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If the polls are to be believed, Mormons rank among America’s most disliked religious denominations. Despite this animus, Mormons have achieved considerable political success. Fourteen Mormons serve in the current Congress, including the Senate Majority leader.
On the national level, however, things may be different. One-quarter of voters say they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon candidate for president. Among religious groups, only Muslims and atheists do worse.
This dislike presents a special problem for Republicans. Two of our most plausible candidates for president in 2012 are leading Mormons: Mitt Romney and Utah governor Jon Huntsman. Both of them bring special and important advantages to the race: Romney his success in expanding health insurance coverage in Massachusetts; Huntsman his innovative stands on the environment and social issues. Both men are highly intelligent, with strong business backgrounds, and easy verbal fluency.
If candidates like these cannot be elected to national office because of their religious affiliation, then our Republican talent pool looks dangerously shallow. It’s important to know: how thick are the barriers against a Mormon president – and what might help to surmount them?
White evangelical Protestants are the religious group least likely to express positive views of Mormons. Mitt Romney’s loss in the Iowa caucuses to Mike Huckabee offers some grounds for supposing that this evangelical distrust will have electoral effect in 2012. Yet it seems apparent that anti-Mormon feeling also runs strong on the left-hand side of the spectrum.
Here, for example, is my friend Jacob Weisberg writing about the Romney candidacy in Slate.com:
I wouldn’t vote for someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism. The LDS church holds that Joseph Smith, directed by the angel Moroni, unearthed a book of golden plates buried in a hillside in Western New York in 1827. The plates were inscribed in “reformed” Egyptian hieroglyphics—a nonexistent version of the ancient language that had yet to be decoded. If you don’t know the story, it’s worth spending some time with Fawn Brodie’s wonderful biography, No Man Knows My History. Smith was able to dictate his “translation” of the Book of Mormon first by looking through diamond-encrusted decoder glasses and then by burying his face in a hat with a brown rock at the bottom of it. He was an obvious con man. Romney has every right to believe in con men, but I want to know if he does, and if so, I don’t want him running the country.
One may object that all religious beliefs are irrational—what’s the difference between Smith’s “seer stone” and the virgin birth or the parting of the Red Sea? But Mormonism is different because it is based on such a transparent and recent fraud. It’s Scientology plus 125 years.
I could be wrong about this, but I find it hard to imagine a columnist at Slate writing a similar passage about a candidate who professed belief in the divine authorship of the Quran. Yet the historical and textual problems of the Quran are in their way very nearly as daunting as those presented by the Book of Mormon. And to give the Mormons their due: they do not threaten violence against those who publish negative verdicts on their holy book.
At the same time, I am also left wondering: If belief in the Book of Mormon makes one too gullible to be president, does it also disqualify one as Senate majority leader?
It’s a rule of American comity that we all refrain from expressing doubts about the purely doctrinal aspects of each other’s religions. It’s hard to see why Mormons should be exempt from this ancient rule of interdenominational respect. Maybe Mitt Romney’s adherence to the teachings of Joseph Smith proves him a sucker. But there’s no sign of the sucker about him when he reads a balance sheet! Why should we assume he’d be any more gullible when it came time to negotiate a treaty or face down a foreign threat or review an EPA regulation?
Anyway, it is never safe to draw conclusions about people’s inner convictions from their religious membership. The husband and wife team of Richard and Joan Ostling have just revised and reissued their study of the Mormon church, Mormon America. Their work stands as about the most authoritative account we have of the Mormon church as an institution – and of the often troubled interactions between Mormon and non-Mormon America. Non-Mormon themselves, the Ostlings have worked hard to understand how Mormons think and feel.
One conclusion that truly jumps out from the book’s pages is that many if not most Mormons respond much more to the spirit of belonging offered by the church than they do to its theology. Here for example is an interview the broadcaster Glenn Beck has given about his Mormon conversion.
Note that he has nothing at all to say about the teachings of the church. Instead he talks about the warmth of community, the power of belonging. He says: “I don’t care if there’s Kool-Aid down in the basement. I’m drinking it. I want to be like that.”
