ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT€¦ · Mormonism. It brings to a head the general question of how . Mormonism. bears on politics and democratic government. Romney is not the only eminent Mormon

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“Mormonism & Democratic Politics: Are They Compatible?”

Dr. Richard Bushman Columbia University

May 2007

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: We are delighted that Professor Bushman can be with us. His biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling, is just out in paperback. Professor Bushman, thank you so much for coming. DR. RICHARD BUSHMAN: Thank you, Michael. It’s wonderful to meet in person all of these bylines. I will tell you that my strongest impression is how young the group is on the whole, except for a few grizzled old sages like Kenneth Woodward down at the other end of the table. KEN WOODWARD, Newsweek: I think the starting point is suitable: Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. It brings to a head the general question of how Mormonism bears on politics and democratic government. Romney is not the only eminent Mormon politician. I think I’ll give you a historical perspective on Mormonism’s relationship to politics going way back. I’ll also try to speculate a little bit about its possible bearings on Mitt Romney. I’m not altogether persuaded that Mormonism has a huge influence on his concrete political thinking. It probably has an influence on his attitudes toward participation in government in some fundamental way, but that is a question that perhaps we can discuss later.

I think it would be useful for you to see how Mormonism has related to politics over its century and three-quarters of existence, which will permit us to speculate about how this might all bear on Romney. Some of it is directly relevant.

It is a little bit difficult to talk about Mormonism and its relationship to Romney because it’s so unclear what Mormonism is. We have divided views of Mormons. On the one hand, Mormonism and Mormons are suspect, they are forbidding, and under the nice exterior

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400077533

http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Mormonism & Democratic Politics: Are They Compatible?”

Dr. Richard Bushman May 2007

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there is something menacing. On the other hand, Mormonism is the archetypical American religion. Mormons are ideal model citizens, and they are very nice people. I often hear that.

That split image applies also to Mormonism’s history, which also divides right down the middle. We think of the 19th century as a time when Mormonism was radical in about every dimension you can imagine, while in the 20th and 21st centuries Mormons are considered conservative in about every dimension you can imagine. The interesting thing is that this switch from radicalism to conservatism occurred in such a short period of time, from about 1890, when polygamy ended, to about 1910, after the Reed Smoot hearings. So the question is, which is the true Mormonism? Which is the one that is most likely to affect Mitt Romney? Let me talk first about 19th century radical Mormonism and point out some aspects of it that don’t always get emphasized in histories of Mormonism but were absolutely critical to its original impetus.

The radicalism, of course, is basically theological. You have to say, at the very least, that Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founding prophet, was daring and bold; perhaps you could say he was extravagant and rash. He seemed to be willing to challenge virtually everything in American culture. Beginning with the theological: he claimed to write new Scripture. His Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants broke the monopoly of the Bible on the word of God. He even claimed he could revise the Bible, the most sacrosanct text in the Western world, through his own inspiration. He added new passages and corrected the language where he chose, which was, by any measure, a heaven-daring act for a Christian to undertake in the 19th century. In the social sphere, he breached Victorian moral conventions with the introduction of plural marriage, which nearly cost him his wife and nearly brought the church down. A lot of church members were horrified. In all of those ways, he was clearly radical.

But let me get a little closer to politics by talking about his daring in the re-envisioning of society. What is not recognized about Joseph Smith is that there is a very deep strain of what I am calling “civic idealism” in him, by which I mean the construction of a new kind of urban society that would embody Christian principles more thoroughly.

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The Mormon Church was organized in April of 1830. Within six months, Joseph Smith added to the church organization a civic organization, which he called the City of Zion. He attached it to the Book of Revelation’s reference to the New Jerusalem. In 1831, a site for the city was chosen in Independence, Mo. It was to be a place where the saints were to gather. It was a “city at the end of time” in that it was to function primarily as a place of refuge in the calamities that were certain to accompany the return of Christ in the last day. He planned that city, laid out a plat for it and instructed his people to gather there in due time. From that point on, the creation of a City of Zion was at the very heart of Joseph Smith’s work. In fact, he called it “The Work.” His commitment to this city over against congregational worship is dramatized by the fact that never in his life did Joseph Smith build a chapel. Wherever he built a city, he built temples — and never a chapel.

In Nauvoo, Ill., the 5,000 to 10,000 people in town met outside in groves of trees or, in cold weather, in houses or other buildings. They were very casual about Sunday worship. Someone was selected as the moderator and he called people out of the congregation on the spot to preach. There was no pastor for many of these congregations. The organization at this level was thought of as temporary. The little branches of the church were really holding pens in preparation for the time when Mormons would all move to one of the gathering cities. The city was meant to be not just a gathering place but an ideal society. It was to be a unified, egalitarian, righteous society. Everyone was to live there. To deal with the poor, everyone who came to the city was to consecrate everything — all of their property — to the bishop of the church, who in return would deed back to them properties sufficient for their needs. It was an equalization program.

In fact, the word “equal” has a fairly strong place in Joseph Smith’s revelations. At another point, he made the drastic statement that inequality was a sign that the whole world lay in sin. These Cities of Zion were to create unified, egalitarian societies and eventually fill up the world.

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Joseph Smith’s thought evolved as he went through life. Initially, the city was just a place for Mormons. But by the time he got to Nauvoo, Joseph Smith saw the city as more open. One of the first ordinances passed by the Nauvoo council was a toleration act specifying that all faiths were welcome in the city and listing a number of them: Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Latter-day Saints, Catholics, Jews and “Mohammedans,” as Muslims were called.

Nauvoo, then, was to be a diverse city, indicating that Joseph Smith’s civic idealism went beyond his own people to envision a much more cosmopolitan society. Nauvoo didn’t develop that way; it came to an end too soon, but that is what he projected.

Smith also got more involved in politics. Initially, he was disdainful of politics the way all millenarians are, taking the attitude that the nations of the earth are going to crumble and the kingdom of the Christ, as a Messiah, would arise. Smith was forced into politics by the abuse that the Mormons received. As soon as they were driven out of their first city site in Independence, Mo., he turned to the government for redress. He never obtained it. No level of government, from local justices of the peace to governors to the president of the United States — to whom he constantly appealed — ever came to the defense of the Saints. But Joseph Smith became a great devotee of constitutional rights because they seemed like his only hope. He said some very extravagant things about the Constitution being God-given because of those rights and became quite conversant in constitutional matters.

Gradually, then, Joseph Smith backed into American politics. In the fall of 1843, as the 1844 campaign began to take shape, the authorities of the church wrote to all of the known political candidates asking them about their views of the Mormons, and none returned a satisfactory answer from the Mormon point of view. The Mormons wanted a pledge that these candidates would protect them if they were attacked again, and they couldn’t get it.

Joseph Smith was nominated as a protest candidate in February of 1844. Like other protest candidates, he began to warm to his work and got quite excited about it. He may have dreamed for a moment that through some strange concatenation of events, he would get elected. Every candidate has to dream such things.



