Depending on your viewpoint there are three candidate for that less than coveted title.  Based on our commenters and emailers, last week’s Economist hit piece on Mormons is the leading candidate.  As we said the article suffers from adding absolutely nothing to the discussion that has not already been said a thousand times before.  Not to mention only like six or seven really geeky people bother to read the Economist.  I can understand how my Mormon friends would be incensed by this cheap shot, but it hardly rises to a level to earn the title bestowed by this section of the post.

That honor, in my book, goes to George Will’s excoriation of Huckabee and Gingrich as “spotlight-chasing candidates.” Remember when we divided the field into Media Candidates and Serious Players?  I think George Will owes us a dinner.  There is little question about Huckabee here – Gingrich is trying to position himself seriously, but I have my doubts he’ll succeed.  More on him in a bit.

Story Of The Week, So Far

Some might try to argue that it was Obama’s toxic embrace of Mitt Romney and Massachusett’s health care – with some help from his friends.  Something they can tie in with the resignation of Obama’s Ambassador to China to make the Mormon connection.  But this is so transparent as to not be effective.

Some might say that it is the unraveling of the “first” GOP debate, but this has been coming for a long time so the impact does not rise to the level to make it important.

For my money it’s how flat the “Faith & Freedom” forum in Iowa fell.  Even devoutly Evangelical sources note there is work to be done.  The country simply has its mind elsewhere this cycle.

The Candidates

Remember Monday when I said Newt Gingrich‘s serial infidelities would be a problem for him?  I love being ahead of the curve.

Jon Huntsman continues to draw press, but as best as I can tell, little else.

I grow very weary of the fact that Mike Huckabee always has an excuse, but never an “I was wrong.”  When it comes to illegitimate religious shots at Romney or cultural shots at Natalie Portman it’s distasteful.  However, this week I heard him, on Michael Medved‘s show,  do it with regards to his commutation of the prison sentence of people that then went out and killed police officers.  He did so on the show when a current officer that served with one of the dead officers in the same police force in Washington called.  That is just wrong.

Tim Pawlenty is playing nice, and has some leftie friends, but he may be making a misstep.

Haley Barbour is looking increasingly serious.

Donald Trump and evangelical commentary.  The fact that there is serious commentary of Trump points to the fact that the Evangelical commenting is not serious.

The far left LATimes took a very hard shot at Mitt Romney.  As did Michael Kinsley.  Such vituperation at this stage is proof the left is afraid of him.  But even David Corn noted that he is doing a good job of staying above the fray.

Religious Reading

Evangelical and LDS leaders meeting in Utah.  Very Interesting – even being analyzed politically.

This is so backwards as to be astonishing.  The Church out of the marriage business?  Where in the world do they think the idea came from to begin with?

Just so my Mormon friends know they are not alone.

About That Book “Review”…

A true book review requires that one read the book in question.  I cannot say that for the book I am going to comment upon here.  The book in question is The Religious Test by our old friend Damon Linker.  I read the first two chapters of the book and grew very annoyed.  Checked the index for references to Mormons looked at the first one and set the book aside never to be opened again, I hope.  When we reviewed his important article from the last cycle in our review of the last campaign we said:

The piece suffered from two enormous problems.  One was it ignored the political realities of the United States, and two it confused religious adherence with religious fanaticism.  The piece assumed that a president could somehow run roughshod over all action of the US government, as if we had no checks and balances.  The fact of the matter is, if the nation did mess up tremendously and elect a president with a nutcase agenda, there is Congress to balance the scales.  Further, while the president of the CJCLDS is considered a prophet, adherents to that faith are very different than fanatical Muslims following the edicts of a crazy Imam.  And even Imams generally only have a few fanatic followers.  There are fanatical Mormons, as there are fanatics of every faith, but then Romney had an established record as governor of Massachusetts.  I doubt we were in for any surprises.

The book is the same mistakes writ long and large.  The book opens discussing Amish and Jewish sects that are “apart,” moves to  radical, violent Islam and then attempts to draw parallels to the Christian Reconstructionist movement as described by R.J. Rushdoony, as affiliated with The Presbyterian Church in America.  I am no fan of Christian Reconstructionism or Rushdoony for that matter but as weird as they are, they do not propose violence and have no history of violent action – a HUGE difference between themselves and radical Islam.  And to tie them with the PCA is about the same as saying that because I read this far in Linker’s book, I agree with him.

When I turned to the first mention of Mormonism as gleaned from the index, what appeared before my eyes immediately?  Why the Mountain Meadows Massacre, of course.  Again, attempting to paint the whole by the actions of the radical few – a long, long time ago.  In his defense, Linker seems to bear no animus for any particular religion, apparently they are all places where violence is lurking just under the surface waiting to break out and stain us all.

As far as I got, which is as far as I could stand, the book is simply anti-religious screed based on the thinnest of arguments, and with a presumption that the scientific method is the only means of determining truth, never addressing the fact that the scientific method has proven wholly inadequate to fully explaining human behavior and other non-mechanistic phenomena.  In other words the book is nonsense written in academic parlance to give it a sheen of respectability.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Sorting out the proper relationship between religion and poli­tics is particularly difficult for Christians. Unlike Moses or Muham­mad, Jesus of Nazareth did not set out a political blueprint or ideal of any kind. He specifically rejected the political utopianism of some of His followers. He lived within a Roman Empire whose ex­istence He hardly mentioned. Jesus’ main arguments were with re­ligious authorities, not political ones. He proclaimed a kingdom “not of this world,” a kingdom based not on an alternative leader­ship but on transformed lives.

Yet Jesus was executed as, in part, an enemy of the state. Con­temporary leaders, political and religious, found His otherworldly kingdom threatening because it demanded obedience to an au­thority beyond their own. Jesus’ followers were soon being executed for failing to show proper respect (that is, refusing to offer sacri­fices) to the Roman emperor. In the Roman world, Christians chal­lenged the political status quo on any number of issues, including slavery, infanticide, and the status of women. Christianity may not have laid out a blueprint for an ideal government, but “love your neighbor” had social and political consequences.

That’s just from the Preface.  Consider this concluding the first chapter:

There is no easy shortcut, no prepackaged formula that tells Christians when to get involved in politics and when to pull back, when speaking out on public matters will help or hurt their Chris­tian witness. This side of the heavenly city, we can only peer through a glass darkly. One day the clouds will part and all things will become clear. Until then, our obligation is to sort through, even in an imperfect way, the choices before us; to seek the coun­sel of people of wisdom and integrity; to examine and re-examine our motives and the state of our hearts; continually to revisit our approach and stance in light of events; and to pray, in the words of the author of Colossians, that God will fill us with the knowledge of His will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

The third chapter concludes:

The Christian political movement is changing and maturing. The younger generation feels alienated by leading figures on both the right and the left. Along with so many of their elders, they are looking for something deeper and something better.

The last chapter on “Persuasion and the Public Square” includes “A Primer for Christian Persuaders” with five basic tenets:

• Maintain self-awareness
• Maintain spiritual grounding
• Maintain perspective
• Maintain community
• Maintain a spirit of grace and reconciliation

I think that is enough for our readers to understand why I liked this book so much.  The premise is simple – how we are involved in politics is changing, we should do it well.  Further it cannot be a matter of slogans and issue stances – serious thought and reasonable engagement are required.

That last sentence somewhat defies modern communication theory which says it has to be said over and over and over again in one sentence or less.  That fact alone may ultimately prevent the excellent vision of these writers from reaching a wide audience.  Even despite the fact that the book is short, concise and well written – it formulates as many questions as it provides answers.

But such is not my bone to pick with the book, that is more my lament on the general state of things.  They quote James Madison “Justice is the end of government” and then go on to make the case that religion is the one force that has defined justice in terms other than “might makes right.” – fair enough.  But they then go on to make the case that as such, government should be involved in charitable acts.   Not surprising since their old boss make the same case in non-religious terms in the Washington Post just yesterday.

I agree with the point, if not the tone, of John Derbyshire on The Corner this morning:

It is the most elementary error, though — and certainly one no conservative should make — to confuse private charity with state action. When governments are generous, they are generous with our money, after ripping it from our pockets by force of law.

That being true in theory – I wonder if such “compassionate conservatism” is not at this stage in our history a political necessity?  I certainly thought so when I voted for Bush, both times.  But this also is changing in our political landscape.  Only time will tell.

That caveat notwithstanding – this book is marvelous for its clarity and thoughtfulness.   Recommended to all.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

John Watson, widely known under his pen name of “Ian Maclaren,” was born at Manningtree, Essex, England, in 1850. For many years he was pastor of Free St. Matthew’s Church, Glasgow. He died in America in 1907. He enjoyed unusual popularity, both as a preacher and as a lecturer.

The sermon begins with Rev. Watson proclaiming the optimistic attitude of many of the early Christian leaders, leaders appreciated by creedal and Mormon alike, Paul the Apostle and Augustine, and then comes this remarkable passage:

They might be losing, but their commander was winning. The cross might be surrounded with the smoke of battle, it was being carried forward to victory.