Mormonism’s teachings may have a lot to say about life on other planets, but Mormonism as a way of life is intensely focused on the here and now. Mormons do not have a professional clergy. Their educational institutions emphasize practical learning over theology, ancient languages, archaeology and history. Mormons have achieved spectacular success in fields like business, politics and national security. They are less over-represented in the sciences, and still less in the arts. The Ostlings depict a church that discourages open inquiry and polices independent thought, that seeks to edit its own history and suppress unwelcome facts. Yet this same story can be told of many forms of organized religion, including that preached in the church in which the current president held membership for 20 years.
The relationship between Mormons and other Americans has been shaped by conflict almost from the beginning. The first of the great Mormon westward settlements – in Missouri – was destroyed by frontier violence that ended in the expulsion of Mormons from the state. The Mormon prophet John Smith was murdered in Illinois in 1844. The US Army sent troops to Utah in 1857 to compel submission to federal authority.
Mormons were not unique targets of religiously grounded violence. Anti-Catholic riots claimed many more lives than were ever lost to Mormon-non-Mormon strife. But anti-Catholic violence in 19th century was always mob violence, never organized or countenanced by state authority. Again and again, Mormons found themselves on the sharp end of the bayonet of uniformed soldiers, state and federal.
While religious differences shaped these confrontations, they were usually provoked by politics. While many 19th century sects sought to establish autonomous godly communities, only the Mormons succeeded on any significant scale. Their success roused the suspicion and fear of their neighbors, especially when those neighbors had originated in southern states. Mormons were ultimate Yankees. The community took form along the line of New England’s westward expansion, first in western New York, then in northern Ohio. (Joseph Smith himself was born in Vermont in 1805.) Mormon missionaries won their first large conversions in Britain and Canada, reinforcing the “northern” flavor of the new denomination.
While pioneers who migrated into Missouri from the Southern states arrived as family groups, Mormons arrived as a pre-formed community. Instead of carving out individual homesteads, they laid out New England style townships. In those early days, Mormons were guided by strongly collectivist and separatist economic ideas, which their scattered neighbors perceived as a form of boycott of non-Mormons. And since Mormons were united while their neighbors were less well-known to each other, this boycott was experienced both as a hardship and a threat.
Mormon separatism was not a politically quietist separatism. Unlike the other charismatic movements that originated in the religious enthusiasm of antebellum New York – Shakers, the Oneida community, etc. – Mormons wanted more than isolation: They sought political sovereignty over the entire community in which they were located. This desire provoked hostility wherever Mormons settled, but Missourians reacted with special hostility because so many Mormons had family origins in New England and because Mormons did not own slaves.
Mormons did not meekly turn the other check when threatened. They organized their own militia groups, bought weapons, and used them too. The rhetoric of the early Mormon preachers could be blood-curdling. They threatened extermination of their antagonistic neighbors; Smith admiringly quoted the ancient Muslim slogan: “The al-Coran [sic] or the sword!”
The Mormons lost the struggle for Missouri. The governor and the state militia intervened on the anti-Mormon side, and the Mormons fled for refuge first to Illinois and then onward to Utah. The migration profoundly reinforced the collectivist and separatist patterns of Mormon culture. After Smith’s murder, his adherents splintered. The leadership of the largest grouping soon devolved on his deputy Brigham Young. Young was a supremely capable organizer, a commander who brooked no dissent. Young’s planning saved the Mormons from much of the suffering leading to tragedy that afflicted pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
Even in the account of fiercely critical biographers like Fawn Brodie, Joseph Smith had been a good-natured and easy-going man. Young was a grimmer and harder character. Smith had taken many sexual partners as a prerogative of his charismatic religious leadership, much like Joseph Noyes in Oneida and many other less famous preacher-prophets. Young was no sensualist, but he believed the theological justifications Smith had offered for plural marriage, and he institutionalized polygamy as a requirement of church leadership.