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His involvement in politics was manifested in a political platform of which he was very proud. He would bring it out whenever he had visitors and read from it. It is an interesting document because it represents a man whose world had been his own people, whose own project had been to create a kingdom of God, and who now had to turn his mind to politics.

Joseph Smith’s political thought had a radical tone, which seemed to carry over from his religious radicalism. It extended to prison reform and better treatment of seamen, big issues in the 1840s and 1850s. Smith seemed to identify with all of the underdogs in society. I think that was why he thought he might get elected – because the little people, the beat-up people, would rise and select him.

This part of his platform accords perfectly with what modern people like us would have liked a candidate in 1844 to say. But Smith went beyond our sense of political propriety in other parts of his platform: he blended his role as candidate with his role as prophet. He was already mayor of Nauvoo and lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion when he ran for the presidency. He seemingly had no sense that church and state should be separated. He gave no hint that he was going to give up his religious offices if he were to become president of the United States.

In the closing peroration of his platform, Joseph Smith indirectly, but I think clearly, offered himself to be the priest of the people, as well as the president. He would be the intercessor as priest as well as prophet. Of course, that is point at which moderns part company with Joseph Smith. We don’t want a prophet with his authoritative words from God governing the nation. That seems to lead to the exclusion of unbelievers and the repression of naysayers. All the alarm bells go off when we see these roles merging.

But I would appeal to you, before you turn away completely from that idea, to pay heed to the underlying theme of that platform and that proposal. I think it can be argued that Joseph Smith actually felt he was fulfilling one of America’s dreams. We think of the American dream as the promise of ascent for the wretched refuse of the teeming



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shores – the promise that in America, everyone has a chance to prosper and to achieve respectability. That is a dream for the individual. But there also is a corporate dream, whether we like it or not, and that is of a righteous America, a people who are blessed of God — an America not too far from Joseph Smith’s Zion, where the people are of one heart and one mind and dwell in righteousness and there are no poor among them. There is an American dream of a goodly society. Joseph Smith’s word for his own political philosophy was “theo-democracy”: God and the people. This corporate American dream includes a virtuous political leadership with the unselfish purpose of seeking, without regard for personal good, the public good — not just to manage the varying interests of society but to bless people.

All of that is in our background and is part, I think, of America’s image of itself. I think it is manifest even in 21st century cynicism about politics. For what is the starting point of cynicism but hope for the good politician who serves the public, a hope that is forever being thwarted, leading to disillusionment?

What I’m suggesting is that the image of goodness is in our collective imagination; it’s present in our national culture. In fact, our finest political rhetoric has appealed to this grand corporate dream of America as a goodly nation. It was Kennedy’s gift to speak in that voice; to a lesser extent it was Reagan’s. And in my opinion, Joseph Smith simply expressed in his own way that underlying aspiration when he offered himself as a prophet president. The French dream of grandeur, we’re always saying. Americans dream of righteousness and being a good nation.

How, then, does all that apply to Mitt Romney’s candidacy? The question in my mind is, can he tap into this vein of civic idealism in American culture? His 19th-century Mormon heritage gives him plenty to work with. And I can assure you, from what I know of him, it’s his natural bent to seek to be a good president in the moral sense. But the question is, is his Mormonism a help or a hindrance?

One of the problems of speaking to this kind of latent idealism is finding a language that will work. Leaders have traditionally invoked the Bible, but in a multi-religious nation, how much longer is that rhetoric going to be usable, especially when the political left is so



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worried about the Christian right and concerned that any reference to righteousness shades over into repressive self-righteousness?

Romney, like every politician, faces the problem of finding a language, but he has the double handicap of being a Mormon. Every word hinting at religious idealism will sound Mormon, even to his natural allies among conservative Christians. How can they trust words that sound like they may have emanated from Salt Lake City?

I, for one, will be listening for how Romney calls Americans to their higher destiny. I think Americans yearn for that call, especially now after all the scandals of the last few years and the defamation of our character around the world. But the question is, can Romney find words that will sound American rather than Mormon?

Let me now turn to the other issue I spoke of earlier: the shift from radicalism to conservatism in Mormon history and the implications of that change for Romney in 21st-century politics.

Brigham Young did not claim to be a prophet like Joseph Smith. He claimed to be inspired and have God’s will revealed to him in the administration of the church; he didn’t claim to look into heaven as Joseph Smith had. He did, however, perpetuate Joseph Smith’s notion of Zion. Under Brigham Young, Zion became a collection of small village-cities up and down the Great Basin, all of them following the same plat that Joseph Smith had laid out for the City of Zion. Zion was transformed from a city into hundreds of villages spread across the Western landscape. Instead of the equalization of property, Brigham Young instituted a series of varied cooperatives. Some of them were very radical: common cooking and common eating in a single dining hall. Others were simply cooperatives where farmers would pool their resources to perform the functions of the middleman in marketing farm products. The exact form differed from Joseph Smith’s time, but the same zeal remained to create a society dedicated to God.

Brigham Young was appointed as the first governor of Utah, and he would have remained in that position if he hadn’t been ousted by the federal government. The church set up

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schools, it managed the courts, it regulated the irrigation system — no small thing — and it created a political party, the People’s Party, distinct from Republicans and Democrats.

All told, the charges that Utah was a theocracy were well founded. It was a theocracy, a merger of church and society under God. Two complaints about Utah were directed against Mormons in the 19th century. One was polygamy, of course, but the other was theocratic rule by Brigham Young, his successors and the presidency of the church.

This was the radical Mormonism of the 19th century, descended from Joseph Smith and continued by Brigham Young. It included a far-reaching social critique. Young criticized capitalism as often as he did philandering. Mormons were sympathetic to European revolutionaries in 1848. They saw themselves as a society set against American society with all of its inequities and iniquities.

It was a society that, as we know, was doomed to defeat. For 40 years, Mormons resisted attempts of the federal government to end polygamy and to destroy theocracy, but finally they gave in. The government began imprisoning Mormon men who had more than one wife and denying Mormons their civil rights. They couldn’t serve on juries, polygamists could not vote in elections, the government began to escheat all Mormon property — including their precious temples — and the church was actually unincorporated. By the late 1880s, it looked like the church, as a church, would be obliterated.

That intense pressure from the federal government was backed up by every branch of government, including the Supreme Court, which was, in Joseph Smith’s spirit, the Mormons’ last best hope. They believed to the end that the Constitution was on their side and that they were simply claiming religious freedom, but the Supreme Court knocked down their claims one after another. Eventually they saw it was hopeless. In 1890, the president of the church announced that they would no longer practice plural marriages.

It wasn’t just polygamy that Mormons gave up; they dismantled the whole theocratic structure. The People’s Party was dissolved and Mormons were instructed to join one or another of the national political parties. They were sometimes assigned: “You become a Democrat; you become a Republican.” There are Democrats in Utah to this day who are Democrats only because their great-grandfathers were told they should be.



