Mitt Romney: The Mormon Factor, Good or Bad?
Dec 3rd, 2007 | 22 responses
read more on this subject re Governor Romney and religiousity, at Pam’s House Blend “Romney Hits Religion Panic Button” here, and the shiny new Poligazette and Michael van der Galien re Romny to Give Religion Speech here… and our own Joe Gandelman’s recent piece on Gov Romney, especially Joe’s observation from speaking to a fellow entertainer who happens to be Mormon and his take on matters:
There’s a lot of suspicion about Mormonism,
that is, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Many point to the least of what some Mormons have put into practice over the years. Just like the least many within other religions have put into practice over the eons, also.
Most all religions are guilty of something; matters of conduct that were looked at differently long ago than they are now.
Which is not to diminish the suffering such failures in acting humanely caused others who were the targets of exclusion, cruel treatment, dismissal, marginalization, condemnation of their very souls, exploitation, invasion, misappropriation of land, torture, and withholding of basic resources.
Regarding Mormons, others point to odd ritualistic clothing or to a Mormon’s seemingly strange beliefs.
True also of most all religions; every religion has some kind of belief in ‘other worlds,’ a belief in homunculi of one sort or another. Every religion has beliefs and certainties that are based on the invisible. Most every religion has developed ritualistic objects and clothing, like the alb, the rosary, the prayer beads, the prayer wheel, the robe, the scapular, and so on.
It is true that Mormons once practiced polygamy as a tenet of faith introduced by their prophet Joseph Smith, and that some current Mormons, in disobedience to the tenets of the first and second Manifestos of the Mormons which forbade such, continue to practice multiple ‘sealings’ with women…
It was recently revealed in the Warren Jeffs trial that support for the literally hundreds of children in his polygamous communities relied on food stamps and other welfare programs from the Federal and State governments. However, that’s a renegade group.
However, having a criminal who is also a Mormon is no indictment of other Mormons, including Governor Willard Mitt Romney, any more that the pedophile priest intrusions in the Catholic churches, or the sexual exploitation of children in the Indian Schools in Canada by certain Anglicans, or the intrusion of a rabbi on an underage student, has anything to do with Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, or Joe Lieberman.
A man who is a believer is not separate from his understanding of Messiah, but rather, as well as he can, fashions his ethics for conduct from that relationship… ever mindful that he is running for secular, not apostolic office in the USA…
reaching not to a coterie, but to all the people, who are made of all different kinds of religious affiliations, as well as no religious affiliation at all.
Yet, as per Mitt Romney, there are many thoughtful questions and ideas within Mormonism and from one of Mormonism’s most prominent leaders, Brigham Young, that can actually only help Mitt Romney, were he to cleave to them, teach from them, put himself forward as a leader with those Mormon ideas as his basis.
(Addendum: To pretend that those running for office are not affected or are disaffected by powerful influences rising from their belief systems, would seem naive, when one considers that the psyche is not a bunch of hotel rooms strung together with doors. The psyche is an eco system where many matters are dependent and interwoven with many others facets.
… A tenet of psychology is that early exposure to religious ideals is imbedded in the core of the developing personality. Religiousity, or a secular set of principles for life conduct, are root stock that the psyche consciously and unconsciously draws upon as outrigger and anchor, for life. One cannot ‘part out’ a person’s psychological development as though it is an automobile; spiritual outlook over here, civic duty over there.
….The line betrween discrete parts of the psyche is far more watery and overlapping than drawn as a straight deep line of demarcation that is unmoving. This includes, abreactions to early religious principles which can cause as much mayhem in the psyche, as can over-identifications that automatically de-value other persons who are not similar to oneself.)
I only know about Mormonism from Mormons, some disenchanted ones who feel they have been shunned by the community after the fact, and some who though they question and even reject some of the old premises that seem made more by man than by God, they hang in there, trying to faithfully find their way in the Mormon Church.
Most of all, I know about Mormonism from selling magazines door to door in the rural outback where I grew up. I was 13. Far down one road was an old woman who invited me in. First she told me about the small rocks sitting in a murky creek fluid in a Mason jar on her fireplace hearth. Her gallstones. Then she told me about the angel Moroni.
