Can Santorum (or you) Say “Satan”?

On Tuesday, February 21, The Drudge Report ran a story about a speech then-Senator Rick Santorum gave at Ave Maria University where he warned that “Satan has his sights on the U.S. ” He went on to say, “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those voices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

This caused an uproar in the mainstream media.  Among many other expressions of disgust, The Daily Beast published a follow up, “10 Outrageous Things Rick Santorum Has Said,” some of which were, in fact, common Catholic views.  To The Daily Beast these statements were so beyond the pale that they required no counter-arguments; they provided a laugh and showed Santorum to be a non-electable fanatic.

Wolf Blitzer on CNN spent all Wednesday afternoon before the CNN Republican debate sputtering over the trouble a candidate must be in if he had to defend his views of Satan.  Donna Brazile, pretending to reach out to the church crowd, spoke of how Santorum was preaching to the choir when he should be addressing the congregation.  The congregation included people of various faiths or none.  Santorum should self-censor any talk of worldviews or phony theologies, she implied, and certainly, Satan.

Political discourse in America has long been defined narrowly as to religious language.  Our nation was founded by Deists and Christians, and the Deists, who believed God never intervened in human affairs, were the dominant rhetoricians.  An unspoken compact evolved in American political affairs that God could be invoked on many occasions, but then discussions of policy should be pursued as if God did not exist—or at least matter much.  The exception to this came with wars and other tragic events where providence came into play.  At times political figures truly did see beyond the merely mortal by the light of faith.  The most profound instance of this came in Lincoln’s second inaugural where he saw the hand of God directing the nation despite the shortcomings of both the North and South.

Still, at the beginning of the nation, and especially with the Second (or Lesser) Awakening as  the 19th century got underway, a broad Christian consensus prevailed in America.  No one in politics wanted to get into the weeds of the Calvinist-Arminian controversy,  but talk of the Devil  having designs on America would have been understood by all and not taken as a laughing matter.

What’s revealing about the Santorum dust-up is the open-mouthed lack of reasoned response to the candidate’s reference to Satan—as if no response to such statements need be attempted because they are simply irrational nonsense.  Wolf Blitzer modeled this in citing the reference with stunned disbelief.  That’s a wonderful means of mockery if you can get away with it, because it immediately threatens any dissenters with shame.

The deepest power the media have is to define in advance how we are going to talk about a subject.  If I can frame political questions as I wish and even dictate the very words that are allowed in political discourse, I will win the argument every single time.  The answer resides in the premises.

For example, are we going to talk about abortion as the taking of life or a woman’s right to control her own body?  Are we going to talk about homosexuality as an “inherently disordered condition,” as the Church teaches or a civil rights issue?  Are we going to talk about the family as an institution instituted by God or a contract that can be canceled by either party at any time for any reason?  If I’m willing to grant the frame of women’s rights, civil rights, and contract law, then I have no argument.

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