The Trend Continues…
More articles are appearing about Mormons gaining ground politically with other social conservatives. Consider this from The American Thinker (responding to Sean Penn’s unreasonable and inappropriate sound-off at last night’s Oscars) and this from Rod Dreher:
Just as Catholics and Evangelicals found they had a lot in common as they met and got to know each other in the trenches of the pro-life movement, I hope that Mormons and more mainstream Christians will now discover the same in the fight for religious liberty, which is just beginning.
The Catholic analogy may be imperfect, but the trend may still be real.
One thing seems certain, Mormons and Evangelicals are right now presented with the first of what this Evangelical hopes will be many “moments” to come. We cannot let past hurts and slights allow this moment to slip. If we have the opportunity to step forward, we should, even if it is a set-up to get hit – at least we are getting hit one step closer to the target.
And we need to remember how we got that step – it was by playing the game in a far more civil fashion than our hoped-for allies.
Quick hit from Lowell: I think, as the saying goes, “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” If there’s a candidate or a ballot proposition or other objective that religious conservatives want to see succeed, and we can best accomplish success by working together with those of other faiths, let’s just do that. Let’s not be deterred or distracted by the foolishness that pops up along the way. So:
- If someone starts a blog about whether a candidate is religiously acceptable, ignore the blog and move on.
- If someone writes an unfriendly book about Mormonism, remember, he’s trying to sell books, just move on.
- If someone wants to raise the claim that a Mormon candidate is not a Christian, give that claim all the time and attention it deserves — which is about 5% of the time and attention we Mormons tend to give such claims — and move on.
- Evangelical leaders and others of influence: If any of the above happens, state your position and why you are disregarding the chattering by the side of the road, and move on.
That’s my two cents. Or maybe four cents.
Posted in Political Strategy, Religious Bigotry, Understanding Religion | 2 Comments » | 
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CarlH on 23 Feb 2009 at 6:14 pm #
For a bit of contrarian analysis (albeit very sketchy, in my opinion), check out Prof. John C. Green’s article, “What Happened to the Values Voter?” published in the March issue of First Things. It has some interesting perspectives on what affected “shifts” (of questionable durability) in the 2008 election, focusing primarily on various categories of Catholic voters, but also looking at shifts among Evangelical and Mormon voters.
First, among the introductory observations:
Some LDS people might well wonder how they managed to miss the “ended” part, particularly in light of at least one comment at the Oscars’ ceremony last night.
Interestingly enough (in light of a long prior thread), the University of Akron’s study doesn’t include a separate category specifically for Mormons, but lumps them in with “Other [White] Christians.” That is likely to get some people’s panties in bunch, from a number of perspectives. But a couple of perhaps topical quotes are worth highlighting:
Personally, I’m not sure the national Republican primary controversies constituted the major component in any shift among Mormon voters here. But I have no hard data to back up my suppositions.
Jerald on 23 Feb 2009 at 7:03 pm #
What Lowell recommends for Mormons is pretty much what most of us were doing before the 2008 presidential elections. Most of us were relatively content to go quietly about trying to be better Christians while largely ignoring the anti-Mormon background noise of slanderous handbills, books, movies, and even TV shows. (However, we still had the burden of continuously having to answer the onerous charges on an individual, private basis.)
Then a viable Mormon presidential candidate appears on the scene and we suddenly find the airwaves, blogosphere, and print media filled with horrible misportrayals of our religion. This was alarming to Mormons whether or not they supported said presidential candidate.
We are told by friendly non-Mormons that the Mormon Church should use better PR to counter the misinformation and eventually Church leaders even encouraged members to get involved in the media, especially the blogosphere, to provide accurate information to the public.
As it is likely there will continue to be Mormons that want to be public servants, even for high offices, I guess we individual Mormons will have to train ourselves to very clearly separate our “crusade” to be understood correctly from our desire to cooperate on political issues that are important to many other social conservatives.
The best we can hope for is that people like John will continue to aid our efforts by taking a stand that Mormons who want to cooperate on political and social issues should be welcomed into the tent and treated as full-fledged fellow Americans.