 

They were right in this conviction, but do not let us make any mistake about the nature of this triumph, else we shall be caught by delusions, and in the end be discouraged. It will not be ecclesiastical, and by that one means that no single church, either the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, or the Church of Scotland will ever embrace the whole human race, or even its English-speaking province. One can not study church history since the Reformation, or examine the condition of the various religious denominations today without being convinced that there will always be diversity of organization, and any person who imagines the Church of the East making her humble submission to Rome, or the various Protestant bodies of the Anglo-Saxon race trooping in their multitude to surrender their orders to the Anglican Church has really lost touch with the possibilities of life. Nor will the triumph be theological in the sense that all men will come to hold the same dogma whether it be that of Rome or Geneva. There will always be many schools of thought within the kingdom of God just as there will be many nations. Neither one Church nor one creed will swallow up the others and dominate the world. He who cherishes that idea is the victim of an optimism which is unreasonable and undesirable. The kingdom of God will come not through organization but through inspiration. Its sign will not be the domination of a Church, but the regeneration of humanity. When man shall be brother to man the world over, and war shall no longer drench cornfields with blood: when women are everywhere honored, and children are protected: when cities are full of health and holiness, and when the burden of misery has been lifted from the poor, then the world shall know Christ has not died in vain, and His vision shall be fulfilled.

Just a thought for the day…

[tags] sermon, thoughts, John Watson, ecclesiastical power, victory[/tags]

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The book I was reading is called The Reformed Pastor by Richard Baxter, and it is a classic of creedal Christian ecclesiastical literature.  Written in 1656, just a few years after the Reformation, the book is a guide to pastors in the then very new reformed faith as to the demands and expectations on their lives and work.  From its pages a couple of passages jumped out at me in light of this blog.

And it is not ourselves only that are scorched in this flame, but we have drawn our people into it, and cherished them in it, so that most of the godly in the nation are fallen into parties, and have turned much of their ancient piety into vain opinions and disputes and envyings and animosities. Yea, whereas it was wont to be made the certain mark of a graceless wretch to deride the godly, how few are there now that stick at secretly deriding and slandering those that are not of their opinions! A pious Prelatical man can reverently scorn and slander a Presbyterian; and a Presbyterian an Independent; and an Independent both. And, what is the worst of all, the common ignorant people take notice of all this, and do not only deride us, but are hardened by us against religion; and when we go about to persuade them to be religious, they see so many parties, that they know not which to join; and think that it is as good to be of none at all, as of any, since they are uncertain which is the right; and thus thousands are grown into a contempt of all religion, by our divisions; and many poor carnal wretches begin to think themselves in the better case of the two, because they hold to their old formalities, when we hold to nothing. [Emphasis added.]

And then a few pages later:

Besides, consider what a disadvantage you cast upon your cause, in all your disputations with men of different views. If your principles be better than theirs, and their practice be better than yours, the people will suppose that the question is whether the name or the thing, the shadow or the substance, be more desirable, and they will take your way to be a mere delusive formality, because they see you but formal in the use of it, yea, that you use it not at all.

More than a century before the founding of the United States of America, almost 200 years before Joseph Smith received his revelations and the LDS were born, this humble pastor in England seemed to see precisely the kinds of issues we would be facing in the greatest nation in history.

Would that we listened.

[tags]Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, prophecy, Reformation, religious plurality, strife, genuineness[/tags]

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Regardless, in the introduction to the book, Gingrich hits on what I consider an excellent formulation of America's "civil religion" that I thought worth presenting here for our reader's consideration.

Then in the Thanksgiving Proclamation of October 3, 1789, Washington declared, “It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” Note that Washington was not only asserting that individuals have obligations before God, but that nations do as well. At this point, the United States government was not yet a year old.

 

That most astute observer of early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed in Democracy in America (1835):

I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can read the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizen or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society

The secular Left and the media-academic-legal elite would argue that even if de Tocqueville were right, he is irrelevant because he is writing about an earlier America. They argue that America has changed profoundly and is now a very different country. Justice O’Connor herself wrote that the phrase “under God” was adopted in 1954 when “our national religious diversity was neither as robust nor as well recognized as it is now.”

 

Yet this is a profound misinterpretation of modern America. As Michael Novak has noted, recognizing one nation “under God” is much more important in a country as religiously diverse as America because the phrase tran­scends any one faith or denomination and is inclusive. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington has pointed out that “Americans tend to have a certain catholicity toward reli­gion: All deserve respect.”

 

More importantly, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers concerning religious liberty is just as relevant today as it was in 1787 because it reflects a fundamental insight about human nature and how men and women might best live out the political experiment in ordered liberty that they ordained in Philadelphia.

 

The Founders had a very straightforward belief that liberty was the purpose of a just government, but that the maintenance of this liberty among a free people would require virtue.

 

And if virtue was to survive, it would require “true reli­gion”, which was any religion that cultivates the virtues necessary to the protection of liberty.

 

Implicit within this vision of the Founding Fathers is a pluralistic sensibility. Any true religion would be therefore deserving of the respect of the government, which would include the freedom to express in public the moral princi­ples of such a true religion.

Lowell adds:  For those who may be wondering, Mormon doctrine is 100% consistent with, and supportive of, these views.  Our 11th Article of Faith states:

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

[tags]Newt Gingrich, Founding Fathers, faith, religion, civic religion[/tags]

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Note:  There is a Monday, March 19 Reading List  and Tuesday, March 20 Reading List as always.

Here's the transcript of our interview.  "LB" is Lowell Brown, "JS" is John Schroeder, and "HH" is, of course, Hugh Hewitt.  Enjoy!

__________________________________ 

LB:    John is going to start us off.

JS:    Lowell and I are here with our favorite radio talk show host and blogger, Hugh Hewitt, who unfortunately is responsible for the blog.  Our lives have never quite been the same.

LB:    Our blogfather.

JS:    That’s right.  And Hugh has his book out this week, A Mormon in the White House? 10 Things Every American Should Know About Mitt Romney, which is very, very kind to Article VI Blog, and we thank you for that Hugh.  

HH:    It was a pleasure.  I didn’t really know if you guys would do what you’ve done and I’m glad you have.  I think it is an incredible resource for the coming campaign, and not just for the Romney people but for every journalist who needs to get their arms around this issue.

JS:    Well, we appreciate that.  Hugh, because we are not real journalists, we are part time volunteer “pajama journalists,” we’ve done our best to prepare for this interview, but it may be a little bit scattered.  Let’s start with a silly question.  You have interviewed a lot of people for the book.  What was the one interview you most wanted that you didn’t get?

HH:    That’s a great question, actually.  I would say, the Prophet. [Referring to the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gordon B. Hinckley. --Ed.]

JS:    OK.

LB:    He wouldn’t talk to you?

HH:    I tried to get over there a couple of times and always the timing was wrong.  They never said they would anyway, but a couple of times I would intersect with one of the 12, and that always blew up too, so that would be the number 1 and 2 through 13 and I suppose the other two members of the first presidency, so, that would have been interesting, but they are very careful not to involve themselves in this campaign.  And I think that led to a little bit more difficulty than normal.

LB:    They want to stay as far away as they can from looking like they are involved or endorsing or taking a position one way or the other.

HH:    Yes, yes.

JS:    While we are talking about that, that raises the issue that occurred, when was it Lowell, when the BYU contacts and that story blew up?  Was that — that was in the fall, wasn’t it?

LB:    It seems like it was September. [It was actually October 19, 2006.  We first blogged about it here. –Ed.]  

HH:    I cover that in the book.  That was much ado about nothing.  One enthusiastic email — I think they met — Josh Romney and a political consultant, and one other person — who met with Elder Holland to brief them. And an enthusiastic email went out and the Boston Globe immediately declared the Mormon Conspiracy to be underway.  And it was a laughable — one of many laughable articles on this campaign from the Globe which bears quite an animus towards Gov. Romney.

LB:    The funniest thing that stands out in my mind is the image of  a Boston Globe reporter staking out the LDS Church Administration Building, sitting somewhere across the street and keeping track of who went in and came out.  Apparently they actually did that.

HH:    Yup.  Trying to figure out if the vast web of connection was underway.  Or the illegal immigration story that tried to connect groundskeepers to Romney.  From Guatemala.  They really have a vendetta underway, a journalistic vendetta, of course.

JS:    Oh, there is no question about that.  Now I have a rather — I want to take a side track from the BYU event.  We had a bit of a dust up on our blog over that event with Patrick Hynes, who at the time was on Ankle Biting Pundits, who rather enthusiastically and uncritically passed that story on.  

HH:    Well, Patrick is working for John McCain.

JS:    Right.

HH:    So, anything he can pass on that will attempt to slow down momentum, either for Romney or Giuliani is to be expected, and I think Patrick does a fine job as a McCain operative, because that’s what he is.

JS:    Well, getting to my question,   — Understood. — But getting to my question, he was not at the time revealing that in his post where he did this, which we thought was necessary.  You have engaged him as a regular columnist at Town Hall, where you are managing Editor.    

HH:    Executive Editor, actually.

JS:    Oh.  Executive Editor.

HH:    I have no management duties.

JS:    OK.

HH:    Thank goodness.

JS:    So that was not really your decision to hire him then?

HH:    No, but I enthusiastically embrace it.  I want everyone in the campaign to have a home at TownHall.com.  

JS:    OK, but it is clearly as the McCain guy.

HH:    Yes.

LB:    As long as it’s disclosed.  Right?

HH:    Yes.  And it is disclosed.

JS:    OK.  I just found that an interesting decision because — well, Lowell took him on more than I did, but up until all that happened, he had not been completely forthcoming about his association with McCain.

HH:    And I think he figured out from that time forward, that that simply cannot be the case.

LB:    Yes, since then he has been open about it.  What I objected to at the time was that if you look up his company on the internet, they are in the business of creating favorable buzz on behalf of their clients.  Or negative buzz on behalf of their clients’ opponents.  Which is exactly what he was doing with stories about Romney.

