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Table of contents
- Mitt Romney, as a leader in Mormon church, became a master of many keys - The Washington Post
- Mitt Romney
- Little Voter Discomfort with Romney’s Mormon Religion
- Public Views of Presidential Politics and Mormon Faith
It probably has an influence on his attitudes toward participation in government in some fundamental way, but that is a question that perhaps we can discuss later.
Mitt Romney, as a leader in Mormon church, became a master of many keys - The Washington Post
I think it would be useful for you to see how Mormonism has related to politics over its century and three-quarters of existence, which will permit us to speculate about how this might all bear on Romney. Some of it is directly relevant. We have divided views of Mormons. On the one hand, Mormonism and Mormons are suspect, they are forbidding, and under the nice exterior there is something menacing. On the other hand, Mormonism is the archetypical American religion.
Mormons are ideal model citizens, and they are very nice people. I often hear that. We think of the 19th century as a time when Mormonism was radical in about every dimension you can imagine, while in the 20th and 21st centuries Mormons are considered conservative in about every dimension you can imagine. When Vice President Dick Cheney wanted a place to deliver a commencement address to a safe audience, he wrote to Brigham Young University.
He gave the talk there this year. So the question is, Which is the true Mormonism? Which is the one that is most likely to affect Mitt Romney? The radicalism, of course, is basically theological. He seemed to be willing to challenge virtually everything in American culture. Beginning with the theological: He even claimed he could revise the Bible, the most sacrosanct text in the Western world, through his own inspiration. He added new passages and corrected the language where he chose, which was, by any measure, a heaven-daring act for a Christian to undertake in the 19th century.
In the social sphere, he breached Victorian moral conventions with the introduction of plural marriage, which nearly cost him his wife and nearly brought the church down. A lot of church members were horrified. In all of those ways, he was clearly radical. But let me get a little closer to politics by talking about his daring in the re-envisioning of society.
The Mormon Church was organized in April of Within six months, Joseph Smith added to the church organization a civic organization, which he called the City of Zion. In , a site for the city was chosen in Independence, Mo. It was to be a place where the saints were to gather. He planned that city, laid out a plat for it and instructed his people to gather there—not in a rush but in good order and in due time. His commitment to this city over against congregational worship is dramatized by the fact that never in his life did Joseph Smith build a chapel. From then on, wherever he built a city, he built temples — and never a chapel.
They were very casual about Sunday worship. Someone was selected as the moderator and he called people out of the congregation on the spot to preach. There was no pastor for many of these congregations. The organization at this level was thought of as temporary. The little branches of the church were really holding pens in preparation for the time when Mormons would all move to one of the gathering cities.
The city was meant to be not just a gathering place but an ideal society. One Scripture describes it this way: Everyone was to live there. Farmers were to live in its bounds, their farms outside the city and their houses inside. Louis had 10,; Cincinnati, the largest city in the West except for New Orleans, had 30, in To deal with the poor, everyone who came to the city was to consecrate everything — all of their property — to the bishop of the church, who in return would deed back to them properties sufficient for their needs.
It was an equalization program. For if you are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things. These Cities of Zion were to create unified, egalitarian societies and eventually fill up the world. But by the time he got to Nauvoo, Joseph Smith saw the city as more open.
One of the first ordinances passed by the Nauvoo council was a toleration act specifying that all faiths were welcome in the city and listing a number of them: There was probably not a Mohammedan within a thousand miles, but it was a gesture of openness to every religion. Smith also got more involved in politics. Initially, he was disdainful of politics the way all millenarians are, taking the attitude that the nations of the earth are going to crumble and the kingdom of the Christ, as a Messiah, would arise.
Smith was forced into politics by the abuse that the Mormons received. As soon as they were driven out of their first city site in Independence, Mo. He never obtained it. No level of government, from local justices of the peace to governors to the president of the United States — to whom he constantly appealed — ever came to the defense of the Saints. But Joseph Smith became a great devotee of constitutional rights because they seemed like his only hope. He said some very extravagant things about the Constitution being God-given because of those rights and became quite conversant in constitutional matters.
