Romney, Mormons brace for a mean political season

RACHEL ZOLL

AP Reli­gion Writer

SALT LAKE CITY — As 20,000 Mor­mons streamed from the church con­fer­ence cen­ter, a rag­tag group of pro­test­ers stood across the street shout­ing that the Latter-day Saints were going to hell. Mor­mon fam­i­lies, who had gath­ered here for two days of speeches and spir­i­tual guid­ance called Gen­eral Con­fer­ence, ignored the heck­lers or laughed and kept walking.

This, after all, is a church accus­tomed to much worse.

Yet, even with a resilience built over nearly two cen­turies as out­siders, church mem­bers are anx­ious about what’s ahead. Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney is about to become the first Mor­mon nom­i­nee for U.S. pres­i­dent on a major party ticket. That will give them a chance like no other to explain their tra­di­tion to the pub­lic, but the church’s many crit­ics will have a big­ger plat­form, too. And the vet­ting will take place amid the emo­tion of what may well be a nasty gen­eral election.

“Peo­ple who have opposed Mor­monism for­ever will use this as an oppor­tu­nity,” said Robert Mil­let, a reli­gion scholar at Brigham Young Uni­ver­sity who co-founded a pio­neer­ing evangelical-Mormon dia­logue. “I don’t know if we’re ready for this kind of deluge.”

At the Salt Lake City head­quar­ters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offi­cials are prepar­ing to defend the church.

It’s an effort that began before Rom­ney offi­cially announced his first, ulti­mately unsuc­cess­ful, 2008 bid for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion. Mor­mon offi­cials met with jour­nal­ists around the coun­try about the church’s non­par­ti­san­ship. Lead­ers were wor­ried that any state­ments they made to clar­ify doc­trine would give the impres­sion of aid­ing Romney.

That con­cern con­tin­ues this elec­tion sea­son. LDS offi­cials have empha­sized repeat­edly that the church doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate with the Rom­ney cam­paign. In a lengthy state­ment on their main web­site, Mor­mon lead­ers say the church does not “endorse, pro­mote or oppose polit­i­cal par­ties, can­di­dates or platforms.”

The Latter-day Saints have been run­ning a multimillion-dollar series of ads, called “I’m a Mor­mon,” since 2010, to dis­pel stereo­types by telling the sto­ries of indi­vid­ual Mor­mons. To avoid any appear­ance that the ads were meant to help Rom­ney, the church didn’t buy ad time in Iowa and some other mar­kets with early pri­maries, said Michael Purdy, an LDS national spokesman. At the Gen­eral Con­fer­ence last month, led by the high­est author­i­ties of the church, there was no men­tion of the elec­tion across the pulpit.

“We’re just going to do what the church does, regard­less of the elec­tion,” Purdy said.

The neu­tral­ity mes­sage can be a hard sell since Mor­mons are known to be over­whelm­ingly Repub­li­can and more socially con­ser­v­a­tive than many other Amer­i­cans. The impres­sion was rein­forced by Mor­mon con­tri­bu­tions of money and vol­un­teers for Propo­si­tion 8, the 2008 Cal­i­for­nia mea­sure to bar same-sex mar­riage. (LDS offi­cials say they were advo­cat­ing for a moral, not a par­ti­san, issue.)

The church has long con­tended with con­spir­acy the­o­ries of Mor­mon plots to take over Amer­ica — claims that have only increased with Romney’s promi­nence. If the for­mer gov­er­nor wins the White House, how­ever, sev­eral polit­i­cal sci­en­tists pre­dict LDS offi­cials would be more likely to pull back from any pol­icy debates to avoid an appear­ance of undue influ­ence, even when Mor­mons have a clear interest.

“There is a good chance that the main way a lot of lead­ers of the church will respond to the elec­tion of a Mor­mon to the pres­i­dency will be to stay as quiet and unin­volved in pol­i­tics as pos­si­ble and put as much day­light as pos­si­ble between that pres­i­dent and the insti­tu­tional church,” said Rus­sell Arben Fox, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at Friends Uni­ver­sity in Wichita, Kan., and a Mor­mon writer. “They’re a global church and have respon­si­bil­i­ties all around the world. For them to appear to be lin­ing up behind a Mor­mon pres­i­dent and endors­ing his poli­cies would just be bad for the church.”

Despite their fears, Mor­mons acknowl­edge that Romney’s nom­i­na­tion will be a mile­stone like none before for the church.

Orga­nized in 1830, Latter-day Saints were per­se­cuted from their ear­li­est days for their doc­trine and sup­port for polygamy, which Mor­mons renounced in 1890. A mob assas­si­nated founder Joseph Smith in 1844, send­ing Mor­mons flee­ing into the unset­tled Moun­tain West. The­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences with other faith groups — about scrip­tures, the nature of God and heaven — pro­vided fod­der for anti-Mormon bias over the years. Chris­t­ian groups chal­lenged the Mor­mon asser­tion that the church is part of tra­di­tional Chris­tian­ity. One such group, the Utah Light­house Min­istry, oper­ates just a few miles from Tem­ple Square, the Salt Lake City com­plex at the heart of the faith.

