LDS Anger Over Romney’s Treatment?
This story by Peggy Fletcher Stack in the Salt Lake Tribune is fascinating. For example:
Romney’s failed campaign revealed what many Americans really think about Mormons. It forced Latter-day Saints to acknowledge that they don’t just belong to another American denomination.
“We have to live with the fact that a lot of people think our beliefs are strange,” said LDS historian Richard Bushman, the professor emeritus at Columbia University who helped explain Mormonism to a skeptical public. “Mormons have never had so much exposure as we have in the last year, so much genuine curiosity on the part of high-level media. I don’t think we’ll ever be the same.”
I tend to agree, but I am not ready to say Romney’s campaign was bad for Mormonism or for religious values voters as a whole. There’s a lot of this story yet to be written.
The campaign did expose some fault lines. Mormons were alerted to the antipathy some — both religious right and left-wing secularists — hold for their faith. Evangelicals of good will and open minds were alerted to the bigotry of some of their co-religionists.
To me, that’s progress.
I don’t agree with this part of Peggy’s story, however:
“As long as the Republican Party is primarily a party with an evangelical base, I don’t see how any Mormon could do any better than Romney,” said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “You can’t explain how a relatively competent, successful businessman and governor could do so badly in the Southern primaries without pointing to his Mormonism.”
Well. Maybe, maybe not. For one thing, it is abundantly clear that Evangelicals did not vote monolithically against Romney. He beat Huckabee among Evangelicals in a number of the primary states.
On the other hand, Huck did win the “solid South” on Super Tuesday, and I’ll grant you, that’s hard to explain. But were that day’s results skewed by James Dobson’s call in the morning for Evangelicals not to vote for McCain?
If so, why did so many of them seem to flock to Huckabee? That’s one outcome I cannot explain away. Maybe better polling data could help us sort this out, but I wonder whether it’s possible to capture information about how voters feel in their hearts.
Huckabee’s behavior hasn’t made it any easier. As commenter Carl H. notes below this post:
Huckabee . . . never disavowed those working actively on his behalf, such as Pastor Sherwood Haisty, Jr., of pastors4huckabee.com (which is still linked on the blog roll at Huckabee’s official campaign website), who much more actively and explicitly attacked Romney on the basis of religion, whose most recent attack you noted here on A6Blog just Wednesday. . . . Without a disavowal, [LDS voters’] anger toward Huckabee personally is certainly understandable.
And yet, and yet . . . . I wonder if the real problem here is not simple familiarity? Our reader and commenter “Texan,” responding in comment no. 19 to our Super Tuesday post below, advances an intriguing hypothesis:
[T]he single biggest antidote to prejudice of any kind is when someone meets people from the group that he or she despises or distrusts. I suspected that states where the average citizen has a high likelihood of knowing a few Mormons were states in which the outcome was different than the states where the average citizen has a low likelihood of knowing any Mormons.
Texan crunches some numbers and concludes that the higher the percentage of Mormons in any state, the better Romney tended to do — even in states where there are not enough Mormons to have any voting impact. It’s an intriguing conclusion that makes intuitive sense.
Call me PollyAnna, but I don’t think Romney’s run was bad for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or for Evangelicalism, any more than Al Smith’s 1928 run was bad for Catholicism or for Protestantism. I think both sides learned a lot about themselves, and that’s only a bad thing if no one does anything constructive about what they learned.
And the American people are just too fundamentally decent to allow that to happen.
Update: This Wall Street Journal article by Suzanne Sataline, “Mormons Dismayed by Harsh Spotlight,” is an impressively comprehensive review of the issue. I think it’s quite fair, and I can attest that Ms. Sataline researched her piece carefully. I had three long telephone conversations with her myself (although she did not have the good judgment to quote me 
). Her concluding paragraph:
Although Mr. Romney’s withdrawal from the race is likely to quiet the controversy for now, many church members believe the turmoil of the past year will have lasting effects.
“There will be a long-term consequence in the Mormon church,” says Mr. [Armand] Mauss, the Mormon sociologist. “I think there is going to be a wholesale reconsideration with how Mormons should deal with the latent and overt anti-Mormon propaganda. I don’t think the Mormons are ever again going to sorrowfully turn away and close the door and just keep out of the fray.”
I’ll buy that.
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JLFuller on 08 Feb 2008 at 8:25 am #
Anger isn’t the right word. Disappointment might be. In communication theory, it is the communicator who is responsible for being understood. In that area we have not done as good a job as we can. We can improve. We Mormons have been looked upon as strange or weird by some, to borrow terms from our late President Gordon B Hinckley. But we are not. I think we embody much of what Americans want in life. Our doctrine may contravene parts of conventional Christian thought but our way of life is good and wholesome. Still, it is up to us to find ways of lessening the perceived threat some see in us. Our doctrine will not change, but I think our approach to explaining it will.
Mitt Romney’s high profile continues to increase ours as well. It provides us with additional opportunities to explain who we are and what we actually believe. It also puts those who demonize us on notice that they too are responsible for what they say. We regularly hear stories from converts who left churches where pastors malign others from the pulpit. It was the disinformation they heard that turned them away. When they became acquainted with one of our number they discovered we don’t have horns, or steal young girls or plan to take over the world. Just because some claim to know what the truth is does not mean they do. People want the real story from their leaders and it doesn’t take long for them to discover who they can trust.
