Recently in Mormons Category

We know about the political Gender Gap: the tendency of women vote Democratic and men to vote Republican. And we know about the God Gap: the tendency of the more religious to vote Republican and the less religious to vote Democratic. To these two (discussed here) we should start thinking about a third gap, more limited in scope but nevertheless of real potential significance. Call it the Mormon Gap: the tendency of evangelicals to vote disproportionately against Mormon candidates in Republican primaries.

The Mormon Gap may be defined as the percentage-point difference between the evangelical and the non-evangelical vote for a given Mormon candidate. Despite reports from the field alleging that Mitt Romney's Mormonism is less of a factor this primary season than it was in 2008, the Mormon gap has thus far not shrunk. To the contrary.

As I've noted before, Romney did worse with evangelicals in this year's Iowa Caucuses than he did four years ago. Then the Mormon Gap (Evangelicals/Non-Evangelicals) was 14 points (19/33); this year it was 24 points (14/38). In New Hampshire, the gap was seven points in 2008 (27/34) and nine points this year (31/40). In South Carolina, the gap was 8 points in 2008 (11/19); according to the latest PPP poll, it's now running at 18 points (21/39).

Now you might think that what we're looking at is not a Mormon Gap but a Romney Gap. But there's a good piece of evidence that suggests that this is not just about Romney. In this year's New Hampshire primary there was a second Mormon candidate who did well enough for a Mormon Gap to be assessed. And in John Huntsman's case the gap was 10 points (9/19).

Of course, given contests with different proportions of evangelical voters and multiple candidates finishing with varying vote totals, the significance of the Mormon Gap changes from state to state. In Iowa and South Carolina, where evangelicals make up some 60 percent of the Republican electorate, it's very significant. In New Hampshire, where they are less than a quarter, not so much: Romney's 9-point gap reduced his total vote by just three percentage points.

How much does the Mormon Gap matter? After the 2008 election cycle, John Green and I ran the numbers and concluded that Mitt Romney lost the nomination because evangelicals didn't vote for him. If he loses the nomination this time around, it will be for the same reason.

To evangelicals, that is. Here's how R. Philip Roberts, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, explained it to Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times:

I don't have any concerns about Mitt Romney using his position as either a candidate or as president of the United States to push Mormonism. The concern among evangelicals is that the Mormon Church will use his position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people.

That would be kind of like Focus on the Family using Tim Tebow's position as the anointed quarterback of the Denver Broncos to run its cute John 3:16 commercial during Saturday's Broncos-Patriots blowout.

Personally, I'd be surprised if the LDS Church decided to feature President Romney (much less Candidate Romney) in one of its "I'm a Mormon" ads. But Roberts' admission does tell us something about why evangelical leaders really like the idea of having one of their own in the White House: It's as much about the religious as the political agenda.

According to Gallup, anyway. In its annual survey of Americans' religious preferences, the eminent polling firm 1) declares that 78 percent of Americans "identify with some form of Christian religion"; and 2) breaks out Mormons as a separate category. Add up the numbers for Protestant/Other Christian, Catholic, and Mormon and you get...78 percent.

I expect this hasn't escaped their notice in Salt Lake. It will be interesting to see if there is any squawking from Protestant/Other Christian or Catholic quarters.

As the Gingrich balloon sinks  back to earth under the weight of its own bombast, Airship Romney motors along, buoyed by the improbability of the alternatives and imperilled only by...the Dark Cloud of Mormonism.

Maybe. To find out, the Salt Lake Tribune engaged Mason-Dixon to do some polling on religion and the GOP's Great Race, and came up with the interesting info that while half of Democrats consider Mormons to be Christians, nearly two-thirds of Republicans do. What happened to all that anti-Mormonism in the Republican base?

I'm thinking that the prospect of having Mitt Romney in the White House is driving (some) Republicans to reassess their exclusion of Mormons from the Christian fold. Only last month, Pew found that little more than half of Republicans considered the Mormon religion to be Christian. (The margin was 54-33, compared to the Tribune's 63-20.) Fully 87 percent of Republicans want their presidential contenders to be Christian (as opposed to 67 percent of Democrats), so if you can't beat 'em, let 'em join you.