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They also began to give up all of the church businesses. Not immediately, but steadily over the course of the 20th century, they were not only turned into capitalist enterprises, but the church divested itself of ownership. The church elementary school system was given up. The hospitals have now all been turned into private corporations. All told, the Mormon theocracy was leveled.

Mormonism gave up on its radicalism because the United States government beat it out of them. They were forced to the point of extinction and then realized it all had to be abandoned to preserve their existence as Mormons. As a result, everything became secular. Mormons, in reaction to this treatment, turned to laissez faire liberalism, having no confidence in the government. Their history gave them no reason to trust the United States government as an agency of the people.

The old idealism revived during the Depression when the Mormon welfare system was organized to care for the Mormon poor. It was an elaborate system of productive organizations to grow and can fruit, grow sugar beets, make shoe polish and glue, the whole works. But that was all done within the church; it was sectarian reform and was not advanced through the government. In fact, it was considered a sign of shame to go on the government dole. Mormons were told to rely on the church and their own families first.

How does all of this bear on Romney? I think the obvious question is, how far will he trust government when his Mormon heritage teaches him to be distrustful of government? His instincts will be skeptical. Joining that problem to the problem of finding a language of idealism raises the question, will he find a way to use the government for any kind of idealistic purposes, or will he remain suspicious through to the end?

His organization of healthcare in Massachusetts — though I gather it’s falling on hard times now, being more expensive than anticipated — was a hopeful sign, not just because Romney tried to solve a big problem, but because he approached it as a pastoral problem. “How do you care for the children of the commonwealth?” And he did it in a Mormon way. The idea of talking personally to all of the politicians, trying to get some kind of a consensus, is very much the way Mormon congregations work. There is never a vote or a



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power struggle. The people strive for mutual consent. It struck me as promising for Romney to work that way in the state.

So I leave that as a question, along with the question of how he will rouse people to the cause of the nation: how will he use the nation’s government to solve the nation’s problem?

Let me turn, then, to a third side of the influence of church history on Mitt Romney. One aspect of this abandonment of theocracy was a pullback from government in general. Mormons realized that theocracy only led to pain. As a church they became very sensitive about any kind of theocratic involvement in government.

On these terms, Mormonism entered the political scene: we will not interfere in politics or in the action of any politicians who are members of the church. And that policy hasn’t changed over the century.

There is, on the church website, this statement: “Elected officials who are Latter-day Saints make their own decisions and may not necessarily be in agreement with one another or even with a publicly stated church position. While the church may communicate its views to them, as it may to any other elected official, it recognizes that these officials still must make their own choices based on their best judgment and with consideration of the constituencies whom they are elected to represent.” On the whole it is fair to say that by comparison to the 19th century, the church has withdrawn from politics. It does get entangled in Utah politics; it’s such a large part of the state’s economy and population that engagement is inevitable. The church also occasionally takes stands on political measures that it considers to be moral issues, such as prohibition, but it doesn’t direct politicians how to vote. There is nothing like the Catholic bishops’ statements. There is no bishop who would threaten to excommunicate a Mormon because he took a position contrary to church positions on abortion or gay marriage or anything of that sort — nothing like the Pope’s recent statements in Latin America.

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So I believe that we should truly be able to lay aside fears that Romney will receive directions from Salt Lake City. There is nothing in the record of the past century that would lead one to think otherwise. The question is, why does this fear keep coming up with fairly well-informed people — the same question over and over again? “Is Romney going to be directed by the church president?”

I think it is because of the logic of revelation. It’s not necessarily a logic that believers themselves follow, but a logic that unbelievers think is required of believing Mormons. The necessary consequence, unbelievers think, of believing that your prophet is a prophet speaking for God is unquestioning submission.

So the question is, why doesn’t that work? Why are there church members who don’t follow their prophet when it comes to political opinions, gay marriage certainly being one of them, but abortion being another, and many other things? The same thing is true for the Catholic Church. There are lots of good Catholics who don’t necessarily do everything that the Pope says. I hope I am safe in saying that.

How can an institution be so self-contradictory? There is a clue given in a statement recently posted on the church’s newsroom Web page defining the bounds of church doctrine. It says, “Individual members are encouraged to independently strive to receive their own spiritual confirmation of the truthfulness of church doctrine.” The fact is that in Mormondom, the revelation doesn’t come solely to the president of the church, but rather infuses the whole church. Everyone is to receive revelation for their own positions, whether as a father or a bishop or a Sunday school teacher, or whatever it is. And that extends from church doctrine to political statements.

So, Mormons believe that all of those strong injunctions to follow the prophet are one end of a paradox. The other end, they say, is that they have to decide for themselves whether they believe what they prophet says. So there is legitimacy within the church for taking an independent position, contrary to what the president of the church may say.

I would say that rather than worrying about dictation from Salt Lake City, we should be more concerned about whether or not Mitt Romney is able to use the agency of the

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government for the idealistic ends that are truly his legacy as a Latter-day Saint. I’ll stop at that point.

E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: I think any tradition is at a disadvantage if its scripture was written 150 years ago instead of 1,000, 2,000 or 6,000 years ago. It’s harder to explain away inconvenient things. I would be curious if you could talk a little bit about what aspects of Mormon Scripture might be dredged up against Romney. How do the passages that might get thrown at Romney compare with passages in the Old and New Testaments that might actually be problematic to modern people? And then three other quick things related to that —the theoretical roots of polygamy; the whole problem with black people that sort of went away, it seems, in Mormon theology; and lastly, any thoughts on George Romney versus Mitt Romney?

DR. BUSHMAN: Well, when you get those switches back and forth, you know that there is a contradiction or a polarity inside the culture. Someone has said that Mormon doctrine should best be described as a set of dilemmas — as contradictory goods posed against one another. I don’t think there are things — Ken can probably think of some for me — in Mormon Scriptures that are going to be scandalous to the moral order of the nation, other than polygamy, of course. Things are more likely to be scandalous to the theological order of the larger Christian community. For example: the ideas of God having a body of flesh and bone, existing in time and space rather than outside, and having once been a man like ourselves. That sort of business just drives other Christians up the wall. But I can’t think of anything outside of the polygamy Scriptures that is going to disturb Americans in general.

Polygamy. How many people want me to talk about polygamy? I know you all are curious. Polygamy is an interesting thing because it serves as a Rorschach test. People project onto Joseph Smith and the polygamists their own sense about human nature. “It’s just what you would expect men to do;” or “Yeah, that is what I would like”— that sort of thing. Neither of those, I think, is accurate in Joseph Smith’s case.



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It’s a perplexing problem for Mormons for a variety of reasons. One important reason is that it is so contrary to Mormon contemporary ideas of family — companionate, eternal friends going on with their children forever, versus a community wives constituting a family. So that is an ideological problem for Mormons.

