When I asked an LDS friend to tell me how the people in his ward responded to last summer's news that 37 percent of U.S. citizens would never vote for a Mormon, he said that they framed that as an example of prejudice against the Mormons.
As for the particulars from pollsters that an equal number of Americans are convinced that Mormonism is not Christian, my friend's ward members fail to recognize that this could be a legitimate doctrinal position for Trinitarian Christians, and instead regard all questions about whether Mormonism is Christian as "anti-Mormon bigotry." While a great many Saints "framed" these poll results in this manner, it was not just the Mormons' feeling that they were being ill-treated. Quite obviously, some negative identity profiling is going on when people conclude that a Mormon ought not to occupy high public office.
A main reason that the downbeat and off-putting public reaction to Mormonism that accompanied the Romney campaign was particularly distressing to the Saints is that, as the campaign started, they continued to bask in the post-Winter Games glow that cast a truly positive light on them. This had put them in a good mood, especially as they were being led by a genial prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, whose message to his followers and to the world was that the Mormons are not weird.
They almost expected admiration. As a result, they simply were not prepared for the Al Sharpton episode in which the well-known minister opined that Mormons do not believe in God. Mike Huckabee's query that seemed to indicate that Mormons must worship Satan as well as Jesus appeared to hit not just below Romney's belt, but their own as well.
During the Olympics, Mormons had been perceived as "gracious hosts," as an attractive native population with wonderful families who lived in a gorgeous, fresh and uncontaminated environment. The weird folks were the Baptists who were walking around the Salt Lake Temple with placards charging that Mormons were not Christian.
Many - perhaps most - Latter-day Saints were hoping that the Olympics had dispensed with negative LDS stereotypes. Consequently, the intensifying intimations of their having odd (even bizarre) beliefs and strange worship practices that accompanied the Romney campaign gave the Saints "whiplash," as one observer put it. At the very least, the message about the Mormons that emerged from the past few months was mixed.
Some Saints blamed the media for making too much of Romney's faith and too little of his success as the husband and father of an exemplary family. Having spent much of their own lives characterized as "cookie-cutter" church members whose religious institution was as standardized as MacDonald's or Colonel Sanders, they were dismayed to see one of their fellows characterized as plastic.
Despite the solidity of the Republican strength in the Mormon culture region, Mormons are by no means all conservatives of the "ditto head" variety. Consequently, the disappointment of many Latter-day Saints about Romney's suspension of his candidacy is mitigated by their appreciation of his decision as an effort to prevent dissonance and disharmony within the Republican Party.
In addition, it is possible to discern LDS pride in Romney's smarts in suspending his candidacy rather than entirely removing himself from the race. His move allows the former Massachusetts governor to retain his standing as a player at the Republican convention when decisions will be made about the party's platform - and perhaps as a player in a McCain administration.
A judgment of "enough already" was surely not widespread among Mormons in the Mountain West. Yet the Saints' pride in the success of one of their own was increasingly combined with worry about how the campaign was reflecting detrimental notions about what being Mormon meant. It was enough to make at least some Mormons, including some leaders of the faith, relieved to see the end of Romney's campaign.
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* JAN SHIPPS is Professor Emerita of History and Religious Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. A non-Mormon expert on Mormonism, she has been studying the Latter-day Saints since the early 1960s. She is the author of Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons, which received the Mormon History Association's best book award in 2000.