JS:    The next place I think we’ll go — you mention this in the book, Hugh, and it was something Lowell and I found out very, very early on when we started the blog, somewhat disappointingly.  There appears to be a great dearth of case law related to Article 6, and I’m just wondering why, and what does that mean?

HH:    It’s self-executing .  That’s why.  For the longest time everyone understood what it meant, that one did not ever suffer penalty for their religious faith in the public life of the United States.  Much like the 14th Amendment removed disabilities to African Americans serving in the public life of the United States.  However, the internalization of that ethic seems to have frayed, even after the 1960 campaign.  And I was talking with Bill Bennett about this this morning.  The bar is so low when it comes to attacks on Mormons vis a vis any other minority, that it is shocking.  And I think that is because simply opinion leaders have not educated those who take their cues from them about what is and what is not acceptable concerning Mormon bashing.  And unless and until they do, it is going to continue, until it becomes unacceptable, or — we internalize from public figures, how to act.  And thus, many of us have watched the decline of Catholic bigotry.  We have watched the decline of attacks on gays and lesbians.  We have watched the decline of attacks on African Americans, on Muslims because of the public debate about those.  That has not yet happened about Mormons.  It has got to.

LB:    I'd like to follow up on that because we have been talking about this issue, and you have been also, in the context of essentially beating up on a religious minority.  But I noticed just a couple of days ago, and I sent this to you, a survey showing that the LDS church is now the fourth largest denomination in the United States.  Ahead of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc.  And so it is not really a minority religion at all.  Is it possible the problem results more from a combination of that unfamiliarity and lack of leadership you mention along with maybe some fear of the church’s apparent success?

HH:    Well, I don’t think it’s the latter.  Even though it is the fourth largest denomination, as, what are there about 5 million in America, now?  It remains a fairly distinct and insular religious minority in the United States as probably fewer Mormons than Jews, I would guess.  I’m not sure about that, but growing rapidly.  And the fact is that it remains very unknown to people.  So envy is not operating here, so much as I think historical hangover from the founding of the church and the persecution years, to the well developed sense of interest in it by mainstream media that has led to things like Mormon America, the Ostlings’ book.  The Under the Banner of Heaven book, which was really quite hurtful to the Mormons because of its purposeful, almost, confusion of the LDS church with the FLDS.  [By “FLDS,” Hugh is referring to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headed by Warrant Jeffs, a notorious polygamist now on trial in Utah for two first-degree felony charges of accomplice rape.  There is no relationship between the Mormon Church and the FLDS. --Ed.] 

And then Big Love.  Again, more purposeful confusion of what is going on in the public square concerning mainstream LDS and its splinters.  So, I don’t think its envy.  I do think it’s a lot of combination of the other things.

JS:    Hugh, if I can just disagree with you a little bit.

HH:    Sure.

JS:    We recently did a series of posts on the Smoot hearings of 1901 through 1905, and the charges against Smoot, that resulted in those hearings and the challenge to his seating in the Senate, were originally brought by the Salt Lake City Ministerial Association.  

HH:    How interesting.

JS:    Yes.  And the woman that wrote the book, Kathleen Flake, who is at the Vanderbilt Divinity School talked about the fact that part of the reason — now, she’s LDS, so we’ve got to take this with a grain of salt, but she talked about the fact that they had to create an issue — the ministerial association had to create an issue, to keep the funds flowing because they weren’t self-supporting and they had to bring in mission funds from the east coast.  And also, I do get some challenges in Godblogging from Christian pastors in largely Mormon communities.  Or creedal Christian pastors, to keep our terminology straight, in largely Mormon communities, who feel discrimination and frustration at being in such communities.

HH:    Really?

JS:    Yes.

HH:    Who’d think — I have never really believed that this was a problem, but you tell me that you think it is?

JS:    I’m not sure it’s a problem on the national scale.  I am not sure it would be a statistically significant problem if we did these numbers, but I do think it’s a really important issue for some people.    Yes.

HH:    You know, when I bring my lawyer’s ear to arguments about that, I often hear people projecting their own sense of failure onto communities.  I have heard that a lot, by the way.  Oh, the Mormons won’t do business with you, the Mormons work against you, etc., etc.  But I just have never seen that made by folks at a high enough level of success for me to credit them.  Does that make any sense?

JS:    Sure it does.  Sure it does.  And the people I hear it from are just pastors of ordinary churches and communities.

HH:    And so they have — on the other hand, when I went over there to do a series for Utah public television, in I guess it would be ’97 or so, the — I interviewed a few Catholic people — I did three interviews for that series.  And they had none of that argument going.  So.

JS:    Well, Lowell — my personal experience is in rural southern Utah where my wife and I like to vacation quite a bit.

HH:    So, I have not been there.

JS:    And Lowell likes to point out to me that there is probably a big difference between urban and rural Mormons as well.

HH:    And I think you are also going to find a big difference in any rural community vis a vis outsiders.  That’s what I would think.

LB:   There are differences among California Mormons, Utah Mormons, Massachusetts Mormons, Illinois Mormons, and Florida Mormons — they’re like anybody else, a product of the culture where they exist.  I haven’t lived in Salt Lake City for 25 years, but having grown up there, it is a phenomenon that I think is tough for some people, many people, to not be a Mormon and live in Utah.  I feel for those folks.  However, you’re right.  There are many non-LDS community leaders in Utah.  There was a Jewish governor of Utah in 1918, for example, which is pretty remarkable, considering the times.  And those successful folks there are the ones who are not the ones who complain, and they find a way to get along and be a part of the community.  

HH:    Yes.

LB:    I have a question that takes us slightly off that track.  In your book there was a very interesting quote from George Romney’s campaign for Governor in Michigan in 1962 where I guess then-governor, that Gov. Romney, made a pretty public fast, meaning as he was deciding to run, he fasted and prayed and sought divine guidance.  And the President of the Michigan AFL-CIO, Gus Scholle, made fun of that.  He said, "The big clown.  He thinks he has a private pipeline to God."  George Romney replied, “The same pipeline is available to Mr. Scholle if he cares to take advantage of it."

HH:    I saw you quoted that in your Meridian review today.  That was very interesting.

LB:    Could a candidate say that now?

HH:    Oh, sure.

LB:    I’m thinking of your book, Painting the Map Red, and your chapter on the left’s war on religion.  I wonder if a candidate could say that today without being laughed off the front page.

HH:    Well, you know the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff can’t say that homosexual acts are immoral anymore.  So, there is a changed political climate.  But whether or not — I think there is a difference between what elite media mocks and what Middle America hears.  And I think they still would applaud the George Romney response that was defending prayer.  That’s what it was.  He was defending prayer.

LB:    And making one of the greatest slap-downs I’ve ever seen, by the way.

HH:    The other thing that was fascinating about that, by the way, was that the Unions just hated George Romney so much because of his time at American Motors. and during the war years when he was helping to run the Detroit production stuff, that they, I think that the public in Michigan understood that it really wasn’t about his religion, it was just another round of the union lobby throw-down.  I have a question for you, Lowell.

LB:    Yes.

HH:    In your Meridian Review you said you cringed when I quoted from the King Follett Discourse and B.H. Roberts.  Why?

LB:    Well, I'll start with the King Follett Discourse, from a Mormon perspective. That is a speech by Joseph Smith, and is based on four different sets of contemporaneous notes taken by by four different people.  It is not taught as church doctrine, and — because there is uncertainty as to  whether the Prophet really said all those things.  So, as a life-long Mormon, I’ve grown up never hearing much about it except as sort of a passing reference in Sunday School every now and then, by a teacher who is curious about things like that.  So, its not really something that we hold out to the world as an expression of our doctrine, and, you couldn’t have known that.  I thought your book was extraordinarily fair and you clearly made a great effort and did a great job of being fair on those issues.  But that one did kind of make me wince.

HH:    So that’s interesting.  So the King Follett Discourse is not church doctrine?

LB:    No.  I think most people think that it is very interesting and probably basically accurate, but there are some statements in there that are pretty extraordinary, and the fact is that we like to be very, very accurate about doctrinal matters like that, and there is no truly reliable historical record as far as I know, of that talk.  Like I said, there are four different versions, and the one you read is probably an amalgamation of those four different versions that someone put together.

HH:    I’m sure it's from the Ostlings’ book.

LB:    Could be.

HH:    How about B.H. Roberts?

LB:    B.H. Roberts is well regarded, probably the first real Mormon intellectual.  He was quite a bright man.  He was elected to Congress, but I think never seated because of polygamy.  A lot of liberal Mormons nowadays like to quote him because he said lots of things that are somewhat edgy.  But he also is not a spokesman for the church and his writings are not considered expressions of church doctrine.  They are just the interesting views of an expounder, I guess.

HH:    And is he incorrect?

LB:    Actually, what he said is essentially what I have always been taught, when you get right down to the very bottom doctrines.  But a lot of people, and you didn’t do this, but many people like to dig up old quotes by 18th or 19th century Mormon leaders and quote those now as if they are expressions of current doctrine, and that’s not always the case.

HH:    Yes, you see I used it because the Ostlings had summarized it as being the easiest way to summarize doctrinal differences between LDS and evangelicals and Catholics.  But you are the third person who said I wish you hadn’t used B.H. Roberts.  And I’m wondering if that is because B.H. Roberts is so clear or because he is so cloudy.

LB:    I think it is more of the latter.  And the Ostlings book, by the way, is not regarded as a very fair book by most.

