Candidates lead US to face its 'Mormon moment'

AMERICA:Two Republican candidates, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, are part of the LDS elite

THE FIRST TIME a Mormon stood for the presidency of the United States, it ended badly.

Joseph Smith jnr, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – commonly called the LDS or Mormons – received a visit from the angel Moroni in 1823.

Moroni led Smith to hidden gold tablets containing the history of the Israelites – the Book of Mormon. In its quest to establish the “New Zion”, the sect migrated from Vermont to Ohio to Missouri and Illinois, before ending up in Utah. Along the way, Mormons encountered persecution and even sparked a war in Missouri.

In 1843 Smith declared he was a third-party candidate for the US presidency. The local newspaper in Illinois accused him of polygamy and of attempting to anoint himself king of a theocracy. Smith was arrested, then shot dead, with his brother Hyrum, by an angry mob that broke into the jail where they were imprisoned.

Despite the rise of Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives and a convert to Catholicism, the former governor of Massachusetts and devout Mormon Mitt Romney is still favoured by establishment Republicans to win the party’s nomination next year. Romney’s father, George, a former governor of Michigan, sought the presidency before him.

This is Romney’s second try for the Republican nomination. He is one of two LDS candidates, the other being Jon Huntsman, a former governor of Utah, where more than half the population are still Mormons. As a result, 2011-2012 is being called America’s “Mormon moment”. To protect its tax-exempt status, the church insists that an “I am a Mormon” advertising campaign in swing states has nothing to do with Romney’s candidacy.

The sociologist of religion Rodney Stark has called the LDS “the first new world faith since Islam”. The church claims six million followers in the US, and eight million more throughout the world, most of them converted by missionaries. In his youth Romney was ill-received as a missionary insecular France, which left him with an abiding disdain for all things French.

Mormonism is a subterranean issue in the Republican race, rearing its head only when some politically incorrect preacher or campaign worker evokes it. This week Gingrich fired his newly hired political director in Iowa for calling Mormonism a “cult”. Polls show Americans are less hostile to Mormons than four years ago, but Romney’s faith remains a major obstacle to his election.

A survey by the Southern Baptist Convention last year found that three in four Protestant pastors believe Mormons are not Christian. In a poll two months ago, a minority of Americans – 47 per cent – said they “felt comfortable” with Romney’s religion. If, as expected, he loses the January 3rd Iowa caucus to Gingrich, religion will be the reason.

Romney and Huntsman belong to the LDS’s monied elite. Huntsman is the only almost- secular Republican candidate. Publicly, Romney focuses on the economy and criticising President Obama, but there is no doubting his Mormon credentials. His great-great-grandfather Miles joined Joseph Smith in 1837 and made the trek to Utah.

As a bishop, then a regional “stake president” for the church from 1981 until 1994, Romney dispensed instructions on abortion, alcoholism, financial and marital difficulties. With a personal fortune estimated at up to $250 million, Romney contributed $30 million to the building of a Mormon temple in his home town.

When a Protestant pastor and supporter of Texas governor Rick Perry denounced Mormonism as a “cult” in October, Romney said he had “heard worse” about his faith. A combination of secrecy and unorthodox tenets have long fuelled suspicion of the LDS.

The British polemicist and militant atheist Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday, provoked one of his last controversies by writing this autumn about the “weird and sinister belief system of the LDS”.

Polygamy is part of that system. Brigham Young, who led the church after Smith’s murder, had 57 children by 16 of more than 50 wives. When the LDS formally ended polygamy in 1890, under pressure from Washington, many of its followers fled to Mexico, where Romney’s father was born. Fundamentalist Mormons still practise polygamy, not always in secret.

The temple garments or “magic underwear” worn under street clothes by devout Mormons are another subject of curiosity. Men and women wear knee-length pants; men a scoop-neck T-shirt, women a top with cap sleeves. The purpose, says Joanna Brooks, the author of the Ask Mormon Girl blog, is to remind the wearer of promises made in the temple of the covenant of chastity and devotion to the church.

Members of the LDS call themselves “saints”. They “baptise” deceased non-Mormons to save their souls, and are polytheists, believing in a “heavenly mother” and the promise that patriarchs of big families will be rewarded with the status of gods and personal planets all their own.