Gradually, then, Joseph Smith backed into American politics. In the fall of , as the campaign began to take shape, the authorities of the church wrote to all of the known political candidates asking them about their views of the Mormons, and none returned a satisfactory answer from the Mormon point of view. Joseph Smith was nominated as a protest candidate in February of Like other protest candidates, he began to warm to his work and got quite excited about it.
He may have dreamed for a moment that through some strange concatenation of events, he would get elected. Every candidate has to dream such things.
His involvement in politics was manifested in a political platform of which he was very proud. He would bring it out whenever he had visitors and read from it. It is an interesting document because it represents a man whose world had been his own people, whose own project had been to create a kingdom of God, and who now had to turn his mind to politics. He began by citing the Declaration of Independence, the famous passages about all men being equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, which of course could be a lead-in to religious rights.
Instead, in the very next sentence, he talked about the obvious contradiction: Josiah Quincy, soon to be mayor of Boston, visited Joseph Smith in the spring of when this platform was in circulation. But if the retired scholar was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in , what shall I say of the political and religious leader who had committed himself, in print, as well as in conversation, to the same course in ?
It extended to prison reform and better treatment of seamen, big issues in the s and s. Smith seemed to identify with all of the underdogs in society. I think that was why he thought he might get elected — because the little people, the beat-up people, would rise and select him. This part of his platform accords perfectly with what modern people like us would have liked a candidate in to say.
But Smith went beyond our sense of political propriety in other parts of his platform: He was already mayor of Nauvoo and lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion when he ran for the presidency.
- Mitt Romney, as a leader in Mormon church, became a master of many keys.
- Is Mitt Romney’s Mormonism fair game? - The Washington Post?
- Is Mitt Romney’s Mormonism fair game?;
He seemingly had no sense that church and state should be separated. He gave no hint that he was going to give up his religious offices if he were to become president of the United States. In the closing peroration of his platform, Joseph Smith indirectly, but I think clearly, offered himself to be the priest of the people, as well as the president. Of course, that is point at which moderns part company with Joseph Smith. That seems to lead to the exclusion of unbelievers and the repression of naysayers. All the alarm bells go off when we see these roles merging.
But I would appeal to you, before you turn away completely from that idea, to pay heed to the underlying theme of that platform and that proposal. We think of the American dream as the promise of ascent for the wretched refuse of the teeming shores — the promise that in America, everyone has a chance to prosper and to achieve respectability. That is a dream for the individual. There is an American dream of a goodly society. God and the people. This corporate American dream includes a virtuous political leadership with the unselfish purpose of seeking, without regard for personal good, the public good — not just to manage the varying interests of society but to bless people.
This is the way Joseph Smith put it: And the main efforts of her officers, who are nothing more nor less than the servants of the people, ought to be directed to ameliorate the condition of all, black or white, bond or free. I think it is manifest even in 21st century cynicism about politics.
For what is the starting point of cynicism but hope for the good politician who serves the public, a hope that is forever being thwarted, leading to disillusionment? Not only is he wise and good in all of his political judgments, he also has a large heart that encompasses the well-being of everyone around him. In fact, our finest political rhetoric has appealed to this grand corporate dream of America as a goodly nation. And in my opinion, Joseph Smith simply expressed in his own way that underlying aspiration when he offered himself as a prophet president.
Americans dream of righteousness and being a good nation. The question in my mind is, Can he tap into this vein of civic idealism in American culture? His 19th-century Mormon heritage gives him plenty to work with. But the question is, Is his Mormonism a help or a hindrance?
One of the problems of speaking to this kind of latent idealism is finding a language that will work. Leaders have traditionally invoked the Bible, but in a multi-religious nation, how much longer is that rhetoric going to be usable, especially when the political left is so worried about the Christian right and concerned that any reference to righteousness shades over into repressive self-righteousness? Romney, like every politician, faces the problem of finding a language, but he has the double handicap of being a Mormon. Every word hinting at religious idealism will sound Mormon, even to his natural allies among conservative Christians.