She did buy one of my magazines. And, I came away with a Book of Mormon she’d given me. In my world, a real book was like gold. I read it. And it was filled with wondrous magical ideas that are literally or figuratively meant to speak to the spirit.
And inside the book was a pamphlet with quotes from Brigham Young, some of which I found again searching today. And though Joseph Smith was a mystic with all the oddities that most mystics carry about … Brigham Young was a different kind of man.
Although carrying the cultural prejudices of his day, and his idea that polygamy was necessary for salvation (as some of the old Eastern Christian and pre-Christian tribes did also)…. as I reread some of Young’s words, I kept thinking, assuming he’d have in our time developed into an egalitarian, that he’d have been a good candidate to run for his party’s nomination himself.
Here are a few of Young’s writings that many might agree with tangentially or more fully. His ideas are based on being a member of a large religious group which is Christian and extero-Christian, both. Mormons encapsulate the Bible and their holy book received in visions by Joseph Smith. And most Mormons would be familiar with Young’s premises and works as he was considered the inheritor of Smith’s angelic propensities.
Brigham Young said that “A good man, is a good man, whether in this church, or out of it.” Surely that sounds like a promising platform for a candidate who is also a Mormon, running for office. A view that one need not be a Mormon to be good bespeaks that others who are not Mormon are seen not as infidels or as apostates but as good souls.
I’d say, Young also had a wry humor too, as when he writes: “A man who remains unmarried at the age of twenty-one is a menace to the community.” Good observation. Even amongst wolves and lions and elk, something must be done about young males in the pack, pride or herd, so there is not mayhem in the community because of unpaired virile males.
It seems that many voters are put off entirely by being told (impliedly or otherwise) that their own religion (or no religion) is not quite the right thing, that heaven is so small and God too, that only those of a certain stripe on a very teeny speck of a planet in the universe can ever hope to be accepted there.
Brigham Young however, put his love for his own faith another way, which is perhaps clever in one way, but I think sincere in another. He follows along with the Christian desert fathers and the old Rabbis of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus‘ fine fabric, and the old mystics like Mechtilde in saying, don’t convert by persuasion but by example… the most difficult thing, for it relies on perfecting one’s own soul… first.
Young advises thusly: “Don’t try to tear down other people’s religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it’s glories.”
Good enough. And this thought from Young as well, perhaps somewhat surprising to those who have been casually exposed to anti-Mormonism. “If I had a choice of educating my daughters or my sons because of opportunity constraints, I would choose to educate my daughters.” Why? Educate a woman and her children, or if she does not have children, the children around her will inherit greatly from her learnedness and understandings.
On the environment Brigham Young wrote a considerable amount on preserving the land, the crops , the water, holding a sanctity for what God gave humans, for the wonder of God’s creation. He wrote: “Nature is the glass reflecting God, as the sun is reflected in the sea, too glorious to be gazed on in his sphere.”
And then too, that early Mormon sense of humor and human nature again: “Remember, a chip on the shoulder is a sure sign of wood farther up.”
And lastly, one of the most profound ideas, akin to that written by Berry the poet in his “Mad Farmer Manifesto”: He exhorts that we do nothing that would disturb a woman with child near her time.
Brigham Young wrote: “We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do.”
If Mitt Romney is a devoted Mormon, not just a social and perfunctory one for business and male bonding advantages, these ideas and other good ones from his faith since childhood, would be seated deeply in him.
Accordingly, instead of being grilled on ‘flip-flopping’ which bedevils most of us to see candidates so charged with such fripperies, as though gaining more information or better information is not supposed to make a thinking competent person change course…. he ought to be asked about his love of the land, his desire and plans to protect water and life on the land, the preciousness of God’s creatures and creations. How does he see himself bringing that to the fore?
He ought be asked about education for those who have traditionally been shut out of education: scholarships and boons at universities STILL never reach down into the muck far enough to bring up the gems stuck there.
Gov. Romney ought be asked about his understanding of preserving young adult males (and females) so they can live long enough to marry and have children (as Gov. Romney did when very young, and he was draft-deferred during an ongoing war, as a result) and NOT be sent to die in a war before they have lived life fully and richly and long.
