Article VI Blog

Ralph Kostant blogs with me at The Hedgehog Blog, where he is known as The Kosher Hedgehog. He recently submitted this guest post to us, and we are pleased to share it with our readers.

Would I vote for a Mormon as President? I see no reason why not. I haven't hesitated to vote for other professed Christians for President. Indeed, as far as I am aware, every Presidential candidate that I have voted for since I reached voting age has been a practicing Christian.

Perhaps that statement may seem jarring to a practicing "orthodox" Christian. If so, please allow me to jar you some more. Some Christians view Mormons askance because they believe that God is or at least once was a corporeal being. Well, that is precisely the Jewish reservation about Christianity in general. To a Torah-observant Jew, God is transcendent and has no material form or limitation. The Nicene Creed, on the other hand, states that God, in the form of Jesus, was incarnate and "was made man." To the Jewish ear, that belief sounds just as strange and fantastic as Mormon beliefs are to the orthodox Christian. (Oh, and for those of you readers who want to acquaint me with "Messianic Judaism," please don't embarrass yourself.) So, bottom line, I would vote for a Presidential candidate even if he or she entertains what I consider to be irrational religious beliefs, whether those beliefs are Mormon or other from some other version of Christianity.

Now that I have offended the religious sensibilities of both Lowell Brown and John Schroeder, let me go on to explain why it would surprise me if any American hesitates to vote for a Presidential candidate solely because that candidate is Mormon. The answer is "St. David." St. David is a town of about 1750 residents, in Cochise County, Arizona. I first discovered St. David on a drive to Tombstone, Arizona, some 10 years ago. It was a beautiful, almost impossibly picturesque small town, and the most prominent building was the ward of the Mormon community, to which I suspect the entire population of St. David belongs. In those days, I was a law partner of Lowell, and after returning to work I told him that I had found the perfect community for him to live in when he retired.

St. David is about 16 miles north of Tombstone. Tombstone, if you know your frontier history, was a silver mining boom town, built following the discovery of silver there in February 1878, by a prospector named Ed Schiefflien. The previous December, when Schefflien told a trooper at Camp Huachuca, a U.S. Cavalry camp, that he planned to prospect for ore in the surrounding hills, the soldier told him that the area was controlled by hostile Apaches, and that "all you will find is your tombstone." Schiefflien humorously named his first silver claim "The Tombstone." Of course, Schiefflien's discovery started a silver rush, and when the town was founded in 1879, its residents adopted Schiefflien's claim name as the name of the town.

What does all this have to do with American presidential elections? Well, while Tombstone was founded in 1879, St. David was settled 1877. Mormon farmers started a town in the middle of Apache territory before Ed Schiefflien ever ventured out of Camp Huachuca. While Tombstone flourished as a Western mining boom town, filling our frontier lore with the tales of Wyatt Earp, the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the Bird Cage Theater and Boot Hill, some 16 miles away Mormon farming families went about their quiet lives, without the bars and brothels of their notorious neighboring community.

Just as Tombstone is part of American history, so is St. David. St. David itself is just one page from the rich history of the contribution of Mormon pioneers to the development of the American West. The Mormons have been part of the American scene for over 175 years. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints began in America. Love the Church or hate it, one cannot deny its essential Americanness. Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution requires that the President be a natural born citizen of the United States. The Mormon Church is a natural born religion of the United States. It would be indeed be ironic if American voters were to conclude that an adherent of this most American of religions should not hold the nation's highest office.

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