HH:    It isn’t?

LB:    No.  It’s not.  I think they tried hard.  And I don’t think they meant to be unfair.  But it is not well received in the Mormon scholar community.

HH:    OK.

JS:    Hugh, if you are really interested in that stuff, there are two books that I read that Lowell didn’t complain at me about.  One of them is How Wide the Divide?

HH:    That is by?

JS:    Robinson and Bloomberg.

HH:    Craig Bloomberg.  He’s supposed to be very good.

JS:    Yes.  And the other one is called A Different Jesus? — and why is his name escaping me?  The guy from BYU, Lowell.

LB:    Oh, Robert Millet.

JS:    Millet.

HH:    I’ll look for those.

JS:    They’re all theology — but if you are interested in seeing the theological divides, they’re helpful. Which brings me to another question I have.  Let’s see if you share a problem I share.  Because you are very accurate and kind, I think, not being the expert on our blog, with Mormon theology.  Have you been accused of being  a Mormon apologist yet?

HH:    No.  Because I tried, I made such a conscious decision to stay away from theology and to cloak myself in the view that I would quote Mormons talking about Mormons and quote anti-Mormons talking about anti-Mormons.  And then I would leave the field quickly and say all of this has nothing to do with politics.  So, I have not been accused of being a — it’s hard to when you quote Walter Martin — who may be the biggest name in anti-Mormon literature.  Is that fair to say, Lowell?

LB:    Frankly I’d never heard of him but from what you’ve quoted him as saying, it looks like that’s true.

HH:    So that is, I think, a complete immunization from anyone saying its an apologist.  Plus there are so many quotes from people like Mark Halperin and Christopher Hitchens in the book that very few people could effectively accuse me of being an apologist for the faith.

JS:    I happen to feel that way about the way I blog, and yet I have been accused of it on more than one occasion.

HH:    I do get emails from cranks.  But that’s not the same thing.  I don’t worry about cranks.

LB:    We all get that mail.  Both of you have been very careful to say that you don’t agree with Mormon theology, and that’s pretty clear.  I think that immunizes you from any claim that you are apologists.

HH:    I hope so.

JS:    And I try to stay away from the theological stuff too.  But you know, for example the place where I get it is the typical arguments that say, well, ex-Mormons say this and ex-Mormons say that, to which I really respond, well, would you like me to bring in the ex-Presbyterians or the ex-Young Life people?

HH:    In fact, I cringed on one of my radio show interviews.  I’m not sure which one it was because I’ve done so many this week.  We had an ex-Mormon call.  And usually that means, here comes a roundhouse.  But this fellow at the end said, so now I’m an evangelical, but I’m going to vote for Mitt Romney because he is an extraordinarily well-qualified candidate and probably the best person to be President.  It was the Laura Ingraham show.  That’s exactly what it was.  And I said, whew!  I was just ready for the experience because a lot of people view their own religious dramas as somehow at stake in this.  And they are not.  It’s the American drama that is at stake in this.

JS:    That’s an excellent point Hugh.  Let’s go back for a second.  You talked about how opinion leaders haven’t taught us since the 60’s.  One of the questions I had written down is that the Democrats really have been playing identity politics, since the 60’s and maybe even for a decade or two before.  Do you think that Bush-Rove played identity politics with evangelicals in the last two election cycles and do you think that has helped make this current debate coarser?

HH:    No, I don’t think they did.  I think that Bush has actually conducted — I’ll back up, there is no doubt the Republican Party has identified people of faith as a core component of their majority, though not a majority of their majority.  That means mass attending, weekly mass attending Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, those people have to be ID’d and motivated and as they say in the business, touched, to remind them to go out and vote.  And that is very much part of the Republican Party base and that is a very good thing in politics to do.  At the same time I don’t think W is attempting to not have secular Americans vote for him.  But he is also not dishonest about his faith. 

And in fact I see in Romney’s responses to my questions the same unwillingness to diminish his own convictions that W has been faithful to as well.  He is not going to attempt to be other than what he is.  It would have been easier for Romney to have sort of accepted the Hitchens invitation to indicate he is not a faithful Mormon.  But he rejected that.  And it would have been easier for George Bush when he was asked who was the most influential person in his life to have cited George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, but he cited Jesus Christ.  So I find that not coarsening at all, but refreshingly candid and I think it is very, very endearing in both candidates.

JS:    Well, the follow up comment and follow up question.  Did you catch the Romneys on Larry King last night?

HH:    No, I had Duane tape it and we will be playing a lot of it on the show today.  How did it go

JS:    It went — I didn’t catch all of it but I read the transcript this morning.  I happen to think Romney hit finally the perfect formulation on the answer to the religion question because he proceeded talking about a person of faith, and the difference faith has made in his life by saying, "Look, my theology is different than yours."  Which is what he did in your book, but usually on his sound bite TV appearances, he doesn’t get that statement in.

HH:    He did do that in my book and I think maybe as the reactions have flowed in, he has recognized that’s the best way to deal with this.  It’s not about theology.  Did he follow by saying, look at my family, because this is what Lowell said in the Meridian Review today. 

JS:     Well, that’s exactly what he did.

LB:    Yeah, he did.  And I actually thought he was quoting from your book.  It was funny.  I think he has realized that theme works, and it was the identical language, almost, that was in your book.

HH:    People believe different things, but look at my family.  And it has the additional benefit of  not upsetting Mormons.  He’s not, he’s not trimming.

JS:    Now, a follow up question to that.  There is a lot of pressure out there, including a USA Today piece by two Mormon political science professors about six or eight weeks ago about Romney to do a “Kennedy speech.”  I’ve argued on the blog that I don’t think he should because of precisely the reasons we’re talking about.  First of all, the Kennedy speech, Kennedy sort of backed away from Catholicism.  It was sort of I’m a Catholic, but I’m not a real serious Catholic.  And I think if Romney said that about being a Mormon, he would be painted as just being disingenuous and secondly because I think the press is so much different that it was then, that he would be opening himself up to far more press questions than he ought to have to deal with.

HH:    I am with you.  I think at this point, he’s almost, I’ll have to read the Larry King thing, but I think eventually he is going to say, "asked and answered."  And I hope he starts referring people to my book, but he should say something like–

JS:    Actually he should refer them to Article 6 blog, Hugh, but that’s –

HH:    (laughter) He’s going to say I have been happy, because it is an important thing for Americans to know, to discuss my faith in detail, with a number of authors, whether Atlantic Monthly Magazine or Hugh Hewitt in his book, or on Larry King, and I have done it a lot.  But there comes a point where the repetition of these questions begins to fray the acceptable approach of Americans to discussions about religion.  And I think we have reached it.  So, at this point forward I am going to tell people I am proud of my church and proud of my family and they can go read about this at length, in A Mormon in the White House, a fine book by that wonderful author, Hugh Hewitt, although I don’t like all of it in the book, and then be done with it.  Because I don’t think a big speech would matter.  It’s a different world.  The big speech was kind of a surprise in 1960.  And his dad did a similar thing in ’66 in Salt Lake City with the Protestant pastors  of Salt Lake City.  But, you know, everybody who wants to know his answers on these questions now have a variety of resources available for them to get them.  I just want to know if you two think that’s the case.

JS:    Yes, I do.  I certainly do.  Lowell?  

HH:     I don’t know that there is any other relevant question left to ask.  Lowell, do you?

LB:    Well, here’s a follow up question I have for Hugh, which kind of answers his question to me.   In your book you quote Romney as follows, he says what we have just been talking about:

"To understand my faith people should look at my home and how we live," Romney at one point suggested.  "Of course, doctrines and theology are different, church to church, but what my church teaches is evidenced by what I have become and what my family has become."

So you say:

This is a powerful response to opponents of Romney who base their opposition on theology . . . Romney is very bluntly underscoring that despite deep differences, the practical impact of his Mormon faith on moms and dads and kids is quite obviously productive of tight and devoted families."

Now, my question, and my answer, I guess, is: I wonder whether this will get out.  I don’t think — I think among people who are conservatives that will strike a great chord, and I think it will indeed get out.  But I wonder how much the left is going to hate that and how hard they’ll hit it and if they’ll get away with hitting it.

HH:    Well, I don’t think they can get away with hitting it, so they won’t.  If you begin to attack someone’s successful family life as irrelevant to the American experience, or to the Presidential campaign, I think you’ll run straight into the red state/blue state divide, only at a much deeper level.  So, I think he’s going to always say that, and I hope he always says that because it is an indication of character to raise a family of well-adjusted productive, happily married children.  It just is.  For people to argue that that’s not true is going to fly in the face of not just American experience, but common sense.  

LB:    Well, the Nation magazines of the world and the Mother Jones magazines will make fun of the "Leave It to Beaver, too-perfect family," but I don’t think that resonates with anybody but their own readership.

HH:    And I also think that the more they do [that], the more they will find themselves alienating voters rather than including voters.  When Howard Dean says, We've got to get away from guns, gays and — what was the other one? — He ended up shooting himself in the foot because what matters to people, matters to people, if I can have a truism.  And families matter to people, a whole bunch. 

The only possible downside to that whole argument is, and I discuss this in the book, is that a lot of families are unhappy.  And they are unhappy because terrible things have happened.  But I don’t think they are going to blame someone who didn’t have terrible things happen to their family for that.  It will be interesting to watch.  But I don’t think so.