And most of all, to say clearly about how his faith informs his secular activities, not being afraid to say how and why. The voters are spry and prescient; if any candidate tries to give glancing answers to such important core matters of character and personality formation instead of showing themselves at depth, then a huge number of voters who are long starved for depth and honesty, and who are tired of being invisible, will vote ‘against’ accordingly.
I think Governor Romney must clearly delineate how he understands the unusual old Mormon idea, prognosticated by the same Young who had such marvelous ideas, that blacks have the mark of Cain upon them in some sort of seeming ignorant view of the breadth of talent and intelligence amongst all of God’s children. Understanding how he sees this will resonate too with the issues about stated equal rights and unions and marriages for GLBTs.
I think people want to know how a long-ago prejudice woven into the religion, sits with Gov. Romney now. And not just blacks would like to know. But all people who care for humanity by content of soul and not by color of skin.
Can Mitt Romney be a Mormon up front, and also be the nominee for president? I think resounding yes. It ought not be despite his Mormonism, but because of it, because of Mormonism’s deep intelligence in many matters that are still germane in our culture today…
–decent self-conduct in public life,
–careful management of resources, and even more so, love of this earth
–the dignity and health of human beings,
–of children and communities especially …
–creating a new nation
all these and more…
… not building toward an inner circle coterie in the old ‘city boss style’… but spanning many kinds of people, inviting them to a system of values, many of which they already hold to, but with increasing despair that their leaders do not.
To cleave to the better of all these would represent a leader who also has Mormon roots in modern times.
Being a capable leader of great heart and good mind would never settle for gloss over gravitas, despite the constant luge the lesser of media is constantly constructing for anyone running for public office.
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22 Responses to “Mitt Romney: The Mormon Factor, Good or Bad?”
[...] Dr. e also weighs in, wondering whether the Mormon factor will hurt Romney or not. My guess is that if he delivers one heck of a speech, this will be one of the turning points in his campaign. It’s the biggest speech he has ever delivered. If he does well, you’ll see him fighting back in the polls. If he doesn’t do well, well, he’s in trouble. Digg this | Add to del.icio.us [...]
[...] Clark Mitt Romney: The Mormon Factor, Good or Bad? » This Summary is from an article posted at The Moderate Voice » Domestic and international news [...]
Dr.,
While I think it’s all well and good the Mitt Romney identifies as a Mormon, what is unmitgatingly irksome to me is the labeling, Is a Mormon a better statesman than a Catholic, a Lutheran, a Jew? No, and we have to get off this road to nowhere with the religious swiftboating. Our founding fathers specifically foresaw this trap we are falling into, as they saw it happen in Europe time and time again.
We have become culturally retarded by our willingness to cling to outdated ideas. This is the 21st century, not the 19th, is it not?
I don’t think that the texts of a religion is whete you can find the meaning of a religion or it’s impact on a man’s life.
A Chsristian is as the Christian does.
AMuslim is as the Muslim does.
And a Mormon is as the Mormon does.
Any text can lead to hundreds of interpretations and applications, and, usually, people work backwards. They believe what the believe, in the way of rules for living, and then they find justification for their beliefs by cherry picking the texts and by creative interpretation.
After centuries of ‘justified ‘ wars, THOU SHALT NT KILL, is still read from pulpits with great seriousness
Killing millions is justified, but we go into paroxysms of self congratulation when defending ‘life’ ia some, highley selective, other areas.
It isn’t the text. It’s how the man reads the text.
This is the same mistake the Republicans have been making all along: to argue that a specific set of religious beliefs fit someone to be president (or anything else). The issue needs to die completely, but it’s hard to see a Republican campaign make this argument without laughing out loud.
Sadly for Romney, there’s probably a substantial part of the Republican “base” who aren’t going to be able to look past the things about Mormonism you want them to look past at the things about Mormonism you want them to see. They don’t roll that way (or at least they haven’t).
It’s not a discussion we should even be having, but the GOP—having sold out the concept of “separation of church and state” to pull in so-called “values voters”—is going to have to have it.
Can Romney Take the Religion Out of GOP Politics?…
Posted by Damozel | Mitt Romney is giving a speech on Thursday regarding the issue of his Mormon faith, by which I expect he means he is going to say that its weight should be nil. According to The Corner at National Review Online—and who would know …
[...] Clark Mitt Romney: The Mormon Factor, Good or Bad? » This Summary is from an article posted at The Moderate Voice » Domestic and international news [...]