How can they trust words that sound like they may have emanated from Salt Lake City? I, for one, will be listening for how Romney calls Americans to their higher destiny. I think Americans yearn for that call, especially now after all the scandals of the last few years and the defamation of our character around the world. But the question is, Can Romney find words that will sound American rather than Mormon? Let me now turn to the other issue I spoke of earlier: Brigham Young did not claim to be a prophet like Joseph Smith.
Under Brigham Young, Zion became a collection of small village-cities up and down the Great Basin , all of them following the same plat that Joseph Smith had laid out for the City of Zion. Zion was transformed from a city into hundreds of villages spread across the Western landscape. Instead of the equalization of property, Brigham Young instituted a series of varied cooperatives. Some of them were very radical: Others were simply cooperatives where farmers would pool their resources to perform the functions of the middleman in marketing farm products.
The idea was to consecrate ordinary economic life to God. All told, the charges that Utah was a theocracy were well founded. It was a theocracy, a merger of church and society under God. Two complaints about Utah were directed against Mormons in the 19th century. One was polygamy, of course, but the other was theocratic rule by Brigham Young, his successors and the presidency of the church.
This was the radical Mormonism of the 19th century, descended from Joseph Smith and continued by Brigham Young. It included a far-reaching social critique. Young criticized capitalism as often as he did philandering. Mormons were sympathetic to European revolutionaries in They saw themselves as a society set against American society with all of its inequities and iniquities. It was a society that, as we know, was doomed to defeat. For 40 years, Mormons resisted attempts of the federal government to end polygamy and to destroy theocracy, but finally they gave in.
The government began imprisoning Mormon men who had more than one wife and denying Mormons their civil rights. By the late s, it looked like the church, as a church, would be obliterated. They believed to the end that the Constitution was on their side and that they were simply claiming religious freedom, but the Supreme Court knocked down their claims one after another.
Eventually they saw it was hopeless. In , the president of the church announced that they would no longer practice plural marriages. They were sometimes assigned: They also began to give up all of the church businesses.
Mitt Romney
Not immediately, but steadily over the course of the 20th century, they were not only turned into capitalist enterprises, but the church divested itself of ownership. The church elementary school system was given up. The hospitals have now all been turned into private corporations.
All told, the Mormon theocracy was leveled. Mormonism gave up on its radicalism because the United States government beat it out of them. They were forced to the point of extinction and then realized it all had to be abandoned to preserve their existence as Mormons. As a result, everything became secular. Mormons, in reaction to this treatment, turned to laissez faire liberalism, having no confidence in the government. Their history gave them no reason to trust the United States government as an agency of the people.
The old idealism revived during the Depression when the Mormon welfare system was organized to care for the Mormon poor. It was an elaborate system of productive organizations to grow and can fruit, grow sugar beets, make shoe polish and glue, the whole works. But that was all done within the church; it was sectarian reform and was not advanced through the government. In fact, it was considered a sign of shame to go on the government dole. Mormons were told to rely on the church and their own families first. How does all of this bear on Romney? I think the obvious question is, How far will he trust government when his Mormon heritage teaches him to be distrustful of government?
His instincts will be skeptical. Joining that problem to the problem of finding a language of idealism raises the question, Will he find a way to use the government for any kind of idealistic purposes, or will he remain suspicious through to the end? The idea of talking personally to all of the politicians, trying to get some kind of a consensus, is very much the way Mormon congregations work.
There is never a vote or a power struggle. The people strive for mutual consent. It struck me as promising for Romney to work that way in the state. So I leave that as a question, along with the question of how he will rouse people to the cause of the nation: Let me turn, then, to a third side of the influence of church history on Mitt Romney. One aspect of this abandonment of theocracy was a pullback from government in general.
Mormons realized that theocracy only led to pain. As a church they became very sensitive about any kind of theocratic involvement in government.
Little Voter Discomfort with Romney’s Mormon Religion
This was reinforced in the famous seating hearings of Reed Smoot in Smoot was an apostle — a very high official in the Mormon Church — elected to the Senate on a Republican ticket, but refused a seat. To settle the question he went through hearings for four years. This protracted examination brought forth all of the opposition to Mormons that was still residual in the nation.
