With the Republican primaries starting January, candidate Mitt Romney and Mormonism have drawn national attention. Some controversy was generated in early October when Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of a prominent Baptist church in Dallas, stated publicly that Romney belongs to a cult and is not a Christian. Minutes before, Jeffress had endorsed Perry at a conservative gathering, calling the Texas governor “a proven leader, a true conservative, and a committed follower of Christ.”
“Mitt Romney is a good moral person, but he’s not a Christian,” Jeffress told the media. “Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.”
Romney was quick to respond. “I would call upon Governor Perry to repudiate the sentiment and the remarks made by that pastor,” Romney said at a news conference. “I just don’t believe that kind of divisiveness based on religion has a place in this country.”
Perry later stated that he disagreed with Jeffress’s assessment of Mormonism as a cult, but he did not reject Jeffress’s endorsement.
ROMNEY DEFENDED
Statements defending Romney and the LDS Church proliferated in the wake of Jeffress’s remarks. LDS historian Richard Bushman said he was encouraged by how many people condemned Jeffress’s comments. “To my way of thinking,” Bushman told KSL TV, “that means that what I would call the tolerant majority thinks this language is really out of bounds.”
Richard J. Mouw, a prominent evangelical and friend of the Mormons, wrote an editorial denying that Mormonism is a cult, although his assessment of whether or not Mormonism is Christian was more cautious. “While I’m not prepared to reclassify Mormonism as possessing undeniably Christian theology,” he wrote for CNN.com, “I do accept many of my Mormon friends as genuine followers of the Jesus whom I worship as the divine Savior.” Only days before Jeffress’s statement, televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson had called Romney “an outstanding Christian.”
A Salt Lake Tribune editorial maintained that Romney’s religion was immaterial to his qualifications for the presidency. “Romney and Jon Huntsman aren’t running for an ecclesiastical office,” the editors remarked. “We wonder . . . whether anyone could get away with implying that someone is unfit for the presidency because he or she is a Jew. Jews aren’t Christians, either. Is Judaism a cult?”
Peter Morici, a non-Mormon and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission, also spoke publicly against Jeffress. “Mr. Romney lives a faith that teaches the dignity of man, tolerance for human diversity, the power of charity to improves the lives of those that give as well as those that receive, and potential for redemption when we fail —which each of us does in some measure,” he wrote for an editorial posted on CNBC.com. “If that’s a cult, then maybe Rev. Jeffress should sign up for some lessons.”
LDS spokesperson Michael Otterson responded in an editorial for the Washington Post’s blog “On Faith” where he warned that “some pastors” could not be trusted to provide accurate characterizations of LDS teaching. “We don’t ask the coach of the New York Yankees to explain English cricket,” Otterson wrote. “There are some things he just won’t get, or won’t want to. And if you ask people with a vested interest to define someone else’s faith, you’re in danger of getting a lot of words but zero enlightenment.”
In a more humorous vein, the comedy news program The Daily Show commented on Jeffress’s statement by staging a “debate” between two cast members—one wearing a T-shirt for “Team Normal” and the other one wearing a T-shirt for “Team Mormon.” The “debate” cast Mormon, Christian, and Jewish beliefs as ridiculous, including the Jewish tradition of circumcision, the Mormon claim that Joseph Smith “read [the golden plates] using a seer stone,” and the Christian tenet that “Jesus was conceived by the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost.”
Mormon humorist Robert Kirby quipped in his Salt Lake Tribune column that “most cults wouldn’t tolerate the amount of irreverence, disregard for authority and general malaise that make up the majority of my spiritual progress.” “If Mormonism really were a cult,” Kirby added, “I’d be dead by now. At the very least, I would have been slapped around a bit or banished.”
ROMNEY AS A MORMON: THE STORIES
Several recent stories in major media outlets have focused on Romney’s “Mormon past”—his experience as an LDS missionary in France in the late 1960s and as a bishop and stake president in the Boston area in the 1980s and early 1990s. A 15 October story found both positive and negative points in Romney’s performance as a bishop and stake president. “Some Mormons . . . found Mr. Romney thoughtful and compassionate; one mother recalled his kindness to her dying son,” Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote for the New York Times. “Others, including a group of Mormon feminists demanding a greater role for women, found him condescending, doctrinaire or just plain bossy.”
A 21 November story in the Washington Post claimed that Romney “evolved” as a church leader from being very opposed to a group of feminists associated with Exponent II to holding a more sympathetic attitude towards the challenges and needs of LDS women. Barbara Taylor, a former president of Exponent II, commented that in the early 1980s Romney “thought we were just a bunch of bored, unhappy wives trying to stir up trouble,” but that in the 1990s he became more inclusive of women in the stake. According to Exponent II member Helen Claire Sievers, stake president Romney held a meeting at the Belmont chapel where he listened for hours to dozens of proposals made by women.
On 22 November, Salon.com published an unflattering sketch of Romney as “an enforcer of the most socially conservative policies of the LDS church—particularly in the realms of sex and women’s rights.” Romney was said to have sternly warned a woman with life-threatening complications “not to go forward” with her doctor’s recommendation that she have an abortion. On other occasions, it was reported, he called homosexuality “both perverse and reprehensible,” and threatened with excommunication a single mother who didn’t want to give up her newborn son for adoption.