This one decision guaranteed further conflict with the United States as the Union expanded westward. The notorious Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which Mormon vigilantes ambushed and murdered a party of Arkansas settlers en route to California was a product of this conflict – and set in motion a more vigorous assertion of federal authority over Utah after the Civil War. Congress passed a series of laws banning polygamy in the Utah territory, culminating in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 which threatened the Mormon Church with disincorporation and confiscation of church assets if it persisted in upholding polygamy. Soon afterward, the church disavowed the doctrine. Utah wrote a ban on polygamy into its state constitution and joined the Union at last in 1890.
Yet for years afterward, dissident Mormons continued the practice and were hunted for it by federal agents. Mitt Romney’s father George – the future governor of Michigan – was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where the Romneys had fled to escape federal enforcement of the anti-polygamy laws. The emergence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints as the pre-eminent supporter of constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman is surely one of the more surprising ironies of American history.
The study of Mormonism has to be discomfiting to any believer. What would we see if the foundations of Islam, orthodox Christianity and Judaism were as well attested as the foundation of Mormonism? Mustn’t all communications between the human and divine be adulterated by human imperfection? From the point of view of God, must not all our human attempts to comprehend him look puny, infantile, and hopelessly distorted by our inescapable limitations, flaws, and vanities? And even if we conscientiously believe that some forms of religion are more an imposture than others – how confident can any of us really be that our own faith falls entirely on the fair side of the line?
Most rankings rate Washington, Lincoln, and FDR as the three greatest American presidents. Only one of these men, FDR, was a Christian in any but the most nominal sense of the term. If today’s Republican primary process would exclude them from the nomination – maybe that suggests something wrong in the process?
gblittle // Feb 18, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I sure hope this is not representative of those who call themselves the “New Majority”. The only reason there is a so-called problem of a “Mormon” candidate is what’s behind their name (D) or (R). Heck the only church has troubled me was Obama’s and Rev. Wright’s, but NO big deal. I don’t recall a Mormon blasting “whitey” or damning the US ever.
LymanKirkland // Feb 18, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I would suggest the following links to enlighten this discussion on Mormonism:
Who are the Mormons:
http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/who-are-the-mormons
A Mormon Worldview:
http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/a-mormon-worldview
The Religious Experience of Mormonism: http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/commentary/the-religious-experience-of-mormonism
ireign // Feb 18, 2009 at 5:35 pm
larryo, I guess the dailykos isn’t left-wing enough for you. Once again, there is no purpose for you being on this blog. You have previously posted that you have no respect for conservative thought and you are to the left of most in the Democratic Party. You repeat libelous things about officials and generally have done little research to support anything you write. You would better served spending your time finding a job.
It is debatable where fascism is on the political spectrum. You can make unbacked assertions all you want but you stating a wacky opinion does not make it a fact. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once stated, “Everyone is entitled to their opinion but not their own facts.”
Sinz-if larryo thinks you are “eating my lunch” than perhaps you may have to rethink your posts. Then again, larryo also claimed he was a prosecutor for five years. I guess he went to a law school that didn’t teach logic. Usually, when people have a difference of opinion than does not constitute “eating my lunch.”
sinz54 // Feb 18, 2009 at 5:42 pm
ireign: “….address what the majority of Americans are unhappy about today, ergo rising health care costs.” There are no magic solutions to rising health care costs. Oh, we can try to reform the health care system to squeeze out waste and duplication of efforts–but that’s a one time saving. And even after all the waste has been squeezed out, health care costs will continue to be driven upward by the steady aging of the U.S. population. This is a problem for every Western nation these days, not just America. In America, managed care has already addressed the problem of costs at the low end (i.e., urgent care by a primary care physician). They require cheaper generic drugs to be used when possible, require referrals to specialists, etc. But at the high end of costs, the big-ticket illnesses like metastatic cancer or my kidney failure, there usually are no cheaper options. My two options are dialysis (for now), and a kidney transplant followed by immunosuppressants for the rest of my life. Both of these options are very expensive, and most of the prescription drugs for these treatments have no generic equivalent. Finally, some have hoped that prevention–aggressive screening, healthier lifestyles–might lower health care costs. But the few studies that have been done so far don’t seem to bear that out. I am not sure why. Perhaps it’s just that diseases like chronic kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and arthritis, cannot be cured–and continue to worsen–no matter how early they are detected. If that’s true, then what we really need is some major breakthroughs in geriatric medicine and in the cure or prevention of degenerative disease. If stem-cell research could cure spinal cord injury, kidney failure, Alzheimer’s disease, etc., health care costs in this country (and elsewhere) would drop dramatically.
