America has not yet escaped all of its prejudices against Mormonism expressed so openly in the 19th century. Most of that prejudice grew out of the controversy over polygamy.
When George Romney, the three times Republican Governor of Michigan, ran for the Republican nomination for President in 1968, he had to seek to blunt prejudice about his religion. It came primarily in the form of questions about the official Mormon policy about black people. He distanced himself from the offending words in the Book of Mormon, but he ultimately lost the nomination to Richard Nixon. His Mormon religion seemed to play little role in that defeat. His comment about having been “brainwashed” over the issue of Viet Nam was thought to be far more the issue than his religion. Perhaps the money and organization possessed by Richard Nixon was the real reason for his defeat.
People had to weigh George Romney’s successful career in the automobile industry as president of American Motors and the designer of the “Rambler,” and his competent three terms as governor of Michigan against their image, however ill-informed, of what it meant to be a Mormon. When he failed in his White House election bid he was invited into the cabinet of the newly elected President Nixon and served for eight years as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The issue of Mormonism in public life faded until George Romney’s son Mitt emerged in Massachusetts politics as an opponent of Ted Kennedy for the Massachusetts seat in the Senate in 1994. He was unsuccessful and once again the issue faded.
In 2002, however, Mitt Romney was elected as the Republican Governor of Massachusetts and served one four-year term. He had prior to this had a successful career in business as the CEO of Bain and Company and the founder of the Bain Fund, a private equity investment firm. Among the companies the Bain Fund brought public were Staples and Domino Pizza. He was widely credited with saving the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from bankruptcy in 2002.
He was an active Mormon, having served as a Latter-day Saint missionary in France for thirty months. He graduated summa cum laude from Mormon university Brigham Young in 1971 and received a joint degree in law (JD) and business (MBS) from Harvard in 1975, where he was named the Baker Scholar. In 2007 he announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for the Presidency.
Mitt Romney’s mainstream life as a successful businessman and politician once more served to neutralize the latent prejudice toward Mormonism. It is still, however, an issue primarily in the religious base of the Republican Party. It does not yet appear to be a vetoing issue. If Mitt Romney wins the Republican Nomination and/or the presidency, it will be a clear indication that Mormonism has become mainstream.
There are, of course, other religious groups for whom prejudice is still operative in American life. There is still residual prejudice toward Roman Catholics that helped to defeat Al Smith’s bid for the presidency in 1928 and which Jack Kennedy had to discuss in 1960. It appeared again in 2004 when certain Catholic bishops refused to give communion to John Kerry, a Catholic politician, who favored a woman’s right to choose. This attempt on the part of members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to force compliance to religious dogma from Catholics in public life had the effect of heightening anti-Catholic feeling in America. When the Supreme Court recently voted 5-4 to ban the procedure known as partial birth abortion, it did not escape notice that all five of the justices who constituted the majority were Roman Catholics, while the minority was made up of two Jewish justices and two Protestant justices. This also informed the anti-Catholic sentiment that still lies beneath the surface of America.
Finally, there is today in this country an active opposition to the political power of the “Religious Right.” This comes about by the attempt of that segment of American political life to discriminate against homosexual people, to ban abortion, to interfere in reproductive practices like birth control and specifically by making the morning-after pill difficult to obtain even after it became legal, and to dictate to families the procedures that they must follow in end of life decisions, as in the Terri Schiavo case.
I think religious prejudice will always find expression against religious traditions that seem to have different values from those defined as mainstream and against even those mainstream religious traditions that seek to impose any religious agenda on the entire citizenry of this nation.
The suspicion about minority traditions like Mormonism will die, however, if a person who professes mainstream values makes no attempt to turn this secular nation into being a religious nation. To me Mitt Romney is a creditable and competent candidate for the Presidency and no one will, I believe, demonstrate that his commitment to the Mormon tradition in which he was raised and to which he is committed in any way disqualifies him from serving this nation effectively in the office of the President. It will be publicly lived out values of his life that will finally put an end to the residual cultural fears that still attend the concept of Mormon Religion.
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