Mitt Romneys Faith is a strengh in my eyes. He has the values that this country so desperatly needs in the White-House. Beyond that his credentials are outstanding when compared with all of the other candidates. He is a shoe-in in my eyes and Fellow Christians need to surround him with support. Mitt Will Win!
Here is the quote you’re missing from Brigham Young:
Brigham Young, if he did not directly order it, certainly incited with fiery religious rhetoric the infamous Mountain Meadow Massacre in 1857, of the Fancher-Baker wagon train. Mormon militia men dressed as Paiute Indians attacked, laid siege to, and after their surrender, executed the surviving members–including women and most of the children–of the California-bound emigrants–on Sept. 11, 1857. The Mormons spared only the children they thought too young to bear witness against them. (These children were raised as Mormons with no knowledge of their true families.) 120 odd people murdered and buried in shallow graves on a cold mountain meadow. That is the dignity the Mormon militia men afforded to their fellow human beings. I have stood in that meadow, on that ground. I have felt them in that ground. Bones do sing, you know.
Needless to say, Brigham Young led the cover-up, denying that Mormons were involved, blaming the Paiutes.
Brigham Young’s Jehovah was just as bloodthirsty as the Joshua’s Jehovah. Blood watered the roots of most religions, particularly the monotheistic ones. The higher the ideals of any particular creed, the more depraved the behavior of its adherents, all justified by faith.
The Romans had gravitas, we got gloss, glitter, and glitz. Fake it til you make it. That’s the real American ‘Protestant Ethic.’ Romney is has a tight holt on them roots, shallow tho they be.
“Mormon’s deep intelligence!” !!! Clarissa, please.
The Mormon predilection for and promotion of LARGE families does not constitute “careful management of resources…and love of the Earth,” to my mind. At a time when about 4 or more children are born every second, 86,400 seconds per day, and when human population will top 7 billion in maybe 4 years, it is a crime, pure and simple–a crime against the Earth.
It is largely due to the criminal enterprise of godlicking evangels and other true believers that we have spent 8 years on cruel and disastrous sideshows instead of searching out the ways and means of retarding the flaming hunka hunka doom we ourselves created and continue to fuel.
To put it in chiliastic terms, the thousand days are over. All will have their place in the lake of fire.
SRO.
I did not know these matters with the Paiutes you name Dr. Omed. This added to the demonization of a race, makes me very sad.
I still would hope that Gov. Romney would see fit to answer what his modern understanding is, particularly about the early 19th century exhortation regarding black persons by JS and BY. At the moment, I can’t find the exact quote re Gov Romney hopefully telling how he parses that horror (that I wrote about in the above article ,) but I’d just reiterate that again here.
Also, I hope people will not forget that some of us who others sometimes call ‘adherents,’ (I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as an ‘adherent,’ but I know some might) wish, hope, try to follow something other than bellowing for bloodwar. I have had this odd experience over the years, of many persons being fed up that only Evangelicals “hog the stage” regarding ideas about Christianity… but I also find when others of us raise our voices, hopfully ‘moderate ones,’ we get lambasted too, before we can barely get out of the gate.
Must be a lamb-basting kind of day. Very Old Testament, no? Ok, a little levity attempted there. I’ve no complaint. Just witness. Ok, picking self up. Let’s keep going, regardless. Yee ha.
dr.e
Some of my best friends are adherents.
I will note I wrote ‘evangels,’ no icals.
I think you try to see the good in everyone.
I’m not blind to the good in people, individually, but that goodness is parochial, not global. The evil men do is global. Evil propagates; goodness insulates. One practical application of this principle is organized religion in politics. Mere goodness will not suffice to save us from ourselves. It’s too late for moderation. Hope and faith are snare and delusion. The jury’s still out on love.
The world people walk in day by day has already ended, as Ray Lafferty put it, and no one can see it except the crazies. Crying out, “Repent, the End is Near!” is absurd. It’s too late to repent, the end is here. Better to say, “Eat, drink, and be merry, because we’re already dead!”
I have a migraine level case of cognitive dissonance, and I am very, very angry at everybody walking around in the daylight as if the sun were still shining–which is irrational–what else is there to do?
