Posted: 8/04/06
Poll: Americans not quite
ready for Mormon president
By Hannah Elliott
Associated Baptist Press
DALLAS (ABP)—With a Mormon looking like a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, it may be time to ask: Is the country ready to elect a Mormon president? If a Los Angeles Times poll is accurate, then the answer is: Maybe not.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known simply as “LDS”) is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, with more than 5.5 million members in the United States alone. There are currently 16 Mormons in Congress—five senators and 11 representatives.
Nonetheless, according to the July 3 poll, 37 percent of American adults would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate.
Among the survey’s choices of Catholic, Jewish, Mormon and Muslim candidates, only the Muslim score came in lower, with 54 percent of American adults saying they wouldn’t vote for a Muslim candidate. Some analysts have said the survey results show that Mormon politicians like Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who may run for the Republican presidential candidacy in 2008, will face significant resistance in the race for the White House.
Other analysts, like Romney supporter Nancy French, said the poll is flat-out wrong.
“The poll is flawed. It’s just not true,” French said. “It comes down to a religious preference test. What the Los Angeles Times poll is missing is that you don’t know Mitt Romney, you just know his religion.”
French, who founded the web site www.evangelicalsformitt.com is a Presbyterian writer who became interested in politics during a college internship in 1994.
Now living in Columbia, Tenn., French said the specific phrasing of political survey questions determines a lot about the results. If the question had been between a nameless candidate who was Southern Baptist and an anonymous candidate who had struggled with alcoholism, she said, most respondents likely would have chosen the Southern Baptist candidate—and thus picked Bill Clinton over George W. Bush.
The Times did not reveal the questions used in the survey at the time of its release.
“Liberals want to divide us (conservative voters), and that’s what this poll is trying to do,” French insisted. “Politically, there’s no air between us (Mormons and conservative Christians). If it wasn’t for Utah, we wouldn’t have a President Bush; we’d have a President Gore.”
French noted that evangelicals and Mormons both tend to be politically conservative, and that, at any rate, voters will care less about the Mormonism and more about the man.
Historically, both Mormon and evangelical groups have opposed gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research and abortion.
A second potential candidate who mirrors evangelical stances as closely as Romney hasn’t emerged, French said.
The bottom line is that “when you compare him to the other candidates, he gives you hope,” she said.
Romney, the 59-year-old son of a three-term Michigan governor, is something of an oddity in Massachusetts’ reliably Democratic politics. A Brigham Young University valedictorian and father of five, his background is as a Boston businessman.
In 1999, Romney was asked to help the committee overseeing the 2002 Winter Olympic Games—held in the center of the Mormon universe, Salt Lake City—restructure planning operations, which were already $379 million short of revenue goals. After Romney’s restructuring job, the games turned a profit of $100 million. Romney wrote a book, titled Turn Around, about the experience.
After his Olympic stint, Romney easily won the 2002 gubernatorial election against Democrat Shannon O’Brien.
Romney has declined to run for a second term as governor, suggesting a possible run for the presidency. To that end, some experts think he should publicly address his religious beliefs before others have a chance to exploit them.
That may require considerable tact in a time when candidates in both parties are increasingly using the language of faith to connect with voters. Romney may be forced to walk something of a tight-rope, maintaining close ties to his Mormon allies while convincing evangelical Christians he’s not so different from them.
If evangelicals look at the specifics of the Mormon tradition, that proposition may be difficult for them to accept.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is by far the largest of several church organizations that claim ties to the religion founded by Joseph Smith. According to several reference sources, Mormons believe in “premortality,” which means the existence of people as spiritual beings prior to Earth’s creation.
They also believe that humans are now what God once was, and that humans have the potential to become what God is now, according to whatismormonism.com, a website hostile to the faith.
Salvation for Mormons, according to the official LDS website (www.mormon.org), comes through righteous living via tests of faith. It culminates in the believer becoming a god and starting an eternal family. By virtue of the “celestial marriage” ordinance, a worthy male may bring his wife to begin the family.
And while Mormons believe and use the Bible as a text for their faith, they supplement it with the Book of Mormon, which they believe was revealed to Smith in the early 1800s. Smith also wrote “Articles of Faith” in 1842, and the articles have similarities to Christian creeds, despite provisions that omit original sin and admonish good work as a way to heaven. They begin: “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost;” “We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression;” and “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel.”
Francis Beckwith, who teaches politics and religion at Baylor University in Waco, said that despite the likeness to Christianity displayed in some tenets of the Mormon faith, most evangelicals would view it as theologically errant.
The fact that Mormonism denies the “great creeds of Christendom” and claims to have restored true Christianity through Smith, Beckwith said, causes most evangelicals to see Mormonism as unorthodox. He is the associate director of the Baptist school’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies. In 2002, he co-wrote The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement.
Still, Beckwith said, Romney should “stand by his LDS beliefs and explain how those beliefs help inform his political philosophy in a way that would advance the public good.” Beckwith compared Romney’s potential run to that of Kennedy, who became the nation’s first Roman Catholic president.
In a July 3 article, the Times quoted a Roper poll from June 1960 in which 35 percent of respondents said it “might be better not to have a Catholic president or that they would be against it.” Kennedy was elected to office just a few months later.
According to Beckwith, Romney should not make the mistake Kennedy did when he told a group of Protestant ministers his Catholic faith played no role in his political agenda.
“This was a terrible concession,” Beckwith said. “For it played to his audience’s anti-Catholic prejudices while saying that religious beliefs are so trivial that Kennedy would govern exactly the same if they were absent.”
Romney, for his part, has referred theological questions to LDS officials. In a June interview on “The Charlie Rose Show,” Romney deflected specific questions about his religion, according to Religion News Service.
“If you have doctrines you want to talk about, go talk to the church, because that’s not my job,” he reportedly said after the reporter asked about Mormon beliefs.
Romney has worked as president of a Mormon stake, or group of local congregations. In his youth, he traveled to France as a missionary and eventually served as leader for an LDS ward, or local congregation, in Massachusetts.
But, Beckwith said, he’s not convinced Romney will have to reconcile much of his faith to evangelicals if he runs for the position. The candidate’s political philosophy and leadership qualities play a larger role in an election than his or her religion, he said.
“A candidate’s faith in and of itself can’t win an election,” Beckwith said. He gave the example of Jimmy Carter, who talked openly of his faith as a “born-again Christian” and who won the evangelical vote in 1976, when he was elected to office. However, in 1980, most evangelicals defected from Carter to Ronald Reagan, a mainline Protestant who spoke little about his faith.
“Evangelicals applauded Carter’s faith, but they did not care for his policies,” Beckwith said.
The toughest spot for a Mormon running as a Republican would likely be in the primaries, Beckwith added. Once Romney got to the general election, evangelicals who did not support him for the Republican nomination likely would change tactics and vote for him anyway, he said.
They’d do that, Beckwith said, “especially if the alternative is a certain Methodist senator from New York.” The reference is to former first lady Hillary Clinton, who is widely expected to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
For Romney and others monitoring the polls, only time will tell.
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