It’s also perplexing because Joseph Smith himself gave so few rationales for it. The best rationale is one revelation written down in 1843. That is virtually all he said on the subject, and plural marriages are depicted simply as part of the restoration of the ancient order of things. Smith brings priesthood out of the Bible. He brings temples out of the Bible. He brings the temple rituals out of the rituals for sanctifying priests in the book of Exodus, and he brings polygamy out of the Bible. That is all he said, that the injunction for polygamy is to go and do the works of Abraham. Beyond that, it’s hard to understand.

In actual fact, polygamy seemed to have served a function in society. We now have a fine-grained study of polygamy in one community where we know every family in the community and all of the details about them. And what polygamy seems to have been was a way in which young women without male protection — no father, no older brother, no near relative to care for them — were absorbed into Mormon society.

Polygamy went up when the immigration rates went up. And the young women who came into these families in this little town were young women in that position. Not all of them – but that was the single most common type of plural wife. More than 50 percent of them fit this description. So it was a way of caring for people and may have contributed to the resilience of the society. But Mormons themselves are puzzled about the meaning of polygamy, beyond what Joseph Smith said about it.

JOHN WILSON, Books & Culture: Could you tease out [critics’] understanding of rationality such that someone like Romney would simply not have the capacity to fulfill this office? And second, who would be some intellectual allies that Mormons and others who might be the butt of the same charge might find outside their own faith tradition? In other words, where are their intellectual allies for responding to this conception of rationality?



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DR. BUSHMAN: Well, their natural allies, which are all conservative Christians, refuse to accept them as allies, and that makes it very difficult. The question is, what is different about believing that an angel appeared to a person and told him about ancient records on plates of gold, and believing that a man who died and was buried rose again after three days and came back to life? Is there something sort of qualitatively different, or is it simply familiarity that makes a difference? Is it less rational to believe in an angel than to believe in a risen person? Mormons say, look, all founding religions have miracles; that’s what gives the religion its impetus, that God intervenes in some incredible way. It’s the belief that God is really involved in human life. Islam and Judaism also have these founding miracles. The question is, is there something inherently more irrational about Mormon miracles than other miracles, or is it just a matter of familiarity?

If it’s just that you say Romney departs so far from the rational standards of our time, he must be crazy — within Mormonism, it’s not a departure. We have lived with these stories all of our lives. Okay, we know angels are rare, but why not have angels? So it isn’t like Romney has to strain himself to believe or that in his believing mode something snaps and he goes crazy; these beliefs are just part of his culture.

ANNE KORNBLUT, The Washington Post: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what the political atmosphere was like around the 1890s and 1904, and if you could talk about who the anti-Mormon forces were then. Who was driving the case? I’m also wondering if you could elaborate a little bit about the conservative Christians who should be natural allies but aren’t, and what your perception is of why they are so reluctant to be. DR. BUSHMAN: In the 1890s, the Mormons themselves were simply struggling for survival and holding onto any raft that came by. A lot of them became Republicans because the Republicans were in power and they needed their support. In the nation as a whole, there was the whole Protestant establishment. Historians are now talking about the 19th century as the era of the Protestant establishment. It wasn’t the formal payment of ministers as in most established churches, but it was the sense



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that Protestant values governed the nation; they governed the politics; they governed the moral sense of the nation. So you had women’s groups, you had religious groups, you had pastors, and they enlisted politicians who doubtless were themselves outraged. So it wasn’t a party division; it was an up-swelling movement that assaulted the Senate during these hearings. They continued to just pummel them with requests.

On the question about natural allies, Mormonism has always been an embarrassment to Christianity. It goes back to the 1830s when, on their own left, Christians had to face the Deists, who said the Christian miracles were ridiculous. To defend themselves, Christians had to find some kind of rational support. While they were fighting that battle, the Mormons on the right came up with these ridiculous stories of angels and gold plates and claimed the same right to believe in miracles, mobilizing the same kind of evidence that Christians used for the resurrection. This required Christians to repel Mormons to prevent the Deists from grouping them with the lunatic fringe. Christian groups have been as forceful as any in trying to put down the Mormons, I think, partly to protect their position as respectable philosophically. I once in a meeting asked a group of evangelical Christians— why don’t we join forces in making a case that there are grounds for believing in the existence of God simply because the spiritual life confirms it? People believe there is a God because it’s manifest to them spiritually. They really didn’t want any of that. They wanted to maintain their philosophical, rational claims, defending their miracles on sort of a quasi-scientific basis. They did not want to get in bed with the Mormons and their strictly subjective view of things. So there is kind of a gap intellectually. Mormonism has never embraced philosophy; it is not particularly interested in philosophy. MR. WOODWARD: I think of 19th-century work society — busy, work, pull yourself up by your bootstraps — and, as you know from my comments in the Times, that has always been my experience with Mormons. So where does the doctrine of grace come in, the doctrine that maybe there is something that happens that is God’s initiative and I have nothing to do with it? I don’t see a lot of room for an effective doctrine of grace.

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What is the question that Mormonism answers? I mean, you can do that with Buddhism; it’s suffering, and it’s sin for Christianity.

DR. BUSHMAN: Let me begin with grace. I think partly as a form of denominational differentiation, Mormons resisted high Calvinist theology in the 19th century. They were, like so many other groups, trying to differentiate themselves from the evangelical culture of the revivals, which basically came out of a Calvinist view of depravity. Mormons don’t like the idea of depravity. So that led to an emphasis on works. You are capable of choosing the good, and God will recognize and reward choosing the good. In the late 20th century, that is reversed. In dialogues with evangelical Christians, Mormons are recovering their own grace theology, which is plentifully present in the Book of Mormon. And they are recovering it not just at the high level of discussion between BYU faculty and Baylorfaculty, but right down in the congregation, seemingly growing out of the needs of the people themselves. There is this sense that, look, we can’t do it ourselves; we have to have the grace of God. There is no other hope for forgiveness or salvation. The doctrine of grace is part of our scriptural culture. I’m sure as time goes on, these elements will be emphasized in varying degrees. Right now, grace is getting more and more powerful among the Mormon teachers.