Steve Shaw, a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist at North­west Nazarene Uni­ver­sity and co-author of “The Pres­i­dents and Their Faith,” com­pares this elec­tion to the 1960 cam­paign of John F. Kennedy, who con­fronted reli­gious bias to become the first Roman Catholic pres­i­dent. Kennedy’s elec­tion marked a move for Catholics more firmly into the Amer­i­can main­stream, a poten­tial shift for Mor­mons as well in 2012. When Rom­ney became the pre­sump­tive nom­i­nee last month, the liberal-leaning Mor­mon blog, “By Com­mon Con­sent,” posted an arti­cle titled, “Excited about Rom­ney, Despite Myself.”

“If Mr. Rom­ney is elected, when he is sworn into office in Jan­u­ary 2013, the his­tory of Mor­monism in this coun­try clearly would enter a new chap­ter,” Shaw said.

Chris­t­ian groups with a com­pet­ing empha­sis on evan­ge­liz­ing worry about a flood of Mor­mon con­verts if Rom­ney pre­vails over Pres­i­dent Barack Obama. With 14.4 mil­lion mem­bers, the church is among the fastest-growing in the world, sup­ported by a full-time mis­sion­ary force of about 55,000 young people.

Yet, with Rom­ney in the Oval Office, the pop­u­lar­ity of the church could fall as well as rise.

Inter­nally, while the church has indeed been gain­ing new mem­bers, it has also been los­ing some oth­ers: A num­ber of younger Mor­mons have become dis­il­lu­sioned about LDS doc­trine and his­tory. Out­go­ing LDS church his­to­rian, Elder Mar­lin K. Jensen, con­firmed that trend in a talk last Novem­ber at Utah State Uni­ver­sity. Lead­ers worry that reli­gion issues raised by the gen­eral elec­tion could exac­er­bate the prob­lem. The Foun­da­tion for Apolo­getic Infor­ma­tion & Research, or FAIR, a vol­un­teer Mor­mon anti-defamation group, said its “Ask an Apol­o­gist” web fea­ture has been espe­cially busy with queries from Mor­mons strug­gling with ques­tions from their children.

“It’s forced a lot of mem­bers of the church to exam­ine their beliefs and how they talk with their kids,” said FAIR’s pres­i­dent, Scott Gordon.

In sur­veys of non-Mormons, only a small minor­ity say they are famil­iar with the church. Rom­ney, a life­long church mem­ber and one-time top LDS leader in the Boston area, will be their intro­duc­tion. How­ever, Rom­ney rarely speaks about his faith while cam­paign­ing and would prob­a­bly be no more forth­com­ing as he tried to nav­i­gate Wash­ing­ton and sur­vive for a sec­ond term. The most vis­i­ble mem­ber of Mor­monism might end up prac­tic­ing his reli­gion in private.

But first, the church has to get to November.

FAIR has started a new web­site called MormonVoices.org, to com­bat mis­in­for­ma­tion about the church that could result from atten­tion to the faith sparked by Romney’s can­di­dacy. Kyle Jar­rett, who lives in Wash­ing­ton, said lead­ers of his LDS ward, or local con­gre­ga­tion, orga­nized an infor­ma­tion ses­sion for church mem­bers on poten­tial issues about Mor­monism in the gen­eral election.

“It’s a new thing for us, to hear our reli­gion being talked about in a round­table on MSNBC,” said Jar­rett, 30, who works for the Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­to­r­ial Cam­paign Committee

Events over the past decade have helped pre­pare Mor­mons for the spot­light. They han­dled the expo­sure that came with the 2002 Win­ter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Last year brought the mon­ster hit “The Book of Mor­mon,” a Broad­way satire about mis­sion­ar­ies in Uganda. The church didn’t protest. Instead, lead­ers who are asked for com­ment often use the line, “You’ve seen the show. Now read the book.”

Now, Mor­mons are brac­ing for the onslaught of atten­tion as Rom­ney tries to break what pun­dits call a “stained-glass ceil­ing” for the presidency.

“I hon­estly look for­ward to hav­ing the pub­lic see an LDS mem­ber live life in full pub­lic view,” said Ali­son Moore Smith, a Mor­mon Repub­li­can from Lin­don, Utah, and founder of the blog MormonMomma.com. “While many (Mor­mons) are wor­ried about the height­ened scrutiny, most seem to have a ‘finally they will see what we’re really like’ attitude.”

Posted by AP News on May 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.