JS:     Well, that steps right — actually I had one more question I wanted to ask you but I’ll put it off because that steps into the question you hinted on the show last night that you want us to ask, why do you think the left has reacted so hard to your Hannity and Colmes appearance?

HH:    Because they don’t like the candor and the honesty.  I have specific examples.   You guys have specific examples, of the left attacking his faith, which are much harsher than the theological critiques being leveled, if at all, from conservatives.  And those theological critiques are typically cloaked in love and admiration but concern over the impact of a Mormon President.  Very different.  There is hatred on the left for Romney.  There is concern on the right for Romney.  And the right’s leaders have many among them, for instance, Chuck Colson and Jerry Falwell, who reject even that expression of concern.  So, I think the reason the usual suspects got all bent out of shape, if they don’t want people to notice this, they want to get the knives into the back of Romney, and they want America to believe the evangelicals put them there.

LB:    Have you noticed, Hugh, that in the case of two examples I am thinking of, the Damon Linker piece in the New Republic, and his later comments; and also the Jacob Weisberg piece on Slate, both of those gentlemen actually made an effort to make a serious argument about either the weirdness of Mormonism, in Weisberg’s case, or the problem of Salt Lake City calling the shots in Linker’s case? And I thought it was interesting that two men who are intelligent, experienced folks, made a great effort at making an argument that can’t be made.

HH:    Yes they did.  And in fact, both of them made efforts to legitimize previously illegitimate arguments in the American public discourse, the mainstream from positions of great influence.  Slate is a Washington Post publication and the New Republic is one of America’s great brands when it comes to opinion journalism.  So that means, not just them, but their organizations attempted to legitimize previously illegitimate arguments. 

It is — if I were an intellectual historian — I am not — I would look at this moment and say, what is going on here?  And I do believe the argument I make in the book.  It’s the opening salvo in the war on faith.  And it is the attempt to turn the weakest flank, if I could use a military metaphor,  of people with faith coalition.  And that weakest link is the Mormon religion because there are some within the coalition that will accept the existence of Mormons in political battles on such subjects as marriage, but when it comes down to it, they remember their theological divide when it comes time to assess Romney.  And so the left is going to attempt to turn that flank and it is important that the right not allow them to.

LB:    I have a two part follow up that I think sort of gets us to the money question that John probably wants to get to also.  Number one, have you seen anybody on the right go to such lengths to attack Romney intellectually?  I think the answer is probably no.

HH:    No.

LB:    And number two is, if people on the right, conservative Christians and the other conservatives, do attack Romney religiously, are we opening the door for attacks like Weisberg’s and Linker’s to have credibility and respectability.

HH:    Absolutely.  Bishop Chaput was very explicit on this, that if you believe in Fatima and Lourdes, for example, you cannot be out attacking John the Baptist appearing with Joseph Smith, because Fatima and Lourdes occur after that — it can’t be Weisberg’s argument that, oh, they’ve been around longer.  That’s what his argument was, that the Catholics and the Jews, their miracle accounts are older.  No, they’re not.  They’re more recent.  And so, the Catholics are very aware of what’s going on here.  Perhaps my advantage in assessing this is that I have been on both sides of the river that is evangelical wisdom and Catholicism.  So I think that what Chaput instantly recognized is that the attach on the miraculous is an attack on all faith based people, because even though we have great apologetic efforts under way across the faithful spectrum, everybody wants it, in the end if it becomes illegitimate for public figures to believe in the miraculous, all people of faith are out of the public square.

JS:    Well said.  I think that is the point of our blog.  Certainly from my perspective.  And that’s certainly why I picked up this effort when I did.  It’s because I’m defending far more than this candidate and a religion.  I am defending my voice in politics and my faith in politics.

HH:    And that’s our joint project.  And that’s why — the book will be out — it will start — then it’s a lateral to you guys, because I’ve got to go on and start doing other news.  but it is very much an alarm that ought to be going up among all people of faith, that this is the attempt to turn the flank.  And be very, very leery of it.  And that’s why the left went crazy on their blogs.

JS:    They did.  Hugh, you brought it up so I want to go back to this question.  I find your personal faith journey a very, very interesting one because crossing the chasm from Roman Catholicism to Presbyterianism is not a mild trip, theologically, ecclesiastically, or culturally, and I am curious, how do you think that — you’ve talked about it to some extent, how do you think that has effected your ability to see this issue and these questions more clearly than somebody who was born, bred and raised Southern Baptist or Presbyterian, or whatever?

HH:    Only in this respect, it has allowed me to begin reporting on religion in 1992.  I have been reporting on religion for 15 years for PBS or in my books, in my columns and therefore it is an experience level that makes it more interesting.  And it has been able to allow me to talk to people who ordinarily might not talk to me because I have been all over the map and remain comfortable in many traditions and so I, I don’t often discuss and dump in the book my own personal views on this. I did in the Embarrassed Believer and in Searching for God in America, for example, and I sat down with Elder Neal Maxwell.  But it’s not central to it, except that the experience I’ve had of reporting on religion has been assisted by it and that experience helped me, certainly, to gain access to a number of people to talk to about this.  I think probably Gov. Romney agreed to a no holds barred series of interviews because of the credibility I had achieved with some Mormons out of my work with Neal Maxwell.  Lowell, you think that’s probably the case?

LB:    I think so.  He was a remarkable guy who opened many doors and yours was just one of the big ones that he opened.

HH:    Yup.

JS:    Now, here is the interesting question, from my part, sort of, moving off the religion issue a little bit, but not really.  I said something on the blog the other day — well, actually, you linked last night to the John Mark Reynolds piece about Romney vs. Rudy.

HH:    That was an interesting way to put it — the prodigal vs. the ally.

JS:    Yeah, wasn’t it?  I argued in that, when I linked to it on our blog, I sort of said that McCain is certainly a lousy Republican and it is hard to say otherwise, and I understand, therefore, you opposition to it, but in terms of being an evangelical Republican, Rudy is a pretty lousy evangelical, so while I like you, would vote for him if he was the nominee, I would do it through gritted teach.  I don’t sense that from you.  

HH:    Oh, no.  I won’t have gritted teach at all.  And the reason is I think that on the issues that matter to me, he will be almost identical to Romney.  And that is that he will appoint the same quality of judges as Romney will and so, the public life of presidents is what I am most concerned with.  And I always go back to this:  If you assess Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington on theological grounds, you would grit your teeth and vote for them.  But you would be happy you did.

JS:    Well, I’m not saying that on grounds of religion, I’m saying that on grounds of stance on life, stance on marriage –

HH:    I know that.  But, on those issues, all that he can do that will effect those issues is appoint judges.  And so, I think they are going to be functionally the same in appointing judges.  The reason that I am, as I say in the book, it’s a long campaign and I’m going to wait.  The reason if, the California primary were held today, I would vote for Romney, I think he is the stronger general election candidate.  I was shown a video of Bill Maher showing  five different pictures of Rudy in drag.  Five different occasions where he was having fun.  But, that just doesn’t really work very well out on the campaign trail.  It will be exploited.  I don’t put any particular downside to it, except that I know it’s going to be the subject of ridicule in the course of the Presidential campaign.  And so I just think, Romney’s a better general election candidate.

LB:    Speaking of Romney, we have only a couple of minutes left, you’ve spent lots and lots of time with him.  What’s the total amount of time you’ve spent interviewing him?

HH:    Oh, six or seven hours probably.

LB:    What’s your personal impression of him?  Is he the real deal?

HH:    He is a — I’ve begun using the term "incandescent intelligence."  So, I spent time with him in my office.  I spent time with him on the west coast.  I spent time — a couple of trips to Boston.  I talked to him on the phone.  I’ve seen him at fundraisers. 

He is the same person wherever you find him.  I think that’s very important for people to know.  And when you see people shift, and it happens in politics a lot, they’re different in small settings and large settings and public and in private with their family, not with their family, with their friends, not with their friends — he’s the same person in each place, which — I’m not a psychologist — and I don’t understand it much, but it speaks to me of integration of personality.  And confidence. 

I also, I mentioned this to Bennett this morning,  Bill brought it up first, Hamilton, in either Federalist 70 or 71 or 72, that the most important thing in a President is energy in the executive.  You’ve got to be alive to the office.  You’ve got to just have it, that electricity, the ability to manage all sorts of different stuff, and he does, in enormous quantity.  I think the reason the McCain campaign is running out of steam is that he’s run out of energy.  I think the reason that Hillary is going to have trouble is that she is so palpably not connected to the same kind of energy that Bill Clinton had, and that Obama has, but maybe her organization will carry her through.

So yes, he is the real deal.  What people mean by the real deal is different from person to person, but I hope I have communicated what I think it is by that.

LB:    You also say, if we can ask one more question, that Romney should have a stable of “high profile Christians of the most orthodox sort,”  people who can step forward at key moments and talk about his faith issues.  Who?  Who are those people?

HH:    I think Mark DeMoss is one of them because of his long standing association with so many great names in the evangelical movement, like Chuck Colson, like Bill Brite, like Jerry Falwell.  Very high profile people.  And at the same time, he is not a pastor.  Chuck Colson would be a great one as well, to speak to this issue, if he does get engaged in the campaign.  But those are the — mostly I am going to look for very, very successful men of business and politics who will, like Jim DeMint, very orthodox Presbyterian senator out of South Carolina, he’s going to be a very effective spokesperson in this.  I also like the fact that Rudy Giuliani, on my program, said in no uncertain terms, we are so far past this conversation that it shouldn’t be occurring.  

JS:    Agreed.