LDS blogger Joanna brooks found the New York Times’s story “the most humanizing profile of candidate Romney that I’ve yet seen,” but admitted that the Washington Post and Salon stories “do highlight aspects of congregational life that, while taken for granted by Mormons, may raise eyebrows among non-Mormon readers.”
“As Romney continues his march to the nomination, readers deserve coverage of the candidate that moves beyond sensationalism and the entrenchment it engenders,” Brooks argued. At the same time, she said, “It is important for readers to know that Romney developed his leadership style in a non-democratic, patriarchal, hierarchical church culture where he rarely encountered open challenge. And it is important to know that there are serious concerns about the status of women in the LDS Church.”
A MORMON CANDIDATE IN THE POLLS
A number of polls have explored Romney’s chances at winning the Republican nomination and, in a hypothetical race against President Obama, the presidency. According to a late November poll by the Pew Research Center, the greatest resistance to Romney comes from evangelicals, a mere 17 percent of whom favor him. For a Republican candidate, the conservative evangelical vote from states such as Iowa is considered crucial: In 2008, 60 percent of Iowa’s Republican caucus-goers, who vote early in the primaries, identified themselves as evangelical Christians or social or religious conservatives.
In contrast, white Catholics and white mainline Protestants (such as Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians) favor Romney over all other Republican candidates. This means that it would be easier for Romney to win the presidency in a race against Obama than it would be for him to win the Republican nomination. Still, overall, more than 40 percent of Americans say they would feel uncomfortable with a Mormon as president.
“DEVOTED TO MY FAITH, MY FAMILY, AND MY COUNTRY”
Between August and November, when polls pronounced him the Republican frontrunner, Romney spent almost no time answering questions or participating in debates—so much so that the media started to call him “the missing Mormon.” In early November, fellow Mormon presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman launched a new website, ScaredMittless2012.com, with dozens of stories about Romney’s vanishing act.
In early December, as Herman Cain withdrew from the race and Newt Gingrich’s numbers soared, Romney reappeared in interviews with Parade and People. In the Parade interview, Romney twice mentioned his “Judeo-Christian foundation,” said that he reads the Bible, and described himself as having “served as a lay pastor in my church.” When asked about the Word of Wisdom and the law of chastity, Romney offered a generically biblical response: “The Ten Commandments, the basis of all Judeo-Christian faiths . . . are not so much restricting as liberating. I think being faithful to one’s spouse is a wonderful source of passion and devotion in marriage and that paying tithes as suggested in the Book of Malachi makes one’s money’s less important.”
When asked to describe himself in one word, Romney answered, “devoted.” “Devoted to my family, my faith, and my country,” he explained.
In his interview with People magazine, Romney made a revelation that subsequently received wide media attention —analogous, perhaps, to Jimmy Carter’s 1976 confession that he had looked on women “with lust” or Bill Clinton’s 1992 admission that he “experimented” with marijuana, but “didn’t inhale.”
“Have you ever had a beer?” the reporter asked Romney.
“I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager,” Romney answered, “and never did it again.”
Politico.com ironically dubbed the revelation “a bombshell,” while a New York magazine blogger wrote the tongue-in-cheek headline, “Alcohol Has Touched Mitt Romney’s Lips.” The picture accompanying the New York story showed Romney in the act of sipping from a mug. “Mitt Romney drinking milk, probably,” the caption read.
“WHY DON’T THEY LIKE ME?”
In a 12 December cover story for Time, Joe Klein argued that even though Romney’s Mormonism “is a matter of real mistrust for many Evangelical Christian voters,” Romney’s long history of “brazen flip-floppery on issues large and small” is the real reason why Republicans ultimately don’t like him. An accompanying chart depicted “the ebb and flow of Romney’s conservative credentials” between 1994 and 2011 on four issues: cap and trade, gay rights, gun control, and abortion. The only “constant in Romney’s world,” a caption declared, is his hair.
Klein suspected that Romney’s flip toward conservative social values “may have been something of a relief, after his clumsy attempts to please his more liberal constituents in Massachusetts.” Wrote Klein: “After all, [Romney] had chosen to become part of the Mormon-church hierarchy. (Huntsman, by contrast, didn’t.) He must have felt comfortable with his conservative tenets—even if, according to recent accounts, he slowly came to terms with the concept of feminism . . . although his present roster of advisers is top-heavy with men.”
As Newt Gingrich came to dominate the polls nationwide, Romney broadcast an image of himself as a devoted Christian and faithful husband. A CBS News poll from early December indicated that in Iowa, whose early January primaries are considered key, Gingrich commanded 41 percent of the Tea Party vote and 34 percent of the white evangelical vote. By contrast, only 10 percent of the Tea Party and 10 percent of white evangelicals would vote for Romney. A December 7 CNN/Time poll showed that in Iowa, Romney trailed Gingrich, 20 percent to 33 percent.
A TV ad by the Romney campaign seemed to appeal to evangelicals and social conservatives by taking a direct jab at Gingrich, who cheated on his first two wives and who converted to Catholicism in 2009 (after being a Southern Baptist).
“I’ve been married to the same woman for 25—excuse me, I’ll get in trouble—for 42 years,” the ad showed Romney saying in a clip taken from the Michigan GOP debate. “I’ve been in the same church my entire life. I worked at one company, Bain, for 25 years. And I left that to go off and help save the Olympic Games.”
