The examples that follow are Bush moving from Episcopal to Methodist, Harry Reid moving from I'm not sure what (Protestantism? nothing?) to Mormonism, Bill Clinton moving from not attending a church to carrying a Bible, and Ronald Reagan going from Disciples of Christ to possibly fundamentalist. Okay, so when there is a move from unbelief in God to belief, sure, someone totally alters the substance of his worship. But many of these cases are from one denomination of Christianity to another. I call that altering the form of their worship. The object of their worship continues to be God. (Actually, I have no idea at all what he means by the "substance of their worship.")

And why in the world does a piece about politicians' conversions turn to intellectuals converting to Eastern Orthodoxy??!: "(There is a whole other article to be written about the cerebral types who find a home in Eastern Orthodoxy: columnist Rod Dreher, the late church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, the historian Albert Raboteau, the writers Andre Dubus III and Frank Schaeffer.)" There are thousands of other articles to be written; it's beside the point to mention them there.