Anti-Mormonism, Past and Present
John Turner
In a contemporary application of his long-awaited and now soon-to-be published A Peculiar People, Spencer Fluhman discusses bipartisan anti-Mormonism in today's New York Times.
In a contemporary application of his long-awaited and now soon-to-be published A Peculiar People, Spencer Fluhman discusses bipartisan anti-Mormonism in today's New York Times.
Fluhman begins with a concise discussion of
nineteenth-century anti-Mormonism, then turns to Mormonism's current place
within American politics. As he explains, political anti-Mormonism today finds finds
a home on both the Left and the Right:
For the left,
Mormonism often functions as a stand-in for discomfort over religion generally.
Mormon religious practice offers a lot of really, well, religious religion:
ritual underclothing, baptism for the dead, secret temple rites and
“clannishness” (a term invoked in the past in attacks on Catholics and Jews) … When
a perceived oddity is backed by Mormon money or growing political clout, the
left gets jumpy … Liberals were outraged by Mormon financing of Proposition 8, the
2008 ban on same-sex marriage in California. They scoff at Mormonism’s all-male
priesthood and ask why church leaders have yet to fully repudiate the racist
teachings of previous authorities.
The Republican Right has a more complicated relationship to
anti-Mormonism. Some conservatives also dislike Mormonism for its perceived
strangeness, while others admire the contemporary church's pro-business image
and social conservatism. A few evangelicals understand that secular liberals
view them with as much condescension and derision as Latter-day Saints
typically receive from such quarters.
Still, Fluhman is correct that "evangelical hatred has been the driving force behind
national anti-Mormonism." At the same time, I think he's also correct that
because "evangelicals are hard pressed for unity to begin with, and
because they have defined themselves less and less in terms of historic
Christian creeds, their objections to Mormonism might carry less and less cultural
weight." [I thought evangelical anti-Mormonism was a major potential
problem for Mitt Romney until President Obama announced his evolved stance on
same-sex marriage].
Read Fluhman's
entire piece here.
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