Mitt the Mormon's Idea of Freedom

By Andrew Sullivan
The Sunday Times, December 9, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

In Mitt Romney’s campaign for president, last week’s speech was a rallying cry. It was designed to say that whatever doctrinal differences Mormons have with mainstream Christians, they are trivial compared with the war against secularism.

We were told: “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom ... Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone.” Those who want to preserve a secular hue to public debates were given no quarter: “It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.”

Romney stated: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the saviour of mankind.” If his point were to say that it is irrelevant what your religion is when you run for president, merely that you have a religion, then why this explicit statement?

The speech was a purely political manoeuvre. Romney is not just a Mormon but has served as a bishop, and for nine years was a stake president. He knows the doctrines as well as anyone, but he will only explain that part of them that reassures the Christian right.

Romney appeals to those who see religion primarily as a benign force in American culture. He effectively says to the Christianist right: forget about our theological differences. What matters is that someone believes in something and advances your political agenda.
 

Romney is not the first Mormon to run for president. In 1844 Joseph Smith Jr ran on an abolitionist platform and in defence of the rights of religious minorities. In that campaign, Smith said: “I go emphatically, virtuously and humanely, for a theodemocracy, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.”

Theodemocracy: the blending of government with a universally Christian populace in which faith is the prerequisite of public office. This is the vision of America that Romney is proposing. He has behind him the Protestant right, the Catholic right, the Mormon church and the Republican party elite.

I would have had no qualms in supporting a Mormon for the presidency, as long as he vows to represent people of all faiths and none. But Romney is veiling intolerance under the guise of tolerance.

Nonbelief is rooted in the same freedom of conscience as belief. Freedom of religion must mean the right to come to the conclusion that there is no God at all.
 

Jordan River Temple, Salt Lake City

What Is It About Mormonism?

By Noah Feldman
New York Times, January 6, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

This should be the perfect time for a Mormon to become president. Mormons share nearly all the conservative commitments so beloved of evangelicals. Mormons also embody the managerial competence that the Republican party’s pro-business wing considers attractive. Yet the Mormons’ political loyalty is not fully reciprocated by their fellow Republicans.

For Mitt Romney, the complex question of anti-Mormon bias boils down to the practical matter of how he can make it go away. In his religion speech, he coupled his promise to govern independently of the hierarchy of his own church with a profession of faith: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind.”

From a constitutional standpoint, the religion of a candidate is supposed to make no difference. The founding fathers inserted a provision in the Constitution expressly prohibiting any religious test for office. But for some, the objection to Romney may be that Mormonism is religiously false and that voters should choose a president who belongs to the true faith. If many Americans felt this way, that would be bad news for Romney but worse news for the country.

Like Mormon ritual, much of Mormon theology remains relatively inaccessible to outsiders. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! That is the great secret,” Joseph Smith is reported to have said in one of his last communications with his followers. Mormonism’s theological secrets actually have more than a little in common with religious mysteries that can be found in medieval Islamic esotericism, kabbalistic mysticism and ancient Christian Gnosticism.

Almost from the start of his career, Smith was denounced as a charlatan, an impostor and worse. Yet Mormonism grew steadily. Mormonism’s opponents turned to violence, and Smith was gunned down by a lynch mob. Unhindered by Smith’s death, the Mormons, now under the leadership of Brigham Young, went out to Utah to establish their own kingdom. After the Civil War, federal prosecutors in the Utah territory and in neighboring areas convicted and jailed thousands of Mormons in the most coordinated campaign of religious repression in U.S. history.

This period of resisting persecution by living outside the law taught Mormons that secrecy can be a necessary tool for survival. The Mormon path to normalization over the course of the 20th century depended heavily on this avoidance of public discussion of its religious tenets. Mormons depicted themselves as yet another Christian denomination alongside various other Protestant denominations that prevailed throughout the United States.

Another part of the Mormon assimilationist strategy was to participate actively in politics at the state and national levels. The condition for political success was that nobody asked about the precise content of Mormon religious beliefs and the Mormons themselves made no particular effort to tell. Ezra Taft Benson became secretary of agriculture under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. George Romney, Mitt’s father, became chairman of the American Motors Corporation in 1954 and was elected governor of Michigan in 1962.

Mormons came to embrace the American ideals of multi-party governance and electoral democracy. They also gradually embraced the Republican Party. What made the Mormons Republican was simply their move toward the conservative center of American public opinion. With Eisenhower especially, the Mormons found a leader they could admire and with whom they could work.

Ezra Taft Benson had ties to the John Birch Society. In the 1960s, as the Democratic Party increasingly began to embrace an agenda of civil and cultural liberties, the Mormon allegiance to Republicanism was cemented further still. The most prominent Mormon national politician in recent years was Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, now in his 31st year in the Senate.

The rise of the religious right posed a tricky political quandary for the LDS church. Mormons were able to argue that they, too, believed in salvation and in the literal accuracy of the Bible. The difficulty was that in addition to the Bible in its King James Version, the Latter-day Saints had further scriptures with which to contend — the Book of Mormon and supplements to various biblical texts known collectively as the Pearl of Great Price.

In theory, the evangelical political movement says that it is prepared to embrace Jews and even Muslims so long as they share the same common values of the religious right. In the case of a Mormon candidate, though, many evangelicals are not prepared to say that common values are enough. One prominent evangelical, the Southern Baptist Richard Land, has proposed that Mormonism be considered a fourth Abrahamic religion.

Faced with the allegation that they do not believe in the same God as ordinary Protestants, or that their beliefs are not truly Christian, Mormons find themselves in an extraordinarily awkward position. They cannot defend themselves by expressly explaining their own theology, because, taken from the standpoint of orthodox Protestantism in America today, it is in fact heterodox.

Mitt Romney has felt the need to minimize the centrality of Mormon scripture by saying that he reads the Gideon Bible when he is alone in his hotel room on the campaign trail. Something similar is perhaps contained in Romney’s outspoken admiration for Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor and best-selling author.

Precisely because Romney is such an impressive candidate, it may be a slap in Mormons’ faces if he finds that he cannot garner the support of conservative values voters. For conservatives to reject a Mormon because he is a Mormon would be an especially harsh setback for a faith that has accomplished such extraordinary public success in overcoming a history of painful discrimination. Surely the day will come when we are ready to put prejudice aside and choose a president without regard to what we think of his religion.
 

Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.