It’s often taken for granted that Christian conservatives’
uneasiness with Mormonism best explains why Mitt Romney has
struggled to win-over those voters.
In Inside the Circus, a new e-book about the 2012
campaign by Politico’s Mike Allen and Evan Thomas, the
Romney campaign is depicted as so consumed with worry that the
candidate’s faith would hurt him with the evangelicals that
dominated the Iowa caucuses that it failed to anticipate Rick
Santorum’s rise. “Part of the reason for the ceiling [of support],
quite frankly, is the Mormon thing,” a Romney aide told the
authors. “If he was even an Episcopalian, he’d be better off
today.”
Negative perceptions of Mormonism so worried Romney’s 2008
presidential team that, according to Politico, “the
dilemma had its own acronym in campaign power point presentations:
TMT (That Mormon Thing).”
Of course, Romney’s ideologically malleability and political
opportunism — not his faith — has always been his biggest
liability with conservatives. But the Mormon angle allowed the
media to portray conservatives as bigoted theocrats.
The media’s preoccupation with anti-Mormon sentiment on the
right has distracted from what is arguably a much more pervasive
anti-Mormonism on the secular left.
Reams of polling data make clear that anti-Mormonism is not
exclusively, or even predominantly, a problem on the right. A 2011
Gallup poll found that 27% of Democrats said they wouldn’t vote for
a Mormon of their own party for president, 50% more than the 18% of
Republicans who felt that way. In a Quinnipiac survey, 46% of
Democrats said they wouldn’t be comfortable with a Mormon
president, while 29% of Republican respondents felt similarly.
And a Pew poll found that 31% of Democrats and 23% Republicans
said they would be less likely to support a candidate if he were
Mormon. The poll also found that the more liberal the respondent,
the more anti-Mormon they were. Forty-one percent of liberal
Democrats said they would be less likely to support a Mormon
candidate.
Given these findings, it’s no wonder that, since becoming the
Republican Party’s presidential nominee in waiting, Mitt Romney —
lifelong LDS member, former Mormon Bishop, Stake President and lay
minister — has been under attack for his beliefs from liberals in
the media.
Writing in New York magazine in January, Frank Rich
heralded
the liberal attacks on Romney’s Mormonism as “the big dog that has
yet to bark, and surely will by October.”
October is a political eternity away. Slate’s
Jacob Weisberg has written that Romney’s Mormonism should
disqualify him for the presidency. Other liberal writers, including
the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd and Charles Blow, have
mocked Romney’s Mormonism as well.
Earlier this month, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell
said:
“Mormonism was created by a guy in Upstate New York in 1830 when
he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife
that God told him to do it. Forty-eight wives later, Joseph Smith’s
lifestyle was completely sanctified in the religion he invented to
go with it, which Mitt Romney says he believes.”
Republicans are concerned that with Romney as their nominee, the
anti-Mormon attacks will only get worse. Last week Mormon
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said that the Obama reelection team
would “throw the Mormon Church at [Romney] like you can’t
believe.”
The Obama campaign insists it won’t raise Romney’s Mormonism as
a campaign issue. “Attacking a candidate’s religion is out of
bounds, and our campaign will not engage in it,” Ben Labolt, a
spokesman for Obama’s reelection campaign, told the Huffington
Post in November. But it may not have to if its proxies in the
media and elsewhere do the attacking.
The left’s hostility toward Mormonism has less to do with church
doctrine and much more to do with the doctrines of conservatism to
which most Mormons strictly adhere.
Even though Romney will be attacked for his church’s past racism
and polygamy, and for some of its more exotic religious practices,
such as baptizing dead Holocaust victims, the left’s real problem
with Mormonism is that its members are the most reliably
conservative religious group in the country. Six in ten
identify as politically conservative, and less than one in ten
as liberal. They are pro-life, pro-family and pro traditional
marriage.
In 2008, Mormons marshaled millions of dollars in donations to
support Proposition 8, California’s traditional marriage ballot
initiative. After Prop 8 passed, LDS activism prompted attacks from
gay groups and others. Mormon temples were vandalized. Two received
envelopes containing white powder. Prominent Mormon donors in the
arts were blacklisted. Tom Hanks labeled the Mormon Church
“un-American.”
Romney has spent the entire campaign downplaying his faith for
fear that it will alienate him from the Christian right. Now, with
the nomination battle behind him, prominent Republicans are
reportedly advising
Romney to “own his Mormonism” — to open up and talk about his
faith and how it informs his policy agenda.
But Romney should beware: he has more to fear from the secular
left, whose anti-Mormonism will likely intensify as the 2012
general election campaign moves forward.