HH:    Ok?  And McCain’s spokesman has said a similar thing, but I have not heard Sen. McCain say it yet.  I suspect that he will.  Someone needs to ask Hillary and Obama about it soon.  and then it has to be rigorously enforced.  And that way we can raise the bar against the Weisbergs and the Linkers and The Nation magazine.  And so, hopefully, that will be a bipartisan effort.

JS:    Well, I think it needs to be enforced within the campaigns as well, because while you are right, a McCain spokesman has said that, there continues to be rumbling out of McCain associates in South Carolina.  

HH:    There have been.  And that’s troubling.  That’s very troubling.  By McCain associates, you mean previously volunteers and associates have attacked Romney for his Mormon beliefs.

JS:    That’s right.

HH:    And that needs to be disavowed and distance needs to be established from people who do that.  It has to be de-legitimized.

JS:    I’m done.  You done, Lowell?

LB:    I think so.  Have you given interviews to other blogs, by the way?

HH:    Nope.  You are the first blog interview.

LB:    I thought so.  We feel honored.

HH:    Well, you guys have done all the hard work.  You know it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens to Article VI Blog as the issue — because for a while no one really thought Romney was going to be that big of an issue.  The early polling.  But now they realize, with the New Hampshire poll yesterday, and with the moving up of the California primary, and when I was on with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, he informed me that James Carville thinks that McCain’s not even going to make it to Iowa, he’s going to drop out.  And then its going to be a very clear choice between Giuliani and Romney, and then this whole issue is going to be dug into by every reporter in America.  And they are going to figure out, where do I go to for this?  And yes, I hope they buy the book, but then they’re going to want to — the book is static, it’s in time, it comes out in march of 2007 and it sits there, and stuff happens after it.  And I think you guys are the go-to resource for that. 

The other thing is I hope on Article 6 blog you keep on the front page a list of the seminal articles, like the Weisberg article and the Linker article, so people can see what we’re talking about in one place at one time.

JS:    We have a link called Resources for that stuff, because the list actually grew larger than the we could keep on the sidebar.

HH:    Interesting.

JS:    So at the — it probably needs to be updated because it really starts with the Novak piece and Amy Sullivan’s piece from way back last summer.

HH:    And to the Atlantic Monthly piece.

JS:    And Terry Eastland’s piece from the Standard, which is more than a year old now.

HH:    I think that was the first major piece.  Yeah.

JS:    Yeah.  So we call that the Resources Page, it’s in the top links bar on the blog, and it takes you to all that stuff.  I don’t know if we’ve got — have we put Linker and Weisberg on there yet?

LB:    I don’t think so.  It’s one of our challenges with our day job is to find a way to find the time to make the blog accessible to everybody who wants to get to it.  So, we will work on that.

HH:    And have you two turned into experts in the media yet?

LB:    What do you mean by that?

HH:    Have other media people called you for quotes?

LB:    Not yet.

JS:    Not yet, no.

HH:    See, that’s what should be happening now.  Or very soon.  That you are journalists is undeniable, I think.  You have been covering this issue, although you are doing it as an avocation rather than as a vocation, and you have been doing original interviewing and original sourcing and that sort of stuff, so they should start coming to you, rather than going directly to the church.  It’s very — it’s a fascinating thing, and I hope it turns out that way, because it is what ought to happen.

LB:    Well, there is this guy who has a radio talk show who lets us on his show every now and again to talk about this issue.

HH:    Well, the other thing that’s happened is I hope you talked to Politico.  Politico ought to absorb your blog.  But, we’ll see if that’s what happens in time.

LB:    Well, we’ll be in touch with them.

HH:    Alright, gentlemen. 

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Before beginning our first mini-review we need to say that A Mormon in the White House? is an indispensable guide to the religious issues connected with Mitt Romney's candidacy.  Anyone interested in those issues would be well advised to read the book and to share it widely with their friends and acquaintances of all faiths.

Full disclosure:  John and I have a special connection to Hugh's effort in writing this book.  As we note here, this blog resulted from a serendipitous appearance by the two of us on Hugh's radio show.  For the last year we have kept a keen eye on everything appearing in the news media and on the blogosphere related to Mormonism, Romney, and the presidency.  During that time John and I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of Hugh’s book, which we knew would be based not only on the same source materials we have analyzed here, but also on a series of in-depth interviews with Governor Romney himself, his family and close acquaintances, and others in the world of politics.  Hugh has not disappointed us. It is a fine and important contribution to the ongoing discussion of religion in presidential politics.  (We also thank Hugh for kindly and generously mentioning Article VI Blog in several places in his book.)

We begin our series of mini-reviews with what Hugh has identified as the three religiously-based objections to Mitt Romney's candidacy: 

1.  If there is a Mormon in the White House, Salt Lake City will call the shots, at least on the biggest issues.

2.  A Mormons president will supercharge Mormons' missionary work.

3.  It [Mormonism] is just too weird. 

We've addressed these issues here, of course, but Hugh brings new information to the discussion. 

James Dobson has famously said, "I don't believe that conservative Christians in large numbers will vote for a Mormon but that remains to be seen, I guess."  Hugh accepts Dr. Dobson's estimate as "a reasonable one," and then addresses his three questions in reverse order of importance:

1.  Salt Lake City will call the shots in a Romney presidency.

For the first time that we have seen, Romney himself provides a strikingly blunt rejection of the idea that LDS Church leaders might call him about policy issues, or that he might take their guidance on such matters:

"Would you ever expect a call from [LDS Church] President Hinckley or his successor?" I asked.

 

"No," he emphatically replied. "Absolutely not.  And I'd also note that when you take the oath of office, that is your highest oath and first responsibility.  That's true when you become governor, it's certainly true for anyone who becomes president.  When I placed my hand on . . . the Bible . . . when I was sworn in as governor . . . my highest and first responsibility was to honor my oath of office and follow the Constitution and protect the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  For those sworn into national office, their highest obligation is to the nation.  It would be inappropriate for Church officials to contact me and it would be less than appropriate for me to take guidance from any institution other than caring first for the oath of office."

2. A Mormon President will supercharge LDS missionary work.

This is essentially the concern that Al Mohler has expressed so candidly, as we've discussed in detail.  In his interviews with Hugh Romney addressed the issue directly– and light-heartedly:

Does Romney think he will be held up as a role model of Mormonism, part and parcel of the missionaries' pitch in the remote regions of the world?

 

"That would kill us," he said with a laugh.  "It's hard for me to know what the impact of that would be.  I think certainly that's not the reason I'm considering a run and I think it overstates dramatically the impact of the faith of a particular president."

 

He laughed again.  "I haven't actually looked.  My guess is that if you looked at the conversions here in Massachusetts, you wouldn't see any change between before and after I became governor, and I don't think Democarts are flocking to the Mormon church because Harry Reid is the majority leader. . . . 

 

To suggest that people would say, 'You know, because it's sort of fashionable, I'm going to join this group where you have to give up 10 percent of your income, you can only have sex with your wife." The dues in my Church are pretty high." 

 

"It certainly hasn't worked that way in Massachusetts," he said, with a final laugh at the idea . . . . 

3. It is just too weird.

This is the Jacob Weisberg argument,which we discussed here. 

This gets right to the heart of the Article VI issue – when is the candidate's religion relevant? Referring back to an early reporter's question about Romney religious undergarments, Hugh frames the issue this way:

"[T]here is  sphere of private beliefs about God that is not right to raise or probe, and though the border is hard to find when there are legitimate issues that need to be discussed, heading for the undergarments angle is disgusting and will appear so to most Americans." 

I still think the best response to the "Mormonism is too weird or irrational" argument is John Mark Reynolds' analysis, which we first quoted here and have referred to many times). Professor Reynolds is interviewed at length in the appendix to Hugh's book, beginning at page 271; the interview is fascinating, and highly recommended.  

Hugh thinks Romney should refer reporters interested in The Question to his book, and should say that The Question's been "asked and answered."  Hugh may be right.  He's given a broad response to the issues, with Romney himself providing the responses– for the first time so far, in most cases.  Romney does respond to the "3 objections" quite definitively.

One of Hugh's closing comments to his book seems most appropriate:

It seems very unlikely that in a time of war, when the country is indeed threatened in very real, very immediate ways, that the electorate will punish a candidate for having a belief in a God who is not indifferent to the conduct of men and women, who hears the prayers of His people, and who believes in compassion toward the poor and justice for the evildoer. 

Indeed.  Get this book for yourself everyone you know who might be interested.  It is a very important and successful effort at illuminating the "Article VI issues" and advancing the related discussion.

John? 

John adds:  First of all, as all of Hugh's books, this one is a masterpiece of readability and clarity.  It would be very easy, given the subject matter, to get lost in esoterica and to brandish a vocabulary that would render the book just flat out inaccessible.  I also would like to add my word of thanks to the kindness Hugh shows this blog in the book.  This book is destined to quickly make it onto the NYTimes bestseller list.  Such is rarified air for a couple of guys like Lowell and I.

We have been over these objections and this territory quite a bit in the year of this blog's existence, so I will be brief.  First of all, there are historical as well as political precedents for these questions and all have been shown historically to be objections without substance.  I am referring, of course, to the Reed Smoot Senate hearing of 1901-1905.  We have examined those in detail in a series of five posts which began February 20 and ended last Thursday on March 8.  If you are interested in the whole series, use the search box in the right-hand column and search the term "Smoot."