What questions does Mormonism answer? What Mormons really try to do is to offer a story — a story of human existence that begins in the world before and comes to this world. It answers the classic questions of whence, why, and where. It’s not just something that stands above Mormons, but is imbued into their minds. It’s related to the Christian story of fall and redemption, which is another story of the meaning of life, but it extends that story into the pre-mortal life and into eternities hereafter. Over and over again, I talk to people who joined the church, and I say, why did you become a Mormon? And they say, it answered my questions. I don’t know exactly what they mean by that, but there is a sense that their perplexities about life somehow were put to rest by what the Mormon missionaries told them.

http://www.wsu.edu/%7Edee/REFORM/CALVIN.HTM

http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/nevanrev.htm

http://www.baylor.edu/



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MR. ALLEN: I was interested in your description of the end of polygamy in the setting of having lost Supreme Court cases and the heavy hand of the state on the church. How does that square with the church’s teaching? I think that it was related to a revelation or a prophecy. DR. BUSHMAN: The way the story is told now, and I think there is some pretty good evidence of this, is that though the announcement ending polygamy sounded like a policy switch — “We are no longer going to perform plural marriages” — it really was based on a revelation. I would be almost positive, just because of the parameters of Mormonism, that the president of the church would not do anything so drastic unless he felt like he had the backing of God, whether it was an angel appearing to him or just a very powerful feeling, like Spencer Kimball had when the blacks’ situation was changed. I think Mormons just say to themselves, he must have had a revelation, and there is some evidence that he did. MS. QUINN: Martha Beck is a Mormon woman who wrote two books. She was getting her Ph.D. at Harvard, as was her husband, when she got pregnant and discovered that the baby was going to have Down syndrome, and she decided to have this child anyway. She suddenly was open to an enormous amount of criticism, so she and her husband decided they would go back to Salt Lake City because people there were so accepting of everyone. She went back and had an absolutely horrendous experience. She finally did leave the church. Reading Martha’s books, I was appalled at some of the things that I read about the Mormon Church and the closed-mindedness and demands on people that they adhere to the beliefs or they will get banished. So I think that kind of story is where a lot of these perceptions come from.

How Mormon is Mitt Romney? I mean, is he someone who would adhere to all of the beliefs of the church? In Martha Beck’s case, when she went against church policy, she was banned or banished. Would that happen if Romney disagreed with the church, and particularly their positions on women?

MR. WILSON: I read the same book. I have also read a lot of other memoirs in the last 20 years. In fact, it seems that about half of the memoirs that I have read that have gotten the most attention — that is, the ones that have been translated into multiple languages

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/od/1

http://www.lds.org/churchhistory/presidents/controllers/potcController.jsp?leader=12&topic=facts

http://scriptures.lds.org/en/od/2



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and won prizes and so on — have subsequently turned out to be downright hoaxes. I’m not talking on the level of minor fabrications, but just outright hoaxes. So I think that first of all, to judge any institution, or any subject at all, by a memoir is a very dubious proposition. I also think it’s significant that in that particular memoir, oddly enough, the author did not mention the fact that she and her husband both came out — he as gay and she as lesbian. It seemed odd not to mention that in the book, because whatever you think about that, whether you think the official Mormon teaching on that is right or wrong, it is very clear what the teaching is. One could infer that by not even mentioning that and how all of that played out in the story, that could perhaps be a red flag to judge some of the other things that she says in the book.

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN: I’m interested in a clarification on the teaching authority, if we can say that, versus kind of revelation. If you shy away from the philosophical or rational kind of development, what is the teaching authority then based on? Is it personal revelation to the prophets, or just how does it work in general, say, in regard to an issue like contraception or abortion or so on, and then how is that binding on individual Mormons or on Mormon politicians? I think you said earlier that they don’t have to follow one thing or the other in the Mormon Church. DR. BUSHMAN: Yeah, it’s one of the mysteries of how it works in that Mormons, both individually and as an official church, have always rebuffed attempts to systematize ideas. There is no creed. If a book is published called Mormon Doctrine that tries to outline Mormon doctrine, it’s repudiated by the president of the church. Over and over again, people go back and say, look, follow the Scriptures, read the Scriptures – which in a way begs the question of how you interpret the Scriptures. But every effort to do doctrine systematically is resisted. In that way, it’s kind of an anti-intellectual thing against systematic theology. When it comes to things like contraception, that comes out of the united feelings of the general authorities of the church, which consists of the president of the church and the Twelve Apostles and other general authorities, who probably are what you’re looking for

http://deseretbook.com/store/product?sku=0190509



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if you’re asking about the teaching authority of the church. There are Catholic versions of these hierarchical figures, are there not? The people in Rome who interpret the doctrine for the benefit of the church?

MS. GALLAGHER: Yeah. But then it wouldn’t be open necessarily to interpretation — it would be binding, in other words, in a Catholic vision of things. But you’re saying they do make these recommendations, but they are not binding. DR. BUSHMAN: That is right. There is great respect. The leaders are followed; they are honored. People wouldn’t try to contradict them, but “binding” isn’t a word Mormons use. We talk about the “counsel” of the brethren. This is what we advise you to do, and this has great weight, but it isn’t like it straps down your conscience. MS. GALLAGHER: So what is the teaching, then, on contraception, say. DR. BUSHMAN: You know, it’s changed. When I was first married, there was a lot of talk against contraception, and that all just faded. You never hear a word about it now. And that is also one of the things that moderates the reception of this kind of teaching authority. That is, there are times that something seems relevant, and then it sort of fades, and other things come to the fore. So there is sort of a give-and-take between the needs of the people, who are always talking to their bishops and stake presidents — look, I have a problem; what could be done about this? – and that seeps up to the higher levels of the church. Over time, these teachings change coloration. Rhe same for abortion. MR. WOODWARD: It seems you have a magisterium, but what you lack is that informal body of theologians or thinkers whose job is to reflect on the content of faith, and magisterial teachings. So there is no placenta like that — am I right — for these things to go through? DR. BUSHMAN: That is true. And you must add the fact that there is no professional clergy, which means no clergy trained theologically. No one seeks to situate every teaching of the church against a broader Christian tradition. The process has a kind of informality to it.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15006b.htm



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DR. PHILIP JENKINS, Pennsylvania State University: My impression is that if I were to join the church, I would read the Book of Mormon, but then many of those doctrines would be very surprising. At some point, if Romney is a candidate, someone is going to raise these doctrines as ideas, and if there is not some kind of answer or explanation or description, it’s going to come as a shock. Would you care to respond to it? DR. BUSHMAN: Often the evangelical critics of Mormonism will make it look like it’s simple, but boy, wait till you get inside of it and you’ll find all sorts of terrifying beliefs. I think the missionary system of the church is not deceptive in the sense that it does present basically what Mormons work with, live by day by day, which is belief in revelation, belief in these new Scriptures, belief that you shouldn’t smoke, drink, and so forth, should pay tithing — all of those basic things are made clear. But once you get into the church, there is a vast amount of lore about how the priesthood works, how the ecclesiastics work, things about baptism for the dead and genealogical work that don’t go into the fundamental teachings. Not that the missionaries would conceal them consciously, but they just don’t figure in the everyday conversation of Mormons or the life of a Mormon. You can be a perfectly good Mormon without knowing every last detail. However, when it comes the doctrines which are extreme departures from standard Christianity, I think they mean quite a bit to Mormons — not to all Mormons, but to many, including myself — as an elaboration of these stories of eternity, as I call them. So you get a larger and larger picture. The trouble with them is that when you begin to explore them in detail, there are all sorts of mysteries and perplexities, things you can’t understand because you’re out at the edge, and how does this work. But the overall picture is that humans are being taught by a father to become like him. That is a fundamental Mormon belief.

