Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Photo: AP/Cheryl Senter

A Salon photo composite of Mitt Romney and the Mormon Temple.

Walter Shapiro, Mitt Romney, GOP race, Mormons | Salon.com, December 6, 2007

America has been wacky about religion and the Oval Office since Richard Nixon, a Quaker, asked Henry Kissinger, a non-practicing Jew, to pray during the depths of Watergate. (That incident was memorably parodied during the first season of “Saturday Night Live” when Nixon, played by Dan Aykroyd, said to John Belushi’s Kissinger, “Don’t you want to pray, you Christ-killer.”)

During a 1984 presidential debate, Ronald Reagan became the first candidate to use the terrorism excuse to explain why he did not attend religious services: “I don’t feel that I have a right to go to church, knowing that my being there could cause something of the kind that we have seen in … Beirut, for example.” Bill Clinton prayed with the Rev. Billy Graham in early 1998 on the same day that the president denied for the third time that he had any involvement with Monica Lewinsky. Graham told reporters, “I know he is sincere.”

Even with this tangled history, it is hard to recall a campaign year when electing a president has been so wrapped up in religion. Huckabee’s new TV ads promote him as a “Christian leader”; the recent CNN-YouTube debate demanded that GOP presidential contenders reveal whether they believe every word in the Bible in a literal sense; and even Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are eager to testify to their religious faith. How far we have come in just four years from the 2004 NPR debate in Iowa in which John Kerry bravely confessed, “My experience in Vietnam … made me question [my faith] for a period of time.”

Is it a sign of societal progress that in a campaign featuring a woman, an African-American and a Hispanic, it is the straight-arrow white male Mormon who is the only major target of prejudice? All this year national polls have painted a chilling picture of the extent of religious bigotry against Mormons. A Time magazine survey in May found that 30 percent of all voters would be “less supportive” of a Mormon candidate. That figure contrasts with 9 percent who say that they would be “less supportive” of a Catholic candidate and 11 percent of a Jewish candidate.

Fifty percent of all voters in a July Newsweek poll said that America was not yet ready to elect a Mormon president. So what does America need to get ready for a Mormon president? Another 218 years of the Constitution’s barring a “religious test” for public office?

Critics of the Church of the Latter Day Saints can easily point to passages in the Book of Mormon that seem bizarre and unfathomable to non-believers. But the same can be done with the Book of Revelation or Old Testament accounts of a “wrathful” God. Religious beliefs by their very nature are not subject to the same dispassionate analysis as healthcare plans.