Who is afraid of Mormonism? Virtually all of the commentary
regarding it and the election has focused on the fact that a
not-insubstantial part of the Christian evangelical right is
hostile towards it.
That may be true but there is evidence that an even larger
section of the secular Democrat left is even more hostile.
To recap an already-familiar story, the “Mormon issue” jumped
back into the news this past weekend when a pastor introducing
Texas Governor Rick Perry before a major gathering of religious
conservatives said the nomination should go to a “genuine follower
of Jesus Christ.” The pastor later told several reporters that
Mormonism was a “cult.”
Mitt Romney, the current frontrunner and Perry’s main rival, is
a devout Mormon and he and his allies wasted no time in denouncing
the remark as bigotry. Perry awkwardly distanced himself from the
comments.
This prompted much
media clucking virtually all of it around whether the
controversy was wounding Romney among the conservative voters he
needs to get the nomination and win the White House. This topic is
hardly new among opinion journalists writing about Romney
either.
Many cited a recent
Gallup poll that found that 22 percent said they would not vote
for a Mormon for president. By comparison, only 9 percent
said they would not vote for a Jew.
Parsing the poll though, a different picture emerges. The number
of Republicans who said they would not vote for a Mormon was 18
percent, several points below the average. The number of
independents who would not vote for a Mormon was 19 percent, also
below the average.
So who was throwing the average off? Democrats. Gallup found
that 27 percent, more than a quarter, definitely said they would
not vote for a Mormon for president.
In other words, it is not Red State voters who fear Mormons the
most, it is the secular, college-educated, liberal blue state
voters that do.
Just consider the obvious fact that a Mormon is the current GOP
frontrunner. Another Mormon, former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, is
also in the race. The late liberal darling Mo Udall aside, when has
a Mormon ever figured in a Democratic presidential race?
This shouldn’t be too surprising. “Mormons are creepy and weird”
has been a favorite theme of liberal opinion commentary ever since
Romney emerged as a major political figure.
Take for example, Jacob Weisberg’s 2006
Slate
column in which he argued that Mormonism should be “an issue
with moderate and secular voters”:
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. … 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.
In a widely noted 2007 essay for
the New Republic, Damon Linker expressed his concern
that a Mormon president might subordinate himself to LDS church
elders.
The essay echoed
the same bigoted arguments that critics of John F. Kennedy made
regarding his Catholicism in the 1960s. The difference, Linker
explained, was that this time the concern was for real:
Mormonism has none of [Catholicism’s] moderating safeguards. It
considers its leader to be the “mouthpiece of God on Earth.” Mormon
cosmology is arguably incompatible with natural law theory.
Bill Maher’s documentary Religulous
included a whole section attacking Mormon beliefs as loopy, though
in fairness to Maher, he at least wasn’t singling them out. The
whole film was an atheism infomercial.
Mormons have also been the target of protests by gay rights
groups for
supporting the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 in California. A
boycott of Mormon-related businesses and institutions by
progressive groups followed the vote.
(That African-Americans actually provided the margin of victory
for Prop 8 was ignored by those same groups.)
For the secular left, Mormonism combines everything they dislike
about Christian evangelicals — their conservatism, their religious
devotion, their power as a political block, etc. — with a theology
that seems even more outré and even less ethnic diversity. If
anything, it is surprising that Gallup’s 27 percent figure for
Democrats wasn’t higher. I guess the Mormon niceness counts for
something.
So, yes, Romney’s Mormonism will complicate his hopes of making
it to the White House — it already has — but it is worth
remembering that the people who are most likely to say, “Heck, no,
I’m not voting for one of them,” don’t vote Republican in the first
place.