sinz54 // Feb 18, 2009 at 5:57 pm
ireign: Health care for illegal aliens is already a problem in America, and would continue to be, even if we didn’t change the current health care system at all. The reason is that by law, no hospital can refuse to treat an illegal alien, even if that person is unable to pay. And hospitals and their doctors don’t work for free. So who pays for the treatment of an impoverished illegal alien at a hospital Emergency Room? Right now, you and I do: The cost of treating him is part of the hospital’s overhead, and they have to charge the insurers for it. (And that’s a big charge, because Emergency Room care is expensive care.) Then the insurers promptly raise our premiums to cover it. If the illegal alien gets treated at a city hospital or government-run clinic, then our taxes pay for that. So in any health care system you can imagine, care for illegal aliens must be paid for–as long as they stay in America. One more thing: I was NOT suggesting that each individual state should adopt the Massachusetts plan on its own. Some states are suffering with relatively high unemployment and they couldn’t really make a go of any state plan. I was suggesting that RomneyCare offered a model for how a *national* plan could be run. It would be simpler and less intrusive on private business than some of the schemes that the liberal Dems in Congress are liable to concoct.
sinz54 // Feb 19, 2009 at 9:20 am
To Ireign: If we cannot defend our ideas in the face of criticism by a leftist like larryo here on this NG, how can we defend them before the Democrats (including Obama’s minions) in any public debate or political campaign? I tried to explain how RomneyCare works. Instead of offering any alternative proposal for health care, all you did was say “It wouldn’t work elsewhere.” You didn’t suggest any modifications to it, you just trashed it. That’s not helpful. This isn’t 1993; the GOP isn’t going to be able to stop health care reform from going forward this time, because the business community has flipped and now favors it. If we can’t offer an alternative to the liberals’ proposals, their proposal will pass. And unlike the stimulus package, once health care reform passes, it will be permanent, just like Medicare is. The GOP desperately needs a better answer to this issue than just “NO”.
sinz54 // Feb 19, 2009 at 9:28 am
To larryo: You are trying my patience, because you are the least civil of any of the posters here. Calling someone else’s post “idiotic,” making cheap shots and personal attacks. I do not appreciate your “stroking” me with your compliments; I do not want to be your cat’s paw, doing your work by criticizing conservatives while you sit back and smile at the disarray. Let me assure you, the feeling is mutual–but the civility, apparently, is not. In the 1970s, I got to see firsthand how liberal government had turned America’s greatest cities into pestholes “reminiscent of Calcutta,” as the late Theodore H. White wrote. But unlike you, I always try to be civil. I always treat you like a fellow American citizen. Try treating us the same way, and you might find more willingness by the Right to consider your arguments. No one ever wins someone over by saying “I think you’re stupid because….”
ireign // Feb 19, 2009 at 10:28 am
Sinz-I would prefer nothing or perhaps even a single-payer solution to Romney’s plan in Massachusetts. At least under a single payer plan, I would pay less in health care costs although my coverage would not be as good. Under the plan you propose, I get hit with more costs and keep the same level of service. Your proposal isn’t an alternative so much as an acceptance of President Obama’s proposal. There was a counter proposal by Senator McCain and unfortunately, the American people sided with Obama. So while Republicans can bring up the proposal again, as Obama put it, “he won.” As to your point that we are already providing for the uninsured who go to the emergency room, that is far different than having to pay the cost for someone with a sinus infection. I am perfectfully willing to subsidize those who are gravely ill.
