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.