Mormons, the pluribus, and the unum

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By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

18 June 2012

I made mention last week of a David Frum article that argued Mitt Romney's Mormon faith might actually make him more palatable to the American electorate. (A recent study by the Centre's David Smith found the exact opposite.) But one part of the Frum article is worthy of some extra attention:

To be a Mormon, on the other hand, is to feel perpetually uncertain of your place in America. It’s been a long time since the U.S. government waged war on the Mormons of the Utah Territory. Still, even today, Mormons are America’s most mockable minority. It’s hard to imagine a Broadway musical satirizing Jews, blacks, or gays. There is no Napoleon Dynamite about American Muslims.

That seems a reasonable observation, and it calls to mind a passage from Frum's post-2008 jeremiad to the right, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again:

Over the decades, Republicans have been many things: the party of the Union, the party of the gold standard, the party of temperance, the party of free enterprise, and the pro-life party, among others. Amid all these changes, there is one thing that has never changed: Republicans have always been the party of American democratic nationhood.

Democrats, by contast, have historically tended to attract those who felt themselves in some way marginal to the American experience: slave-holders, indebted farmers, immigrants, intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, blacks, feminists, gays — people who identify with the "pluribus" in the nation’s motto, "e pluribus unum." As the nation weakens, Democrats grow stronger.

The last sentence is silly and divisive, but overall, this isn't a bad way of understanding the two parties as they currently exist. It works less well over a historical scale: slave-holders were at the centre of American political life throughout the first 80 years of the nation's existence — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson rank among their number — and they only really felt marginalised from the American mainstream when the country dared to elect Abraham Lincoln. Meanwhile, the African American wing of the Republican Party that existed for the hundred years after the Civil War was never a part of the nation's elite. Frum is doing a milder form of what Kevin Williamson did recently: attempting to smear the modern Democratic Party with its racist history.

But Frum's pluribus/unum division is a useful one if it's applied to liberals and conservatives rather than to two parties that have only become ideologically unified over the past few decades. And since liberals represent the marginalised pluribus, shouldn't they include among their number Mormons, a people who Frum says "feel perpetually uncertain of [their] place in America"?

Of course, Mormons hold many traditionalist beliefs that make conservative politics a more natural fit for them. But, by the same token, so too do large parts of the Jewish, Hispanic, and African American populations, all of which fit fairly uncontroversially within the liberal coalition.

I don't have an answer for this, but here are two suggestions. The first is from a reader of Andrew Sullivan:

Mormons outside of Utah (and the LDS Church among other religious organizations) emphasized families and strong family life to shield themselves from anti-Mormon persecution and shunning, and as a way to purchase acceptance at the Evangelicals' "cool kids" table.

Mormon fear of bullying and the desire for acceptance from other religious institutions has led to efforts to be uber-American, to assist (and lead out on) crusades against the ERA or LGBT rights (although many members overlook the Church's real support in Salt Lake for LGBT protections in housing and employment). I think Mitt is part of this "acceptance at any cost" generation, masking his true self to the point that it's difficult to know where the mask ends and the person begins.

I am not a Mormon and know few of them, so I can't judge the truth of this. But it makes sense why a marginalised group's desire for acceptance might attract it to the unum and hence conservative politics.

The second is from David Smith's paper:

Because of the strength of [the association between Mormonism and conservatism], it is possible that liberals and people without religious convictions increasingly see Mormons as being on the same side of America’s politico religious divide as evangelicals and other religious conservatives who oppose abortion, gay rights and nontraditional gender roles. Social identity theory would predict that liberals, especially with secularist tendencies, would be less likely to trust Mormon candidates the more they associate Mormons with a conservative and authoritarian religious identity that is antithetical to their own. We might also expect that other religious conservatives would increasingly see Mormons as allies, and this may moderate any distrust based on denominational differences.

From this, I infer that the association between Mormonism and conservatism strengthens the ties between the two. Because Mormons seem culturally conservative, they become more fully absorbed into that ideology — liberals are uninterested in reaching out to them and conservatives feel an increasing affinity toward them. I suppose the answer here would be that, yes, many religious conservatives of minority groups are liberal, but Mormons are exceptionally conservative religiously and so are also conservative politically.

I don't know if that's a satisfying conclusion.

Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Conservatism, David Frum, David Smith, Liberalism, Mormonism, Religion, Religious Right