Of course, it all comes down to choosing actual candidates, and mercifully, more pollsters are recognizing the need for including religious i.d. in their questionnaires. A case in point is Quinnipiac's most recent Virginia poll, which has Gingrich and Romney running one-two at 30 percent and 25 percent respectively. Sure enough, Gingrich has disproportionately more evangelicals (34 percent) and Romney disproportionately fewer (22 percent). Even so, Mitt's got as much evangelical support as the three evangelicals--Bachmann, Paul, and Perry--combined. If he does secure the nomination, I look for further revaluation of Mormonism's claims to Christian identity.

Four years ago, Richard Land, who took over the public affairs division of the Southern Baptist Convention sometime in the last millennium, had the clever idea of identifying Mormonism as the "fourth Abrahamic religion"-- after Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Land was seeking to provide some cover for Mitt Romney, whom he didn't exactly endorse for the GOP presidential nomination but whom he definitely preferred to fellow Southern Baptist Mike Huckabee. (Just why is a nice question for another day.) Since then, other non-Mormon Christians have picked up on the usage, most recently Neal Humphrey of the Ogden Standard Examiner.

But why exactly Abrahamic? The term has come into general use in order to extend the awning of Western religious identity over Islam. Islam is called an Abrahamic religion because it traces its origins to Abraham--via Ishmael, Abraham's son by the maidservant Hagar, both cast out of the household in deference to Sarah's wishes backed up by God's command. It is through Isaac, Abraham's son by Sarah, that Judaism and Christianity trace their lineage to Abraham. Call us one big unhappy Abrahamic family.

Although Joseph Smith did produce a Book of Abraham, Mormonism is Abrahamic in exactly the sense that Judaism and traditional Christianity are--descended through the line of Isaac. Indeed, among the restorationist religious movements of the Second Great Awakening, what distinguished Mormonism was its claim to be restoring ancient Judaism (the Temple, patriarchal polygamy, etc.) as well as ancient Christianity. In that sense, it is perhaps the quintessential manifestation of latter-day Judeo-Christianity.

Of course, it is easy to understand why evangelicals like Land would prefer Mormons to be Abrahamic. Like Muslims, they have an additional holy book. Like Muslims, they claim a revelation that takes them to a new level. Like Muslims, they compete with evangelicals for converts. But none of these circumstances make Mormons more Abrahamic than Judeo-Christian.

"I am shaped by the Judeo-Christian values which I have and I hope those will hold me in good stead, as they have so far," Mitt Romney said last week in Council Bluffs. If I were him, I'd keep playing up his Judeo-Christianity. As much as evangelicals have come to identify the term with themselves, it will be a lot harder for them to exclude Mormons from the Judeo-Christian fold than the Christian one.

It's possible that the overt anti-Mormonism expressed by Robert Jeffress and Bryan Fischer represents little more than frantic concern among the evangelical elite that the Republican nomination is in imminent danger of slipping into the hands of a heretic. As Sarah Posner pointed out over the weekend, last time around the anti-Mormonism was more discreet. When you've got the likes of Pat Robertson willing to accept Mitt Romney as the party's Christian standard-bearer, it's no wonder that the more excitable Christian Americanists find themselves on the anxious bench. In these economic hard times, the rank and file are going to be more concerned with choosing the candidate most likely to defeat Barack Obama, no?

Not likely. A few months ago, the Pew Research Center's Carroll Doherty pointed out that white evangelicals are just as loath to vote for a Mormon now as they were back in 2007. Then, their reluctance to do so cost Romney the nomination. That, at least, was John Green's and my conclusion, in an article that relied on a regression analysis of the state Republican primary returns--which, unfortunately, has escaped the notice of TPM. Of course, you never dip your toe into the same electoral river twice, and given the absence of a Huckabee or a McCain, Romney may well swim easily away with the nomination this time. But if, as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council hinted, "values voters" coalesce around a single un-Romney, he will have his work cut out for him.

Both Mormon presidential wannabes showed up at Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition (FFC) confab in Washington and managed to let the white evangelicals in the audience know who they were without actually using the M-word. After beginning his talk with a litany of anti-abortionism, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman gave a big shout-out to the people of his state and to the magnificence of its super well-run government and super prosperity, perhaps not realizing that nothing annoys white evangelicals more than having to acknowledge the kempt successes of Mormon lives and communities.