And it can be stated quite innocently in a way that many other Christians would agree with, that the purpose of becoming a Christian is to become godly, become like God, in his moral image. It’s just that Mormons carry this further and start talking about governing worlds. The business of governing worlds is an extrapolation that is not in the Scriptures; it’s just something Mormons have made up to make it concrete. But all of that is part of this extended picture, which does come as a shock to many people.



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MS. QUINN: What are the secret doctrines? DR. BUSHMAN: There are things that go on in the temple that are not talked about outside the temple, but they are not really doctrine; it is really a set of rituals that are practiced in the temple that are not discussed. Shall we talk about the temple for a minute since that came up? This goes along with this “secret life” of Mormons. Sally, you were referring to that earlier. What do they do when it comes down to it? Do they shun people and beat them up and so on? That has always been part of the story of Mormonism — you know, the “hidden horrors” of Mormonism — these advanced doctrines, and then the temple, because Mormons insist on saying it’s sacred, not secret — but it is secret. Mormons do not talk about what goes on in the temple outside the temple, even to each other. Inside the temple they will talk about it, but not outside. There will be glancing allusions, but never a full-fledged description.

The way I put it comes out of a conference we held when the Manhattan Temple was dedicated in 2004. We wanted to have a scholarly conference to mark that occasion, and Jonathan Z. Smith talked about how we call this a sacred space. How do you define a sacred space? How do you do it in the modern city, where there are all sorts of groups? Before you can go to the temple, you can’t simply be a member of the church. You have to see your bishop. Every two years you have to talk with your bishop who will ask you a set of questions. Are you committing adultery? Are you honest in your dealings with people? Do you believe in God and Christ? And so on down the list. It’s a worthiness interview, and you have to have a recommend to get past the front door of the temple. Once you get past that door, you immediately go to a changing room where you shed your outer clothes and put on special white clothing. In the temple you speak in whispers. You don’t speak aloud. And then outside the temple you don’t talk about it at all. Some people think of this as secretive in the sense of hiding things. But for Mormons, it’s all part of the process of creating a sacred space. When you walk in there, life is different. You just feel things are on a different plane.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2004-04-26-mormon-usat_x.htm

http://divinity.uchicago.edu/faculty/smith.shtml



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When you come out, it’s not usually an overwhelming vision you have experienced, but you feel elevated. It becomes very important for Mormons to go into that space, just like practicing the Sabbath, keeping it holy, has an exalting effect on human life. So that’s the way I look at the temple ceremonies.

MS. KORNBLUT: Can children go to the temple, or is it something that happens past a certain age? DR. BUSHMAN: They can go into the temple for certain purposes, for example, to be sealed to their parents for time and eternity. Those 12 years old and above can go to be baptized for the dead, but not through all of the temple ordinances. There you have to be older — 18 or older. STEVE WALDMAN, Beliefnet: I wondered if you could talk a little from a historical point of view about whether there has been any evolution in Mormonism’s self-identification as Christian over the years. Is it the same as it always was? Is there any shift in that? Also, we’ve talked about the belief in the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Could you give us a little bit of a sense of weight? In a Mormon upbringing, is the Book of Mormon really the heart of it, or is the New Testament the heart of it and the Book of Mormon an elaboration? Could you give us some sense of how Christian the identity is for Mormons growing up?

DR. BUSHMAN: I think Mormons have always thought of themselves as Christian — as more Christian than the Christians themselves. That’s what Christian reform groups do — they say, we are the true Christianity. It’s become more crucial to Mormons to insist on that identity since all these other groups have tried to exclude us from the Christian circle. There is almost an overemphasis on saying, we are Christian. The fact is, we know we’re Christians, why can’t that satisfy us? I wouldn’t say there’s been any significant evolution. The Bible has always been accepted. Mormon missionaries have always taught from the Bible more than they have the Book of Mormon because that’s the lingua franca of Christians.



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In terms of weighting, if you ask a Mormon, the first answer they would give you is they’re all equal. In fact, we probably give the Old Testament more credit than most Christians do. We don’t give priority to the New Testament particularly. The Book of Mormon went through a period when it was not very commonly used in church teaching materials. The Bible was primary. This was during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. But I think using this was primarily a matter of maintaining communication with the larger Christian world. Mormons have always been confident that everything we believe can be found in the Bible, at least in embryo.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the Book of Mormon has come back. In general, I would say that now Mormons are probably more likely to cite the Book of Mormon because it’s simpler and plainer. Biblical texts get complicated; they seem to come out of a more remote culture. On the whole, I would say the Book of Mormon is our preeminent book in terms of usage, but theoretically they’re all equal. They’re all considered the word of God. There is this qualification, of course: they are equal as far as the Bible is translated correctly. There is a feeling that the Bible lost some of its potency in the process of transmission down through the generations.

FRANKLIN FOER, The New Republic: We seem to be in the middle of a kind of Mormon moment. I want to ask your impression of this moment in the Romney campaign and whether within the Mormon community there’s some sense of anxiety over this moment, or whether people are grateful for this opportunity to explain their faith to the mainstream and view this as an opportunity to break past a lot of the old clichés and stereotypes? DR. BUSHMAN: My own feeling is it’s very good to air all of the inner feelings. This image of the church as secretly ominous and oppressive is common. I think those things need to get out in the open. Mormons need to hear it, and the people who voice those questions need to talk to Mormons about it. As long as we’re all polite to one another, there isn’t going to be true understanding. What I’m hoping is that the discrepancy you sensed between Martha Beck’s Mormonism and Mitt Romney’s – the question, can he really be a Mormon if Martha Beck’s is the true Mormon? — will be continually thrust upon people. They will have to ask, can it really be



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that fairly sensible, pleasant, educated people believe all these crazy things and are part of this nutty religion? I hope that discrepancy will become more and more clear and will lead to a realization that all of these things can become sensible. That is, if you live by them, after a while they work for you in making your life better and bringing you closer to God, and this is a legitimate form of religious expression despite the seemingly fantastic nature of the faith. I’m hoping that this juxtaposition will lead to that realization.

JOHN FUND, The Wall Street Journal: This morning, every talk show host in the country apparently got this eight-page email from a former Mormon talking about whether Mitt Romney can serve two masters. I think one of the points this woman makes is really what I wanted to ask you: “Do you know that if Mitt Romney does not follow what the prophet of the Mormon Church tells him to do, that he is an apostate and could lose his place in the Mormon afterlife?” Is there any ancient historical basis for a statement like this? Even if it’s not part of the official church doctrine, do some Mormons believe that if you publicly state that you’re not going to follow the dictates of the church leadership that you’re somehow an apostate and would lose your place in the Mormon afterlife? There’s this undercurrent, which I think really has to be addressed, asking, can Mitt Romney remain as faithful a Mormon in the eyes of his co-religionists as he wishes to be should he make the John F. Kennedy speech, or something similar to it? Or would a large portion of the Mormon Church view him as less than a full Mormon if he were to make that declaration? DR. BUSHMAN: I don’t think in any case he’d be shunned or lose his place in the afterlife. I don’t think that is an issue. But would he lose his standing and respect if he came out and said explicitly, I am not going to follow the prophet? It would be like Kennedy saying, I’m not going to obey the Pope. What he can say is, I’m going to have to follow my own conscience, come what may. And that statement would be perfectly acceptable, because every Mormon believes the same thing. You have to follow your own conscience above all.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0507/4007.html



