The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) is the fastest growing world religion. From a reviled and feared sect for much of its history, the LDS have become a politically, economically and globally powerful church. The partial accommodation Mormons have made to American culture, especially in the official repudiation of “plural marriage” (polygamy), as well as their growing economic and political power makes it inevitable that their cultural and religious location would change.
While the Mormons have certainly moved more toward the American mainstream, it is important to note that the “mainstream of American religious life” itself has changed in the last twenty-five years. Americans self-report as more religious and as more religiously conservative than in the previous quarter century. There are many factors in this shift, but one factor that has heightened American religious conservatism is that of changing attitudes toward human sexuality and the role of women.
The LDS church centers its theology on a normative, heterosexual, procreative family. “Plural marriage” is still practiced by the more “fundamentalist” segment of the Mormon church not only as a way to remain culturally separate from the mainstream of American culture, but also as a kind of hyper-family where the large number of adults and children serves to concentrate the energy of the participants almost entirely on the family as a social unit.
For American culture as a whole, the advent of the women’s movement along with the freedom the pill gave women to plan their reproductive lives, was socially disconcerting. For the Mormons it was a direct threat to their core value of family. Gloria Steinem directly credits the Mormons with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment: "If the Mormons had supported the amendment, it would have passed. They were enormously powerful in opposing it because there are certain key state legislatures which they control."
The women’s movement, the pill and then the gathering strength of the gay rights movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s produced an inevitable backlash in both religion and society. Conservative politicians and religious leaders have capitalized on fears of changing roles for women and the gay rights movement and thus both religion and society have become more conservative. It is as yet unclear whether anti-war attitudes will serve to reverse this trend.
So, while it may be the case that the Mormons are becoming more “mainstream”, it is also the case that the “family values” core that Mormons project to the wider culture has met a rising conservative trend half-way. Mormons and the American mainstream met each other. Mormons tend to look like the 1950’s picture of “Ozzie and Harriet” that the “pro-family” lobby wishes to impose on American religion and society as normative. It is therefore unsurprising that this election season has produced a serious Mormon as a Republican candidate.
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