As for Mitt Romney, he began by noting that there "we're united tonight in a lotta things," which is to say, there's that thing that we're not united in, that bit me in the butt last time around. Before that, there was his youthful wife Ann, who introduced her husband by mentioning her 16 grandchildren. Sixteen?? And what about your sister wives?

Yes, the emergence of the FFC (which may or may not become a readily identifiable acronym) has provoked a spate of familiar talk about whether or not those pesky evangelicals will support a Mormon for president. Helpfully, Pew came out with a new survey last Thursday that provides some insight into the question. Amy Sullivan rings the changes on it; cutting to the chase, nothing much has changed from four years ago, when one-third of evangelicals said they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon--way more than any other religious group. Less helpfully, Pew doesn't present a simple cross-tabulation showing which candidates white evangelical Republicans like in the current GOP field--something that's done for Tea Partiers. C'mon, Pew!

If the question at hand is whether white evangelicals are going to sink a Mormon candidacy in the GOP primaries, then what we want to know is whom they're going to vote for, whether or not they say they're "less likely" to vote for a Mormon. At this point, according to Pew, Romney has the highest name recognition of any candidate in the field other than Palin and Gingrich, and whereas 39 percent and 38 percent of GOP voters who recognize the latter two say they wouldn't vote for them, as Amy notes, only 18 percent who recognize Mitt say they wouldn't vote for him--lowest in the entire field (tied with the relatively unknown but currently hot Herman Cain). So while there is a high correlation between those who say they're less likely to vote for a Mormon and those who say they won't vote for Mitt Romney, that doesn't add up to big negatives. Maybe evangelical anti-Mormonism will be no biggie, this time around.

The prosecutors overreached...sez I.

...the go-to source is Joanna Brooks, over at Religion Dispatches. In the latest of her posts, Brooks explains why Mike Lee's victory in Utah's GOP Senate primary Tuesday was not the clear-cut Tea Party triumph that some--i.e. WaPo's David Weigel--imagine it to be. In Utah, Mormon roots run very deep, and you can't tell the players without a genealogical scorecard.

Bottom line: Lee's as hooked into the multi-generational Mormon past as you can be, while his opponent, Tim Bridgewater, is not. That's not to say that Lee didn't have some Tea Party support. But as Brooks points out, the movement has distinct regional variants, and in Utah it's got a strong admixture of Mormon establishmentarianism: "Call it Brigham Tea?"

For months and months, Harry Reid seemed about as likely to be reelected to the Senate as the Orioles are to win the American League East. But a new poll now shows him leading all three of his main Republican rivals. What gives?

As the folks over at TPM point out, the GOP candidates have done an excellent job of knocking each other down. But there may be a bit of a hidden religious factor at work as well. At the Mormon History Association meetings in Kansas City last weekend, the word was that the leadership of the LDS Church was putting out quiet signals that it would be a good thing if Reid retained his seat. No Mormon has ever held a higher position of authority, and even if virtually all of the church's general authorities (as they're called) are Republicans, keeping a Mormon Democrat as Senate Majority Leader is preferable to having him replaced with a first-term Republican.

None of the three leading Republicans are Mormons, and though a latecomer to the field, Chad Christensen, has been playing the LDS card for all it's worth, he's not given much of a chance. Anecdotally, Reid--who is an active and enthusiastic member of the church--seems to enjoy considerable LDS support.

How much of a difference does the LDS vote make in the Silver State? According to the 2008 Trinity ARIS, Mormons constitute only 5.2 percent of the population. (Thanks to emigration from California, that's down from 9 percent a decade ago.) Still, in a close election, a few percentage points matter, and turnout among Mormons is always high. 

Mitt Romney scored a huge and unexpected victory In the January 2008 Republican caucuses, racking up over 50 percent of the vote to Ron Paul's 14 percent and John McCain's 13 percent. Later that year, Obama beat John McCain handily, 55-43. With the quiet blessing of Salt Lake City, I wouldn't count Harry Reid out this year.