Now that the initial news over Mitt Romney throwing in the towel has been absorbed by the media far and wide, a lot of news copy and bloggage is picking over the relationship between his candidacy and his faith. Libby Copeland of the Washington Post in “Did Mormons Get a Bounce from Mitt?” thinks Romney may have been a little too perfect for the American public:
Romney seemed so Mormon, so squeaky clean, so Pollyanna-ish, even. (Remember when he went to Michigan and said he could bring those lost jobs back?) Romney’s seeming normalcy isn’t the norm anymore. Maybe we understand better those who’ve strayed or failed and recovered — or, for that matter, those who aren’t fabulously successful and can’t put tens of millions into their own campaigns. Maybe we relate to the family lives of other candidates, candidates who have been divorced, who have blended families, whose children don’t all campaign with them (and may not even like them). Sure, they’re messier, but messy is authentic.
Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune today concentrated on the “weirdness factor” that dogged Mitt and the Mormons during the last several months:
…Romney’s failed campaign revealed what many Americans really think about Mormons. It forced Latter-day Saints to acknowledge that they don’t just belong to another American denomination.
“We have to live with the fact that a lot of people think our beliefs are strange,” said LDS historian Richard Bushman, the professor emeritus at Columbia University who helped explain Mormonism to a skeptical public. “Mormons have never had so much exposure as we have in the last year, so much genuine curiosity on the part of high-level media. I don’t think we’ll ever be the same.”
If it has been tough for many Latter-day Saints to see themselves as others do, it has been equally hard to face the country’s continued bigotry, said others.
And it may not bode well for the future, says Stack. “The anti-Mormon whispering campaigns in the Bible Belt may also have permanently derailed the growing political alliance between Mormons and evangelicals,” she predicts.
The New Republic’s Peter Keating, in “The Wrong Kind of Religious, agrees with Stack:
Southern Baptists and Mormons are not only two of the four largest religious denominations in the country, they are the most aggressive of American missionary faiths, and have been on a collision course for generations.
He then backs up his belief that Romney was beaten from the start.
Southern states have GOP primary electorates dominated by evangelical Christians, specifically by Southern Baptists. And many of those Southern Baptists are committed to blocking the ascension of a Mormon to the presidency.
Keating traces some of this animosity back to the 1980s, when the Mormon Church began making serious inroads into the South and evangelical pulpits responded by blasting away at Mormonism. Keating quotes Columbia doctoral Neil J. Young, who reportedly said, “Probably no other organization in the nation has played a bigger role in perpetuating the idea that Mormonism is a cult than the Southern Baptist Convention.”
While Keating has lots of other reasons why he doesn’t like Romney — he isn’t as funny as McCain or Huckabee, for one — he maintains that the tension between Mormons and evangelicals is essentially to blame.
Romney’s campaign was doomed for the simple reason that as he exposed his Mormonism to a greater number of right-wing Christians, he branded himself as unacceptably impure, a priori, to a critically large subset of them. And maybe the reason Romney got so little bang for his advertising buck is because the cost of luring evangelicals to support a Mormon—of conversion, if you will—is essentially infinite.
I’m a little surprised that the Mitt-watchers didn’t attribute some of his Super Tuesday defeat to his attendance last Saturday at the funeral of Mormon Church President Gordon B. Hinckley. For Romney, it was the right and only thing to do, but it could be seen as further emphasizing his ties to the Church. The last image many potential voters may have had of Romney may have been of him sitting in the aisle of the Conference Center in Salt Lake City near Sen. Bob Bennett and HSS Secretary Mike Leavitt.
The press and the bloggers will now move on to other things, but this issue will not go away. After years of congratulating ourselves on how well we’re doing in the media and in the world, Mormons and the Mormon Church has just received a major wake-up call. And the timing of the issue is fascinating, just as the Church has lost its long-time leader President Hinckley, acknowledged by many inside and outside the Church as a media and public relations genius.
Keating says that the reservoirs of money and ill-will possessed by evangelicals are nearly infinite. We’ll have to see if Mormon faith and patience are equally so.