Given the massive growing deficits in this country, universal healthcare coverage is going to be on the backburner for quite sometime. Moreover, it is inevitable that we are going to have a big costly medical program in this country at some point. If Hillary had been willing to make a few concessions, we would have had one in 1994.
larryo // Feb 19, 2009 at 12:42 pm
sinz – you and I have crossed swords often enough so you ought to know that I don’t “stroke” you or anyone else here – I was agreeing with you on the specific points you raised, all of which I thought were good ones. There were several, in fact, in a row. How do you reconcile that with your “leftist” stereotype. Second, I do not think the collected rightists here are in disarray – in fact, it appears to me that you divide up into three pretty distinct groups, with the views of one of which I agree so often it surprises me. Third, I am civil to everyone here – everyone – except ireign. I will be civil to her as soon as she is civil to me. She initiated the uncivility – the cheap shots and the personal attacks in response to something I wrote about what I really believe – and she can put an end to it any time she wants. In the meanwhile, if she aims her vitriol at me I will continue to excoriate her and you can completely lose patience if you wish – I suggest you redirect your complaint in that light. Before you cite me to mikedbike, I just turned his own polemic around on him – surely that is fair. Finally, I have found significant common grounds of agreement on various points with several of the columnists here – Mssrs. Vecchione and Ligon, for example, and even with you over the past few days – how that could possibly be offensive you escapes me, I admit. You are embarrassed at the state in which you and your political bedfellows find yourselves – some of your most cherished myths and superstitions have been exposed for what they are. I more than understand – I was humiliated when Clinton turned out to be the charlatan he is (i.e. his support for the unfettered mobility of capital which he called “free trade” and his push to scuttle Glass-Steagal), but even Clinton knew the way out of the economic doldrums that Reagan and GHWB left in their wake and even Clinton had some sense of his duty to the general welfare of the nation as a whole. You cannot say that about Reagan or either Bush. What none of you seem to understand is that this discussion between the right and the left has been going on since the time of the colonists, and the compromises that were reached were embodied in the Constitution. The real work is done on the grounds of common agreement between what Madison called “the factions,” which he abhorred. The more common ground we can find the better. Or, to put it another way, sinz, it’s not all about you – sorry.
dendup // Feb 19, 2009 at 1:18 pm
McCains health care proposal was focussed on cutting costs. His plan covered everyone, but provided only a catostrophic care. This was not clear in most comparisons during the campaign. The market would be available to provide the rest. Every health care system rations care in some way. The free maket rations care on an ability to pay. HMO’s are essentially a rationing system for employer subsidized care. Congress and the President decide how to ration care in Medicare/caid. We need to have a discussion about all this without using emotionally charged language if we want to make any meaningful progress. Are there groups who should not get subsidized health care, or should get a more limited version of it? What procedures, treatments, medications shouldbe excluded from subsudized health care? When we talk about various heath care funding systems, we are really talking about these questions.
larryo // Feb 19, 2009 at 2:45 pm
BTW, sinz, you wrote: “In the 1970s, I got to see firsthand how liberal government had turned America’s greatest cities into pestholes ‘reminiscent of Calcutta,’ as the late Theodore H. White wrote.” Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, and a Republican was in the WH until 1977. What did these conservative leaders to to clean up the cities? Why, what they always do – they undertook deficit spending (which they ardently advocate against) for money to feed the war machine and the mega-corporations but no one else. Carter faced double-digit inflation on account of the policies of his predecessors. So tell us again: Who was responsible for the sorry state of the cities in the 1970’s?
gerrysh // Feb 19, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Do the trolls actually believe that anyone reads their off-topic rants? Just search for “Mormon” on this page and see all the garbage posts that fly by.
Romney is No Conservative « Furthermore… // Sep 24, 2009 at 7:42 pm
[...] Romney also has a major identity problem. Romney ’s tried to go from claiming to be a super-moderate New England Republican to being a super-conservative national primary type Republican. Mitt couldn’t pull it out against McCain. Did we not learn from electing John McCain in 2008? Romney needs to remember that many supported him in 2008 simply to stop McCain, not because they thought he was the next Reagan. Romney hasn’t shown that he is someone that the country can vote for. So, at this point mind you, he would be relying on votes against Obama to put him over the top. And even still, if the polls are to be believed, mormons rank among America’s most disliked religious denominations. If you like David Frum, you should like Mitt Romney. Click here and here. [...]