Religion in America: The year of the Mormon

By Jack Miles

The surprise hit play on Broadway this summer has been The Book of Mormon, while out in the hinterland the Republican presidential candidate to beat — the candidate President Barack Obama is reportedly preparing to campaign against — has been Mitt Romney, a Mormon and, indeed, the great-grandson of Mormon polygamists who established a colony in Mexico rather than content themselves with standard American monogamy.

Is America “ready” for such a Mormon president?

The answer is almost certainly yes. To be the target of a Broadway lampoon by the creators of the popular cartoon series “South Park” is, crazily enough, a badge of normality. Mormons themselves, beyond tolerating the lampoon, have embraced it with good humour, and the entire exercise has become a further step in their assimilation into the American mainstream.

If only the American mainstream chose the Republican nominee! Romney might be thinking. Inconveniently for him, the Christian Right that is so influential in the Republican South regards Mormonism as a “cult” rather than as what it has overwhelmingly become: a thoroughly domesticated denomination of Protestant Christianity with a back story finally no more embarrassing than, say, the royal uxoricide in the back story of Anglicanism.

The Republican South is not the whole of the Republican base, however. There is also the Republican West: Utah itself, of course, the Promised Land of Mormonism, but also contiguous Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The residents of these states, to which Montana and Washington should probably be added, know their hometown Mormons well enough not to regard them as a forbidden flavour of Christian. They may even quietly admire them for their disciplined family life and for, famously, the way that they “care for their own.”

Jon Huntsman, Jr., a former governor of Utah, the second Mormon in the race, and the only centrist, has rather cleverly sought to turn the tables on Texas Governor Rick Perry, the Christian Right’s favourite son, by declaring him “unelectable” and subtly suggesting that if there is a religious extremist in the race, it is Perry rather than either of the two Mormons. Huntsman is more consistent in his policy positions and more dynamic and outspoken in person than Romney. Could he be the nominee?

The answer seems to be no, but less on religious grounds, in his case, than on extra-religious grounds — namely, his acceptance of an Obama appointment as US ambassador to China. Effectively, any friend of Obama’s is an enemy of the Tea Party. The elegant and urbane Huntsman might well be formidable in the general election, but for the party faithful, he is unbearably moderate.

And yet if not to Huntsman himself, perhaps the nod will go to someone more like him than like either Perry or Representative Michele Bachmann, the winner of the Iowa Caucus. Significantly, many of the largest Republican donors see none of the currently leading candidates as strong enough to defeat even a weakened Barack Obama. Moreover, a deep, intra-party division has emerged over a religion-related issue that could become, to the consternation of some, the signature issue for Bachmann.

In late July, the New Republic’s Eli Lake noted that “The notion that there is currently a stealth jihad seeking to infiltrate the United States has found multiple champions among the GOP candidates,” with Bachmann reckoned the most vigorous such champion. Yet if some welcome the prospect of a covertly or overtly Muslim-bashing campaign, others, including anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, actively resist it. They worry about how the electorate might react if Bachmann, whose intellectual biography shows deep influence from a nativist, Christianist political movement called Dominionism, were to wed that school of thought to a campaign to defend America against the spectre of Muslim subversion.

As all the world knows by now, a good many backyard Republicans believe that President Barack Hussein Obama is a foreign-born, crypto-Muslim illegal immigrant. The Muslim issue thus could be a potent one as the Republicans choose their standard-bearer. But in the general election, boardroom Republicans are right to be concerned that shari’a, shari’a, shari’a promises to be a far weaker general-election wedge issue than jobs, jobs, jobs. Moreover, a powerful current of public opinion in the United States sees mutual religious tolerance as the American way. Thus, on September 10, 2011, some 500 houses of worship — “mosques, temples, churches and other assemblies,” according to a pastoral letter from the Episcopal bishop of Los Angeles — will gather at Los Angeles City Hall for “the One Light Vigil.” Each participating congregation will bring back from that rally a lantern symbolizing “interfaith experience as a wheel in which God is found at the central hub, linking us together as fellow spokes.” American prejudice against Muslims is real, and there is doubtless some political mileage in playing to it, but there are countervailing tendencies as well. It almost certainly matters less that Michele Bachmann scares liberals than that she scares deep-pockets conservatives as well.

The Book of Mormon's central figures, missionaries to Uganda, draw laughs for their invincible niceness and their bottomless blandness. In the theatre of presidential politics, Mitt Romney, a former missionary himself (to France, a setting with decided comic potential), is by far the blandest of the candidates. But Romney can plausibly cite his business success as a credential for the reassuring claim that he can put Americans back to work, and blandness is rarely held against a businessman. Mitt Romney is, in short, the quintessential boardroom conservative. The other boys in the boardroom would doubtlessly like best a better Romney, but it may already be too late. They may well end up going to war with the Romney they’ve got rather than the Romney they want.

31 August 2011