Doctor Scratch is definitely on to something in his fascination with the psychology of LDS apologists, chief among them Dr. Daniel Peterson. As I have admitted recently, I have become a casual follower of Dr. Peterson's "Sic et Non" blog, where he favors the world with this musings on various subjects.
He has continued with his reflections on personality cult and the presidency in a
recent entry concerning his two encounters with Jimmy Carter.
The entry begins, appropriately enough, with a candid story about a humorless interpretation of a cheeky sign at the 1976 Democratic convention, which read "JC can save America." Dr. Peterson's unnamed friend saw this sign and was inexplicably offended that someone dared to enter upon the "blasphemy" of intending JC in two quite different senses at the same time: Jesus Christ and Jimmy Carter.
I must have missed that extra dose of humorlessness in my DNA that would render me incapable of imagining a God with enough of a sense of humor to find that worth a chuckle.
Dr. Peterson accompanied his friend to protest this sign at a Carter campaign stop in SLC. He assures us, on the one hand, that protesting in public is "not his thing," and that he only yielded to the request out of a feeling of obligation to an old missionary companion and friend. Then, on the other hand, he informs us that his "expressed dislike of messianic pretensions in politicians is genuine, and of longstanding."
So much, indeed, that the only way he could be dragged to protest something as silly as that sign was out of a sense of obligation to an old missionary pal.
In any case, dutifully accompanying his friend, Peterson stood in position to assist in holding up a sign calling upon Jimmy to disavow this one particular "JC" sign. As fate would have it, Carter saw the sign and shouted at the doughty duo, "I didn't like that either!" Clearly, there was a man who could judge what played in Peoria or not.
Peterson informs us that the matter was thus settled for him. As he claims, he never doubted Carter's devout Christianity (thank goodness, the man was a lifelong Sunday School teacher, a fairly decent indication), and so he never imagined that Jimmy would ever confuse himself with the Messiah. Peterson then goes on to relate his second, more recent encounter with Carter, which reaffirmed his respect for the former president in spite of their abiding political differences. The Jimmy on the road to Emmaus was no more disconcerting than his earlier Salt Lake epiphany, as it turned out.
Like many of Peterson's posts, this one is rather revealing. Its aim seems to be to reassure his reader and himself that he is a fair-minded man, who does not confuse religion and politics to the point where he would assume that a man must be a blasphemer and phony Christian simply because he is a Democrat. In other words, he is big enough to acknowledge that it is possible to be a Democrat and an actual Christian. By extension, we can imagine that, unlike Droopy and bcspace, for example, Daniel Peterson may even go so far as to allow Democrats the benefit of the doubt with it comes to the capacity to be good LDS folk as well.
The revealing part is that Carter serves as an obvious foil for President Obama. Just as Peterson assumed that Carter was sincere in his Christianity, and thus he was not so much surprised as relieved to find that Jimmy disapproved of the sign too, Peterson seems to imply that he does not believe that Barack Obama is a true Christian and sees the president as rather relishing this quasi-messianic cult of personality aimed at him.
There was a time when I might have looked to see the devil's horns on my opponent's head. In times of uncertainty, it is reassuring, I suppose, to know who your enemies are. Unfortunately, it is in times of uncertainty that people are given to identifying others as enemies a little too easily and then scapegoating them. Thus it happens that "the gays" become responsible, in the minds of the disturbed armchair theologians of our world, for tsunamis in the Far East and the stumbling of America at the hand of an angry God. And the president who has an unusual name and professes a Christianity of a different kind suddenly becomes the anti-Christ in the minds of others.
I can't help but think that all of this talk of Obama the "false messiah" is really an act of tagging a pretty bland president of the United States as an anti-Christ in tentative apocalyptic speculation. It reminds me of the reelection of President Clinton during my time at BYU. So many students were wringing their hands and talking of the "signs of the times" in response to this cataclysmic event--the reelection of Clinton. Even in the most learned minds, the temptation is almost overwhelming, it would seem.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