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CLAIRE BRINBERG, CNN: Do you think that Romney might be forced to make a Kennedy speech? DR. BUSHMAN: I think the problem is whether he can find an occasion where he can deliver that speech for the very reason that he has been saying it for decades. You need to find a moment when the issue is posed in such a way that an answer is required and then he comes forward with it. It may sound just like the same old thing, because what more can he say than he’s already said? He needs some way to drive the point home. PAUL FARHI, The Washington Post: I want to come back to a question you raised right at the beginning, which is, why does this prejudice continue? Mitt Romney’s father ran for president. I was a little kid at the time. I don’t really remember, mainly because I wasn’t terribly engaged, but I don’t remember the same level of concern, invective, or prejudice that we seem to see now against a Mormon candidate. Have we devolved? Have we gone retrograde? DR. BUSHMAN: I think his father was protected by the 1960 campaign. We learned our lesson then. If George Romney was in the shadow of Kennedy, Mitt Romney is in the shadow of the Christian right, where there’s been all that intervention, so we’re hyper-sensitive to religious involvement. If your aim is a society where everybody can participate on an equal basis, no matter what their personal belief, then yes, we have devolved. DAN HARRIS, ABC News: There’s all this talk about the distrust among evangelicals toward Mormonism. If you were working for the Romney campaign, what would you tell him to say to these people? There’s this argument made by political experts that he’s going to need them in order to win the primary or the general. How can he bridge the gap? Also, you talked a lot in your opening remarks about how quickly the religion went from radical to conservative. I wonder how Mormons today look back at their past and reconcile some of the differences.

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60610FA38590C748EDDAE0894DD494D81



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DR. BUSHMAN: Your first question, I think, applies to Mormon doctrine rather than to the social issues, where he’s got this problem. There, I think the answer is emphasis on the positive. I mean, he is a believer in Jesus Christ. He’s trying to live a Christian life, and I think going into details about the doctrines and trying to defend them is just going to get him into trouble. I think he’s got to emphasize what he truly is, and I think he’s actually doing a pretty good job of that, or all he can do. It may not be enough. I’m doubtful it’ll be enough. But I don’t think there’s anything else he can do — he’s just going to get in more trouble than not. On the radical versus conservative question, Mormons actually love their radical roots. It’s like all these neo-cons that once were Marxist. I think there is a feeling that somehow religion was more intense then. We were willing to give all, consecrate all of our property to the church. We were willing to give up respectability by practicing plural marriage. The plural marriage is sort of covered up by the church because it’s a public relations disaster, but in terms of Mormons themselves, they’re willing to honor those people as having done a lot.

So it’s sort of our glorious flaming youth when we did many daring things. And I think for intellectuals, it’s a cultural resource that can be drawn on in times of need. That is, there may come a time when we will need to become radical again for some reason to change the social order in some respect, to head back towards equality. I don’t think we’ll go back to polygamy, but I think we might go back to a kind of a social radicalism in time. That’s the way I think of culture, as a mine of possibilities that you can draw upon from time to time. That’s why I don’t like to repudiate anything, even if it’s unpopular or ungainly at a certain moment in time. Mormons don’t have much trouble with that past, believe it or not.

ALAN COOPERMAN, The Washington Post: Do you worry that this campaign will be a disaster for Mormons? DR. BUSHMAN: If his campaign compels people to think not just about these stories, these horror stories they hear about Mormonism, but to compare them to Mormons they know, then they will begin to realize that Mormonism is something different than is depicted in those extreme examples that seem to be typical but are not. It is a life. I don’t



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think there’s any other way to do it except to know a lot of Mormon people and how they live their lives. MS. HAGERTY: A lot of conservative Christians don’t support him. If he can’t win the conservative Christian vote on the moral issues, because that’s where he’s got an appeal, who can he appeal to? DR. BUSHMAN: You’re going to have to take him for what he says rather than what his religion says he should be. I don’t know any other way to get around that. In terms of his natural allies, ideologically, I don’t think there’s a group that’s going to be closer than the conservative Christians, on the social issues, anyway. I think his appeal will be on the basis of competence. He’s been very effective in virtually everything he’s done. There’s a kind of a technocratic voter, let’s say, who just wants efficiency — someone who can run a tight ship and make it work. Personally, I think he’s winning as a personality. People who talk to him like him, and they have confidence in him. He exudes enthusiasm and hope and intelligence, and I think that’s going to reach a large number of voters. Not everyone is divided into religious ideological camps, and he may get that group. CATHLEEN FALSANI, Chicago Sun-Times: I’d like to think that this moment in our history in public discourse can be a learning moment, not just about what the LDS Church is and what it believes, but a learning moment about identity and faith and beliefs and that it doesn’t really matter what the label is, you’ve got to ask the person — the man, the woman — what he or she really believes. And beyond that, what it means for how they live their lives and the decisions they make, learning that these are individual decisions and that’s what we should be focusing on. There’s no more reason to believe that Mitt Romney as a Mormon would do something x, y or z that we could set out before us and predict, than if he were a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran or a Buddhist. I think we just need to learn that lesson, that if we don’t know, we need to ask better questions. If there’s something we’d like to know about his faith and how it might affect a decision he could make or could not make in the future, we should ask him that explicitly and not make assumptions.



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One last thing. I do think the reason Mormons are an easy target is because of the Ned Flanders factor, the dork factor. They’re clean living, they don’t swear and they’re sort of an easy target to take a tweak at.

DAN GILGOFF, U.S. News & World Report: Over the last few decades, with the rise of the Christian right, that movement has shown an increasing openness to building bridges of what might be termed co-belligerence, whether it be with the Catholic Church, replacing hostilities with real friendships there; the black Protestant churches, which many evangelical churches were at odds with during the civil rights movement; or other traditions. I’m wondering if there’s been, during that same time, any lessening of the evangelical opposition to making common cause with Mormons on political issues. DR. BUSHMAN: Mormons have been involved in discussions with evangelicals with real progress, I think, in mutual understanding, largely through Richard Mouw at Fuller Theological Seminary. Mouw gave a famous talk in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle, in which he apologized on behalf of evangelicals for their verbal abuse of Mormons and in return for which he was assaulted with thousands of e-mails criticizing him for having given away the store. I think that represents the reality. On the level of educated thinkers on both sides, there is a compatibility. It’s very much like the Catholic-evangelical conversations that are going on now. They are not nothing. But down at the grassroots level, as John Fund pointed out, there’s this anti-Mormon literature and great condemnation of Mormons. So it’s going to be quite a time before the two cultures as a whole — or two societies as a whole — are compatible. STEVE DRUMMOND, NPR: I don’t understand the geography of the church outside Utah, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. DR. BUSHMAN: More than half of all Mormons live outside the United States. In Africa, along with everybody else, Mormons have reaped converts, and very heavily in Latin America and the Philippines, and then spotted here and there — slow in Europe. Within the United States, the heartland is Southern Idaho, Utah and Arizona, with California as a powerful colony — the whole West Coast really is a powerful colony — and then sprinkled

http://www.fuller.edu/

http://www.fuller.edu/

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/156/story_15656.html



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everywhere. Manhattan has 14 Mormon congregations in it now, and Brooklyn and Queens have an equal number. In the South, there is a strong Mormon tradition that goes way back, despite the opposition coming from the South. I would say there would be as many Mormons in South Carolina as in Iowa. It would be pretty evenly distributed. They tend to focus around schools, because Mormons get into education, and around business centers where technicians of any kind are needed — there are a lot of Mormons in that. Then there are conversions and they spread out from that point.