It was charged that they were still practicing polygamy, that they were still theocratic, that their reforms were superficial and not to be trusted. The president of the church, a man named Joseph F. Smith , nephew of Joseph Smith, was called to testify. He was asked over and over again, will Reed Smoot be obligated out of his loyalty to you as the prophet of the church to do what you say in political matters?
Over and over, Joseph F. Smith answered, no, he is not obligated; he should follow his own conscience and the obligations he feels to his constituency, not to the president of the church. The repetition of that question was an indication of the deep suspicion that prevailed and I think prevails to this day. To calm the fears, at the end of the hearings, the church authorities codified the testimony of the church president in an official statement: On these terms, Mormonism entered the political scene: We will not interfere in politics or in the action of any politicians who are members of the church.
There is, on the church website, this statement: While the church may communicate its views to them, as it may to any other elected official, it recognizes that these officials still must make their own choices based on their best judgment and with consideration of the constituencies whom they are elected to represent.
On the whole it is fair to say that by comparison to the 19th century, the church has withdrawn from politics. So I believe that we should truly be able to lay aside fears that Romney will receive directions from Salt Lake City. There is nothing in the record of the past century that would lead one to think otherwise. The question is, Why does this fear keep coming up with fairly well-informed people — the same question over and over again? I think it is because of the logic of revelation. The necessary consequence, unbelievers think, of believing that your prophet is a prophet speaking for God is unquestioning submission.
The same thing is true for the Catholic Church. I hope I am safe in saying that. How can an institution be so self-contradictory? Everyone is to receive revelation for their own positions, whether as a father or a bishop or a Sunday school teacher, or whatever it is. And that extends from church doctrine to political statements. So, Mormons believe that all of those strong injunctions to follow the prophet are one end of a paradox.
The other end, they say, is that they have to decide for themselves whether they believe what the prophet says. So there is legitimacy within the church for taking an independent position, contrary to what the president of the church may say. I would say that rather than worrying about dictation from Salt Lake City, we should be more concerned about whether or not Mitt Romney is able to use the agency of the government for the idealistic ends that are truly his legacy as a Latter-day Saint.
First of all, thank you for that really helpful talk. I want to start with a narrow question and then a couple of broader ones. Utah is very interesting politically. In , it was one of only two states that voted for Taft. But then it was all Roosevelt and Truman during the New Deal years. Then from on, it voted Democratic only once. Can you explain these shifts and what Utah was like when it was — or appeared to be — a New Deal state during the Roosevelt and Truman years?
The second question feeds into the first. I think any tradition is at a disadvantage if its scripture was written years ago instead of 1,, 2, or 6, years ago. I would be curious if you could talk a little bit about what aspects of Mormon Scripture might be dredged up against Romney.
How, in fact, do the passages that might get thrown at Romney compare with passages in the Old and New Testaments that might actually be problematic to modern people? The theoretical roots of polygamy; the whole problem with black people that sort of went away, it seems, in Mormon theology; and lastly, any thoughts on George Romney versus Mitt Romney? Otherwise, I have no questions. I figure you can answer everything, so I want to take advantage. Well, when you get those switches back and forth, you know that there is a contradiction or a polarity inside the culture. Someone has said that Mormon doctrine should best be described as a set of dilemmas — as contradictory goods posed against one another.
My father was a Democrat growing up in Utah. He was not a very well-off person. I think Mormons have always identified with underdogs because they felt like they were underdogs so much of the time themselves. So the appeal of the New Deal, of caring for the people, was very inspiring. FDR had that great gift of speaking to the better angels of our nature, and I think Mormons responded to that because it was a language they hear in church a lot. On the other hand, there is always the suspicion of governments, which I think means that, under the circumstances, Utah could go Democratic again.
Things are more likely to be scandalous to the theological order of the larger Christian community. That sort of business just drives other Christians up the wall. How many people want me to talk about polygamy? I know you all are curious. Polygamy is an interesting thing because it serves as a Rorschach test. People project onto Joseph Smith and the polygamists their own sense about human nature. One important reason is that it is so contrary to Mormon contemporary ideas of family — companionate, eternal friends going on with their children forever, versus a community wives constituting a family.