Yes, let’s keep going, regardless. Yee ha.
BTW–Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century linguist and adventurer, not the actor, visited Utah in 1860 and met and spoke with Brigham Young. He wrote it all up in a book called The City of the Saints. As a comteporary account by a relatively unbiased observer, it’s worth reading.
OK, I’ll get off my hobby horse now.
dear Dr. Omed, Thank you for the reference to City of the Saints (for our readers… “saints” is what some in the early Mormon church called themselves)
You and I have both walked in this world a long time (although you really do look a heck of a lot better than me…lol, seeing your great pix up on your blog at Salon)… but here’s ‘my final word before my final word’… To see what you and I and others have seen in our lifetime with regard to the most of what humans are and can be, and also the least of what humans are straight down into the offal and lower… to still note good, and to be reasoned in defining it, is a feat, a calling, not a delusion. Even though some would name it the latter. It is a difficult feat, and it costs far more dear, and daily, than some easier ways of either capitulating or becoming a mock mocker.
One of the premises you return to time and again, I would characterize as differentiation, which is consciousness, and I couldnt agree more. Needed. Globally. Far more.
Fellow travelers like you mean a lot. Siempre.
dr.e
So, what do you think of Romney’s speech, now that he’s made it?
It doesn’t seem like a man who makes that kind of statement has much room for atheists like me in his republic of ‘saints.’
I reckon under his regime I’ll continue to be ‘tolerated’ as long as I’m not too expressive of my freedom FROM religion. I find I’m very tired of being ‘tolerated.’ In fact, I’m very tired of tolerating such religious tolerance.
I’d rather perish alone. F Romney and the god he rode in on.
No candidate who ruts with God in public will ever get my vote except at the very last resort as the least of manifold evils.
Dr. Omed, may I draw your attention to my new post Romney Re-Launches?
dear Dr. Omed, I think, re your above question….that Gov. Romney this morning, in his speech, said his own radical truth. I think what he said is what he meant. I find his an honest effort to say– from a small opening poked in the political sheen that most of the candidates live in, but also as a believer– what is actually so for him.
I do see that in his mind/heart and perhaps in his speechwriter’s as well, that certain phrases leave many persons out, and not only abbreviates history by omitting reference to ‘the backstories’ of our founders, but puts forth an inaccuracy regarding Deists and others of the 18th century and earlier ——–whose idea of religiousity, and freedom to not be harmed because of one’s religious beliefs or absence of such, was not likley thought of in the 21st century way of seeing that Gov Romney puts forth.
People will like/love/hate/consider what he said or not, parse it or not. Myself, I have liked to consider.
And in the brief analysis as I looked over the transcript of his speech today , I think the most striking thing is he had the cojones to try to say something publically in the midst of much political scrapple aimed at him. He said his beliefs clear: that he sees the foundation and founders as rowing an ark for the US rather than an armada of individual boats of many kinds, all with their own maps and destinations as they choose.
I think a most striking lack of consciousness in this particular speech is the leaving out of good persons who are unaffiliated with any organized or corporate religion, or non-Christian ones… people who have their own way of understanding goodness, or not goodness, without the anlagen being God.
I think being president means making overt effort to see all the many different kinds of people in the US. and elsewhere.
This is the phrase that is exclusionary: “Our constitution was made for a moral and religious people.”
And this one I don’t think would pass basic geometric logic: “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.”
There are other clangs.
And, he made himself clear about his root philosophy as a believer. I personally, find knowing his way of thinking, valuable in terms of seeing not just the outline of the candidate, but something of the stuffing.
I realize, full well, that many see his speech and his person differently. I think many in our world have suffered neglect, harm, ridicule and ostracism by people who say they are ‘religious’ when in fact, they invisiblize others or act inhumanely toward others. I find this generational wound in our culture, far more a psychological bleed-out that goes unhealed. Some day soon, I hope to write about that.
Thank you for asking me my opinion. I think I do see yours and understand it as you say it and mean it and the merits
dr.e
Dear heart, I would not come over here and bother you if I did not value your opinion, your thoughts, and your understanding.
dear Dr. Omed, your wildish wit and heart are always welcome
…and your art.
dr.e