My second comment is one of the two shortfalls I find with the book.  There is a lack of direct quotation of evangelical Christian leadership.  With the notable and valuable exception of Al Mohler, Hugh does not present an interview with James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tony Perkins, Richard Land . . . .  One is forced to wonder why.  I had hoped Hugh would get interviews with these people.  We have tried and failed, at least to date, but I was hoping that Hugh's credibility and visibility would allow him to succeed where we could not.  Hugh, of course, cites the already public statements by these individuals that we have cited on this blog, but why were we not treated to Hugh's great and patented interviews with them.

I have a conjecture in response to that question:  These individuals have nothing left to say on the matter.  As Lowell has pointed out, with the exception of Dobson, and Mohler, all of these people have said Romney's faith should not be an issue.  They know The Question is going to echo through people's minds and concerns and that if they say too much about it they risk alienating such people among their constituencies, but they all realize the essential illegitimacy of the question when it comes to American style politics.  They all find themselves on a bit of a political high wire here.

Regardless, this is a great and valuable book.

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The question which I address concerns the powers of prophecy.  As a church based on prophetic revelation, the CJCLDS strikes many as a boat easily steered onto the rocks.  Creedal Christian experience with prophetic utterance creates an image of leading people in very wrong directions, like Jim Jones.  What prevents such an occurrence in the CJCLDS?  True, it has not happened.  In fact, prophetic utterance since the time of Joseph Smith has moved the CJCLDS in better, not worse directions.  But it still struck this evangelical observer as a theoretical possibility, at least until I read this book.  And while even if the church turned south, it does not mean Romney, or any other LDS politician, would.  Such would certainly create a dilemma and personal crisis for any LDS politician.

However, the incidents surrounding the Reed Smoot hearing in the U.S. Senate illustrate how such a prophet-lead wrong turn is unlikely.  The reasons are both structural and pragmatic.  The pragmatic reasons have been well discussed by Lowell and others.  The church is just too big and too diverse to move like a ship at sea.  The split that developed between pro and anti-polygamists within the church in the period between the 1890 Manifesto and the Smoot hearings illustrates that.

It's the structural issues that I want to look at.  The Catholic analogy is useful.  The word of the Pope is Holy Writ in the Roman Catholic church.  But no one seriously considers them some sort of prophet-led cult.  Why is that?  Simple – the Pope rarely, if ever, speaks without thousands of staff hours, multiple reviews by endless bureaucracies.  The Vatican rivals the federal government in complexity, Byzantine processes, intrigues and bureaucracy.  Utterance by the Pope is in fact the product of an incredibly complex process and politics.

Now, the LDS heirarchy is not nearly so Byzantine as the Vatican, but its intrigues are obvious in the stories surrounding the Smoot hearings.  What is important to know is that there are really two branches of LDS governance – the President/prophet and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the latter being a body of twelve very independently minded individuals.  I had always imagined the Quorum as a body of "Yes" men designed to add a stamp of legitimacy to the utterances of the president/prophet.

Yet, in the Smoot hearings, we see the Quorum acting quite independently and requiring a great deal of political pressure get them to fall in line.  The 1890 Manifesto banned further polygamous marriage, but it did not dissolve existing such marriages.  If you think about it, this is actually humane.  These women were dependent on their husbands for their livelihoods and to force those marriages to dissolve would put them on the street.  However, some members of the Quorum continued to perform the marriages.  This became a huge issue in the Smoot hearings.

During his testimony in the Smoot hearings, president/prophet Joseph F. Smith indicated that church officials performing polygamous marriage would be disciplined.  And yet, it took more than a year for the offending members of the Quorum to be forced to resign.  It becomes apparent in Flake's well-documented retelling of events that Smith's declaration in front of the Senate committee created an extended and difficult political crisis within the church.  Far from his word carrying the force of God, Smith had a great deal of good old-fashioned politics to bring it to reality.

This stems in great part from a structural independence between the two offices of president/prophet and Apostle.  While, as best as I can tell, the CJCLDS lacks the sort of constitutional documents that would set these separate power bases in stone, it is obvious that they exist.  It is also difficult to believe that in an organization the size the CJCLDS that such independence could be overcome through maneuvering or stacking of the Quorum somehow.

What I find most fascinating is that we often see the charge leveled at Mormons that they are misleading or duplicitous.  That somehow they talk-the-talk on say, monogamy, but they do not really walk-the-walk.  Certainly when the president/prophet is in front of the Senate saying one thing, while the Quorum is back in Utah doing another, one could see where such an image would arise.  However, that same observation says that either the president/prophet is a liar of almost unparalleled proportion, or the CJCLDS does not march in quite the lockstep with the president/prophet that people like Linker would have us believe.

Of course, the virulently anti-Mormon will trot off quickly to "the liar" explanation, but is that really the case?  How often have perfectly reasonable people been made to appear the liar by the simple facts of politics?  Take Bush 41 with his "no new taxes" pledge.  Was he a liar or did he get backed into a corner politically?  The answer depends not on the facts but on whether you are predisposed to call him a liar or not; on whether you examine the facts and circumstances carefully, or you simply want to use the event as a weapon against him.  And so it seems to me in the case of the relationship of the president/prophet to the CJCLDS.

The vision of the CJCLDS presented by this book and the events it describes is one quite typical of a democratic organization.  Strife, conflict, discussion and resolution are all at play here.  Hardly the stuff of a prophet driven cult.

Lowell's footnote:  Like all faithful Mormons, I sustain the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve as "prophets, seers, and revelators."  That's fundamental to our faith.  Too many outside observers, however, understandably find that disturbing.  After all, if Mormons were automatons, blindly and slavishly obeying the whims of Church leaders, that would be disturbing even to me.  But as John notes, and as Richard Lyman Bushman has made clear elsewhere, the reality is far different.  

It may help to understand the makeup of the Church's leadership.  The current Quorum of the Twelve includes a former tenured law professor at the University of Chicago who became a university president and then a justice of the Utah Supreme Court; a nuclear physicist; another university president; a former Stanford Business School professor and junior college president; a former senior executive with Lufthansa who was also a 747 pilot and high-ranking officer in the German Air Force; yet another university president; a successful automobile dealer; a senior executive in national retail business; a successful lawyer; a CEO of Revlon; and a world-renowned heart surgeon.  I am probably forgetting some of them.

Now, bear in mind that decisions of the Twelve need to be unanimous.  How easy do you think it is for a group like that– all men of real achievement and distinction who are used to leading– to come to a consensus on difficult issues?  And yet they do it.  More importantly, how likely is it that such a group would come up with weird or bizarre policies?  No reasonable person would think it very like likely at all.  One result of this structure, which we believe is divinely appointed, is that major changes come slowly.  Some evidence exists, for example, the the 1978 change that made all worthy adult men (including African-Americans) eligible to receive our priesthood came so slowly because of the consensus rule in the Quorum of the Twelve.  That may well be, but my point is that the structure of the Church's leadership is inherently deliberate and conservative. Nothing very cultish about that.

[tags]Mormons, prophecy, structure, politics[/tags]

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

If one presses for specifics, the conversation always ends up discussing Mormon Temple practice.  These practices are something Mormons do not discuss with Gentiles like me.  It's their secret.  So, into the information vacuum flows all kinds of amazing contentions.  I have seen and been quoted all sorts of "authoritative" accounts of what happens in Mormon Temples.  All of it designed to make Mormons look like something just this side of devil worshippers.  I always wonder where such accounts come from since the people who are actually there promise to keep it a secret.

Of course, it's always from former Mormons.  But it always occurs to me that it is generally in the best interest of people that have left an organization to engage in exaggeration, and even lying, to make themselves feel better about leaving, and to give general justification to their actions.  Such charges from such sources scream for factual, not testimonial, confirmation.

Such charges showed up, entirely predictably, in the closing days of the Smoot hearing. In this case, the charges concerned an oath that Mormons were reputed to have to take to aid vengeance on the nation for the persecution suffered by Mormons prior to their move to the mountain West.  An extended quotation from the book is informative:

Unlike their judicial counterparts, senators hold hearings primarily to find prospective remedies, not to apply retrospective punishments. If the L.D.S. Church, as Smith promised, was going to change its ways and, as hoped by those who supported Smoot, discipline wrongdoers Taylor and Cowley, new justification was needed for Senate action. By making the L.D.S. temple oath an issue in the third and final round of the hearing, the protestors hoped to provide that justification. They could show that Smoot himself had participated in the temple ceremony and was bound by the terms of the oath he had taken there not to disclose it. This refusal, like Taylor’s and Cowley’s defiance of the Senate’s subpoena power, could condemn Smoot as one who placed himself above the law and in conflict with his oath of office. Smoot warned his church leaders, “This subject [of the oath] seems to have been revived in the Senate for some special pur­pose, and this purpose I believe to be the exclusion of all Mormons from holding Federal offices."

 

Wolfe provided the most confidently detailed, firsthand account of the L.D.S. temple ceremony. “The law of vengeance is this,” he said. “You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray, and never cease to pray, Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation.’ “ Unlike previous witnesses who were confused on the point, Wolfe explicitly named the “nation” as the object of Mormon vengeance. The drama of Wolfe’s disclosure of the “secret oath” was compromised, however, by the evidence of its scriptural basis in the biblical book of Revelation, which all Christians believed but with no visible effect on their behavior. “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held,” prophesied the Revelator, observing that the righteous “cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, 0 Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” In addition, the force of the protestants’ argument was undermined when it was shown that the Latter-day Saints who took this oath did not act on it. Senator Knox asked one witness, “What did you ever do in the line of keeping that vow? Did you ever avenge the blood of the martyrs upon this nation?” “No, sir,” the witness responded, “I have enlisted twice to try to defend the nation.” Though expressing an unpleasant sentiment, the oath was sentiment only and, because it was never expressed in action, was constitutionally pro­tected, religious belief.