So that is an ideological problem for Mormons. The best rationale is one revelation written down in That is virtually all he said on the subject, and plural marriages are depicted simply as part of the restoration of the ancient order of things. Smith brings priesthood out of the Bible. He brings temples out of the Bible. He brings the temple rituals out of the rituals for sanctifying priests in the book of Exodus, and he brings polygamy out of the Bible. That is all he said, that the injunction for polygamy is to go and do the works of Abraham.
In actual fact, polygamy seemed to have served a function in society. We now have a fine-grained study of polygamy in one community where we know every family in the community and all of the details about them. And what polygamy seems to have been was a way in which young women without male protection — no father, no older brother, no near relative to care for them — were absorbed into Mormon society. Polygamy went up when the immigration rates went up. And the young women who came into these families in this little town were young women in that position.
Not all of them — but that was the single most common type of plural wife. More than 50 percent of them fit this description. So it was a way of caring for people and may have contributed to the resilience of the society. But Mormons themselves are puzzled about the meaning of polygamy, beyond what Joseph Smith said about it. It seems particularly interesting to me, not just because Romney is a candidate, but because so many of the arguments that are made in this debate are also being heard in arguments about evangelicals and Catholics.
I want to focus on one particular strain of criticism that was very sharply expressed in a quote from Jacob Weisberg in the TIME magazine cover package on Romney this week. There was a quote from Weisberg saying that someone who believes the kind of things that Romney believes lacks the capacity to serve in the office of president. I thought that was a very interesting way of putting it. And then Herzog goes on and says they eat green salad and they drink human blood.
And, of course, that was one of the reasons they were long denied the vote. It was presumed that they lacked this capacity. It seems to me that a certain conception of rationality underlies what Weisberg and many others have said in this vein. And so I have two questions for you. One is, could you tease out their understanding of rationality such that someone like Romney would simply not have the capacity to fulfill this office? And second, who would be some intellectual allies that Mormons and others who might be the butt of the same charge might find outside their own faith tradition?
In other words, where are their intellectual allies for responding to this conception of rationality? Well, their natural allies, which are all conservative Christians, refuse to accept them as allies, and that makes it very difficult. The question is, What is different about believing that an angel appeared to a person and told him about ancient records on plates of gold, and believing that a man who died and was buried rose again after three days and came back to life? Is there something sort of qualitatively different, or is it simply familiarity that makes a difference?
Is it less rational to believe in an angel than to believe in a risen person? Islam and Judaism also have these founding miracles. The question is, Is there something inherently more irrational about Mormon miracles than other miracles, or is it just a matter of familiarity? We have lived with these stories all of our lives.
OK, we know angels are rare, but why not have angels? Just for clarification, Latter-day Saints believe in both of the miracles you were just talking about, right? Who was driving the case?
One of the numbers that struck me in all of our polls was the percentage of Republicans who say they would never vote for a Mormon. I just want you to talk about that a little bit, and what your take on that is. In the s, the Mormons themselves were simply struggling for survival and holding onto any raft that came by. A lot of them became Republicans because the Republicans were in power and they needed their support. Archived from the original on July 15, Archived from the original on April 7, His tax plan wouldn't bump that".
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Public Views of Presidential Politics and Mormon Faith
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Evangelicals were only slightly more hostile to Mormon candidates than the population at large, and Democrats were much more hostile. It may be that many secular-minded voters consider Mormonism particularly alien and threatening. Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in to an American mother [an atheist] and a Kenyan father. When he was two, his parents divorced and Obama's Harvard-educated father, a muslim, returned to Kenya. In or about , when Obama was approximately six 6 years old, his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, married Lolo Soetoro, an oil manager and citizen of Indonesia [a muslim country], and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia with Obama.
He attended the Basuki School, a "public school" with no particular religious agenda. In , Obama traveled to Pakistan [another muslim country]. At the time of his travels to Pakistan, Obama was twenty 20 years old. It is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Polytheist. Franklin Graham, one of the nation's most prominent evangelical leaders, "I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. That's what he says he has done. I cannot say that he hasn't.