I am not angry. I am more hopeful. In fact you might say I am very positive. My reluctance to engage others is less now than it was. I am not sure you call it missionary zeal but certainly I look forward to talking about us when the opportunity presents itself. The challenge to me is not in overcoming disillusionment or sadness at how we have been treated. It is in becoming a better man so I can take a bigger part. Mitt Romney contributed to that. He contributed in a very large way.
JLFuller on 08 Feb 2008 at 2:05 pm #
The quote above attributed to Armand Mauss“I think there is going to be a wholesale reconsideration with how Mormons should deal with the latent and overt anti-Mormon propaganda. I don’t think the Mormons are ever again going to sorrowfully turn away and close the door and just keep out of the fray.” doesn’t resonate with this old country boy. I never had an image of Mormons shrinking from confrontations.
I think even my friends and relatives who served missions in the deep south will find that way off the mark. Maybe it was Mauss’ experience but I never knew anyone who thought that way. My youthful chums and I had visions of re-constituting the Danites! We were way too eager to get in the middle of things and crack some heads. That could be the reason we were never called to serve missions and we all ended up in the military and law enforcement. Now days we know better. But shrink from confrontation? Nope - not even close.
Rocky Hulse on 10 Feb 2008 at 9:41 am #
Mormons recoil in dismay that evangelicals don’t simply accept Mormons as just another Christian denomination, and have serious reservations about the Mormon religion. I’m amazed at the “Mormons dismay!”
Mormonism begins with the “First Vision” of Joseph Smith. Joseph says he was confused about which church he should join. So, he went out into a grove of trees and knelt down to pray and asks his question. Joseph said that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in a vision; both beings having bodies of flesh and bone and they spoke to him. Joseph relates the following, with the Personage speaking being Jesus: 19. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt;….” (Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith, 2:19, 1977) In this first sentence of verse 19, the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, claims that all churches are wrong, all creeds are an abomination (Christian doctrine comes from the creeds), and all professors of Christianity are corrupt—ergo, all Christian churches are false, all Christian doctrine is an abomination in Jesus’ sight, and all Christians are corrupt. This declaration set Mormonism on a collision course with Christianity everywhere it went, and continues on this course to this very day.
This “First Vision” is an all out attack on every Christian denomination and every person who is Christian. I marvel that Mormons “just can’t understand why Christians don’t accept us!” The position that Mormons try to pawn off on those who don’t know any better that “we never say anything bad about other faiths,” is pure balderdash! The first second of Mormonism is the “First Vision” that is an all-out attack against all of Christianity. Then Mormons play the victimization card in pretended innocence that “we just can’t understand why we aren’t accepted into the religious community as equals?”
How about a little honesty here? Mormonism condemns all churches as wrong, all Christian doctrines as abominable, and all who profess to be Christians as corrupt, and then Mormons wonder why Christians don’t accept them as equals?
Can we have some intellectual honesty here? Why is it Anti-Mormon Propaganda to talk about Mormonism, but it’s not Anti-Christian Propaganda for Mormons to propagate the “First Vision” story that God and Jesus appeared to Joseph Smith and condemned all of known Christianity? If this isn’t hypocrisy, I don’t know what is!
texan on 10 Feb 2008 at 11:42 pm #
I agree Evangelicals did not vote monolithically against Romney. My observation is that McCain and Romney did best among Evangelicals in states with the lowest percent of Evangelical voters, and Huckabee did best in states with the highest percent of Evangelical voters.
Here’s one way of looking at what happened. I calculated the mathematical correlation between the percent of votes received by each of the three candidates and the percent of votes cast by Evangelicals in the twenty states for which CNN posted polling data (and in which all three candidates competed).
The result:
* Huckabee’s correlation was +0.87. More votes for Huckabee was highly correlated with more Evangelicals voting.
* Romney’s correlation was -0.43. This means the correlation was in the opposite direction, but weaker. That is, less votes for Romney was weakly correlated with more Evangelicals voting.
* McCain’s correlation was -0.22. Less votes was correlated with more Evangelicals, like for Romney, but the correlation was even weaker than for Romney.
In those cases where we have polling data, the state with the highest concentration of Evangelicals in which Huckabee lost the Evangelical vote was Illinois. CNN’s polling data shows 41% of the Republican voters in Illinois were Evangelical, and McCain won among that group.
Other than the state where Romney was born (39% of the Republican voters were Evangelical in Michigan, and Romney won both the Evangelical and state vote), the state with the highest Evangelical concentration where Romney won the Evangelical vote was Nevada. CNN’s data shows 24% of the Republican voters in Nevada were Evangelical.
Sticking with the same 20 states mentioned above (the states with polling data where all three candidates competed), Huckabee won the Evangelical vote in all 8 states that had greater than 50% of the voters being Evangelical (and he won the overall state vote in 5 of those 8 contests). He has never won the Evangelical vote nor the state vote in states with less than 50% of the voters being Evangelical (though he did tie with McCain for the Evangelical vote in one of those states, New Hampshire, where McCain won the overall vote).
Huckabee’s win in Louisiana fit with this pattern from before Romney’s withdrawal from the race. Greater than 50% of the voters in Louisiana were Evangelical, and Huckabee won both the Evangelical vote and the state vote.
My suspicion is that the trend in states with a low percentage of Evangelical voters will also continue, and Huckabee will never capture a state with less than 50% of the voters being Evangelical.
CarlH on 11 Feb 2008 at 10:37 pm #
The LDS Church’s official comments on the public [mis]perceptions of the Church in the wake of several articles, including Sataline’s Wall Street Journal article. No “anger” here, I think, but a lot of angst.