 

Moreover, the country was accustomed to secret societies of oath-bound men. Many in the Senate belonged to one and were routinely in­vited to join more. The Methodist Reverend Joshua Stansfield, D.D., had recently written Senator Beveridge  inviting him to become a mason in “our Lodge — The Mystic Tie.” Latter-day-Saint-turned-Unitarian John P. Meakin characterized himself as a “joiner” when he testified on Smoot’s behalf, and he was not exaggerating. “I belong to the Knights of Pythias,” he told the committee, “and am the Past Grand Chancellor of our State. I belong to the Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks, and I served as chaplain for six months. I belong to the Fraternal Order of Eagles, to the Woodmen of the World, to the Maccabees, and I still have standing in the Odd Fellows, but not active.” Ultimately, the L.D.S. temple ceremony aroused less suspicion because of its easy comparison to the activities of other secret societies.

Note, like most conspiracy theories, the charges went almost nowhere in the Senate.  Flake notes two reasons why the charges went nowhere:

• It was based on scripture held in common by creedals and Mormons
• Secret ceremonies are common and generally do not indicate great revolutionary conspiracies.

To Flake's analysis I would like to add a couple of other reasons why the charges simply don't hold water, for Smoot, for Romney, nor any other Mormon.  Firstly, no witness matched the testimony of the "key" witness without prevaricating or being vague.  In other words, strict corroborative testimony could not be found.  There are and were a lot a ex-Mormons in the world; I would think certainly a few with identical testimony could be found.  That is, unless, of course, the witnesses were indeed fabricating, exaggerating, or otherwise embellishing their tales for impact.  Meaning at least part of their testimony was a product of imagination, not reality, and two people rarely share identical imagination.

Secondly, after several years of watching Smoot work in the Senate by the time these charges were levelled, other Senators and the public that paid any serious attention, saw no factual evidence to corroborate the testimony.  Simply put, Reed Smoot did not act like someone that had sworn vengeance on the United States of America.

The same must be said about all the wild hair stories that circulate today.  What Mormon behavior can anyone point to to indicate they are the subversive, perverse, near insurgency that is so often charged?  I know nobody will find any such behavior on the part of Mitt Romney, reducing such charges to nothing more than conspiracy theory nuttiness.

Lowell adds:  My church's temple ceremonies present Mormons with an interesting (and fairly unique, I think) problem:  We hold them so sacred that we do not discuss them outside the temple, even among ourselves.  For example, my wife and I may attend the temple, and while inside the temple discuss in detail everything said and done there.  Once we are outside the building, however, we will not discuss those subjects, even in private in our own home.  That's how sacred the temple and its ceremonies are to us.  In fact, we like to say the temple ceremonies are "sacred, not secret."

Knowing that, you can imagine how we feel when ex-members or critics of the LDS Church start talking about the temple ceremonies in public.  We cannot in good conscience respond in any detail.  It's quite frustrating, to be honest.  It provides a wonderful opportunity to attack the church, spread distortions, innuendos and rumors, and generally make Mormons (and Mormon politicians) look weird, because members of the church are all but powerless to respond.

I will not (and really cannot) lapse into Mormon apologetics here, but I can say this:  As a lifelong LDS member and frequent temple attender, everything that I have ever experienced in any LDS temple has been wholesome; has centered on the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the eternal nature of the family; fundamentally involves the purest form of Christian service; and has been beneficial to me as a man who wishes to be a better person and a true disciple of Jesus Christ.  The most sacred and personal experiences of my life, including my marriage, have occurred there.

But I can't and won't discuss them outside the temple.  Curious, isn't it?  For better or for worse, that's just the way it is. 

[tags]conspiracies, vengenance, L.D.S., Reed Smoot, U.S. Senate, temple, Mormon, conspiracy theories, baseless charges[/tags]

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Another frustration Evangelicals often experience in dealing with Latter-day Saints is the fact that we have no professional clergy, no creeds or catechisms, and no theologians in the strict sense. Pure LDS orthodoxy can be a moving target, depending on which Mormon one talks to. Indeed, my part of this book represents only the views of one Latter-day Saint, though I hope a credible one. I do not speak in this volume for the LDS Church, only for myself, but I think I qualify as the world’s authority on what I believe, and I consider myself a reasonably devout and well-informed Latter-day Saint. [Emphasis added.]

I could not help but reflect on that quote as I read the later portion of the subject book here.  In the wake of the 1890 Manifesto and the Smoot hearings the CJCLDS underwent enormous change.  Polygamy had been a bedrock on which the church had been built and now it was jettisoned.  Flake spends roughly the last third of the book examining how president/prophet Joseph F. Smith and The Quorum were able to pull off this seeming ecclesiastical miracle without schism.  (It should be noted there are schismatic Mormon groups to this day, but they are statistically and poltically insignificant, criminals in religious guise.)

To my creedal Christian eye, the astonishing fact was that it was such an amazing and difficult accomplishment.  From my basic understanding of a prophetic, revelatory faith, changes in direction would be fairly easy – "the prophet says so and off we march."  Which as an aside shows the utter ignorance of that South Carolina woman, Cindi Mosteller that looks like she is McCain's Mormon attack pit bull.  Lowell quoted an article quoting her sometime back this way:

On Tuesday, Mosteller, who is a Baptist, said, "The question is: Does Governor Romney support Joseph Smith's doctrines? We as evangelicals don't believe we can go in and change Paul's doctrine. I don't see how you move around this."

This reveals on Mosteller's part, and I think that of many others she represents, a particular ignorance of creedal Christian faith and history, since she assumes orthodoxy never, ever changes, and Mormon faith and history since she assumes it would have an orthodoxy in the same sense we do, and that that orthodoxy had never changed.  But I digress.

The plain fact of the matter is that Mormonism has an orthodoxy.  It is both more plastic and more individualistic than creedal Christian orthodoxy, but it is no simple matter of prophetic declaration.  This is born out in the political, liturgical, and ecclesiastical maneuvering which occurred in the wake of the Smoot hearings that Flake goes to such great lengths to examine in the later portion of the book.  I am reasonably certain that her examination of such would be uncomfortable for a Mormon to read.  It is my understanding that Flake is Mormon (she did undergrad at BYU) but she does not fail to turn a very scholarly eye on things that are deeply devout, making what appears to be very spiritual appear to be very pragmatic. I will leave the detailed discussion of events to the book.

These facts should, however, be a comfort to creedal Christians that fear Mormon faith in a presidential candidate.  The Mormon ship simply will not turn on a dime as this history illustrates.  For example, a Mormon in power would not therefore give license to Mormons to return to their polygamous ways.  Forget for the fact that a President could not make it legal by Executive Order anyway; the church itself would rebel against such a thing because it would violate their current orthodoxy.  Any prophet that tried to turn the church in that direction would need to be as opportunistic, shrewd, and most importantly patient, as Joseph F Smith was.  Even one that is as opportunistic and shrewd could not accomplish the feat today as the cultural conditions in the church simply are not ripe for it.  Such a prophetic utterance would, if I understand how it worked 100 years ago properly, create an enormous crisis in the church, but the more likely outcome would be an ousting of the current prophet and a gross weakening of the office, as would happen if any other religious figure in any other normative religion defied orthodoxy.

The events surrounding the Smoot hearings demonstrate practically that there is a Mormon orthodoxy and it is tightly held.

Lowell comments:  I have one clarification.  I am still reading the Flake book, so can't comment in great detail, but I will quote Richard Lyman Bushman, a Mormon emeritus professor of history at Columbia, on the question of prophetic revision of Mormon doctrine (link may require subscription):

But [the concern that LDS Church leaders will dictate policy to a Mormon president] –rooted as it is in logic rather than reality–does not take into account how revelation actually works. In Mormonism and in biblical history, the prophetic tradition itself places heavy restraints on prophets. It makes a big difference that the moral law is enunciated repeatedly in Mormon scriptures. The Ten Commandments were restated in an early revelation, installing them as fundamentals of the church. Later, the saints were told that "no power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood, only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned." Could all this be overthrown by a new revelation? Linker thinks that revelation negates everything that came before, but this is not the case. The best analogy is to the courts and the Constitution. Theoretically, five Supreme Court justices can overturn any previous interpretation of the Constitution on a whim. But, in fact, they don't, and we know they can't. Their authority depends on reasoning outward from the Constitution and all previous decisions. The same is true for prophets. They work outward from the words of previous prophets, reinterpreting past prophecy for the present. That was certainly true for church founder Joseph Smith, whose most extreme revelation, plural marriage, was based on plural marriage in the Bible. Prophets do not write on a blank slate. Like Supreme Court justices, they would put their own authority in jeopardy if they disregarded the past.

So I think Steven Robinson's claim that "LDS orthodoxy can be a moving target" vastly overstates the case.  LDS orthodoxy may evolve, but it does so exceedingly rarely and almost always at a glacial pace.  History is full of examples:  Polygamy and African-American access to the Mormon priesthood, for example.  Neither change happened overnight, although both were critical to the church's continued success.

[tags]Mormon, orthodoxy, polygamy, Reed Smoot[/tags]

©2012 Article VI Blog. All Rights Reserved.