MR. WOOLDRIDGE: Do we know what proportion of Romney’s entourage, the people who are close to him, are Mormons? Do we know what proportion of his funding is coming from Mormon sources? Is it really the case, as I’ve been told by several people, that Mormons are hugely overrepresented in the CIA? DR. BUSHMAN: I think Romney raised more money in Utah than in any other state. So there are going to be a lot of Mormons behind him. I don’t know about his staff. I know it’s not strictly Mormons. I know there are a lot of non-Mormons. Do you know, Anne? MS. KORNBLUT: From what I know so far, lots of them are businesspeople. His staff in Boston, especially, has been venture capitalists. I know Jewish advisers to him on the foreign policy in particular; he’s had a connection to some of the neo-cons. I will say there are pockets. A former senior adviser to former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in Washington, Bob Stevenson, is a Mormon, and he has been helping Romney corral some of the Mormon support, but I haven’t seen it. Has anyone else seen something different? MR. ALLEN: Yeah, in fact, there is no visible member of the senior staff who is Mormon. John says his finance chair is. But the point is it’s rare. DR. BUSHMAN: The CIA is a rumor that’s spread around. I don’t know of any count. Lots of Mormons know a language because they’ve been in a foreign country on a mission. They tend to be good Scouts. They tend to keep their noses clean. So I don’t see anything incompatible with the CIA.



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MS. BRINBERG: We’ve seen in some evangelical churches and some black congregations vague kinds of get-out-the-vote messages close to an election. There are voter scorecards, there are candidates coming in — is that something that you would see in a Mormon congregation? My second question is, is America ready for a Mormon president? Because that implies everybody will grow into it eventually and it’s okay that we’re not right now. But if you look at polls, you had an ABC poll that said 36 percent of the country would not be comfortable voting for a Mormon for president. When you attach a name and a face to that Mormon, maybe you’ll have a different number, but when you see that kind of a number, do you think it’s possible for a Mormon to be elected right now?

DR. BUSHMAN: In answer to the first question, no. It’s forbidden by the church for any candidate to use the church or church congregations for any political purposes. You cannot make political announcements from the pulpit or anything of that sort. You can’t get access to mailing lists for Mormons. That’s part of this anti-theocratic thing. In terms of whether he can win, I think it’s going to depend heavily on his personality and character. Can he sell himself and his views? He’s a very winning person. I think he’s going to win over a lot of wavering middle people, including some like Cathleen’s evangelical friends who will say, look, this is a godly man; he’s a faithful family man; he believes in good values; why not? Then there is going to be the suspicion factor from many others that will simply exclude him.

MR. PAULSON: Frank said we seem to be in this Mormon moment in the popular culture, and I wonder if there is anything parallel going on in the academy. What is your sense? You’re in the relatively rare perch of being a Mormon historian at an Ivy League university. I wonder, what is the state of Mormon studies in the American academy, and what are the live questions that people ought to be looking at? DR. BUSHMAN: There are two universities — a strange pair: Claremont Graduate University and the University of Wyoming — that are actively raising money for a chair in Mormon studies. Not to mention Utah State University. There have been a number of

http://www.cgu.edu/pages/1.asp

http://www.cgu.edu/pages/1.asp

http://www.uwyo.edu/

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conferences on Mormonism — two of them at Yale within the last couple of years, one with the Library of Congress, others in various places — where Mormonism was discussed within an academic setting. I gave a paper on the Book of Mormon to the Intellectual History Seminar in theCharles Warren Center at Harvard with a huge group present to discuss seriously the place of the Book of Mormon in American literature. I think it’s on the radar screen after being off it for a while. It’s being treated gingerly by people not knowing whether or not to take it seriously but still recognizing that it’s unavoidable. But there was Kim Clark, who was the dean of the Harvard Business School; there was Mitt Romney; and now university professor Laurel Ulrich, who is running the seminar, a Mormon herself. Mormonism not only grows in numbers and spreads, but there are more Harry Reids and Gordon Smiths around. You can’t disregard it. It’s forced on your attention. That affects the academy as well as political reportage. So my guess is that we’ll see a huge number of books that are an introduction to Mormonism. Presses all over the place are trying to find something because they sense there is a market there. MR. HARTMAN: Part of what we’ve heard today is that a lot of people think one of the things that’s very attractive about Mormon communities is their sense of family and community and mutual support. I wonder if it’s possible for you to estimate or quantify what that range looks like in America. In other words, what percentage of people might you consider cultural Mormons as opposed to the number who are truly devout and observant and knowledgeable and really conversant about all of the doctrines, even the secret ones. DR. BUSHMAN: One numerical measure of that is the percentage of people who tithe their income — who give 10 percent of their income to the church. That’s some measure of commitment. That’s probably around 25 percent of the stated membership. The stated membership includes everyone who was ever a Mormon of any kind — born into the church or converted to the church — even if they’ve long since gone. There are 12 million Mormons. The population is around five million in the United States, and I’m really speaking more of the United States than the rest of the world, so it’s 25

http://www.yale.edu/mormon_conference/

http://josephsmithconferenceloc.byu.edu/

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ecwc/

http://www.hbs.edu/news/releases/060605_dean_bio.html

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Eamciv/faculty/ulrich.shtml

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percent of 5 million. That’s one measure. Most of those people would be conversant — they would be going to the temple, they would be conversant with all the doctrines.

Then you get a lot of people who hang on just because the Mormon Church takes good care of them and there’s a home teacher who visits them, and they will not be necessarily conversant in all the doctrines, but deeply affectionate. A lot of Hispanics and other immigrants join the church under these circumstances. At the end of the spectrum you get people who know a lot about the church but don’t like it and have left it. So it’s not an ignorance spectrum we’re talking about; it’s commitment and proximity to the heart of things. There are other types that you could work out, but those are some of them.

MR. CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking Professor Bushman.

END

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org

or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]

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ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT€¦ · Mormonism. It brings to a head the general question of how . Mormonism. bears on politics and democratic government. Romney is not the only eminent Mormon