Mitt Romney: Evangelical Voodoo Doll

Media outlets of all varieties have over the years offered a robust sampling of strident anti-Mormonism. However, the volume and intensity of the rhetoric has measurably increased with Mitt Romney’s run for the presidency. Never have so many written so much about that which they understand so little. Blogs, newspapers and talk shows are overflowing with pundits too busy, too important, or too impatient to study the facts about a Church and people who have done incalculable good across the globe, including in Central Africa, for the past century and a half. But there appears to be more to the phenomenon than mere lack of understanding.

Romney has become a sort of voodoo doll through which longstanding critics can get at the Latter-Day Saints as a people. After Jason L. Riley launched his racial bomb at the Church in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, I decided that my silence might be misinterpreted as acceptance. Riley is wrong. Whether through malice or ignorance it is unclear. Regardless, I believe that thoughtful, objective observers will eventually see that he tortures the facts in an apparent bid to discredit the Church and its people, including Romney. The truth, when it comes to race, is that few organizations have done as much as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to build bridges and heal wounds.

Playing up Riley’s attack, some protestant commentators, like Paul Edwards, whose home page features pics of Mike Huckabee and (ironically) John Calvin, suggest that George Romney (Mitt’s father) should have just “walked out” or “used his considerable influence” back in 1964 to force the Church to change its then policy on blacks and the priesthood. A brief response to this suggestion is that just “walking out” would accomplish nothing. Romney would have had less influence after “walking out” than he did, in reality, by remaining in the Church. As to using his influence, can Edwards or anyone else know what kind of influence Romney exerted? For all we know, he did everything possible.

Meanwhile, back to Riley.

Riley asserts that the Church’s policy (during a period between about 1850 and 1978) banning blacks from the priesthood “was a manifestation of a central belief that blacks are unfit to be full members of the church on Earth, or to exist alongside whites in heaven.” The falsity of this assertion is demonstrated by official Church doctrine as well as the behavior of the Church and its leaders from its organization in 1830 down to the present day.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (often called the “Mormon” or “LDS” church or simply “the Church”) has historically been a leading advocate of civil rights for blacks, women, and everyone else. (Civil rights trivia question: Where in the United States were women first granted the right to vote by the territorial legislature, in 1870, and then denied it by the U.S. Congress? Hint: It wasn’t Alabama.) The essence of the LDS egalitarian racial sensibility is captured in the following quote attributed to Joseph Smith, the first President of the Church:

“They [Negroes] came into the world slaves, mentally and physically. Change their situation with the whites, and they would be like them. They have souls and are subject to salvation. Go to Cincinnati or any city, and find an educated Negro, who rides in his carriage, and you will see a man who has risen by his own mind to his exalted state of respectability.” (History of the Church 5:217)

Smith ran for the U.S. presidency, in 1844, on a platform that proposed, among other things, to free the slaves by financing their purchase from their owners by the sale of then plentiful public land. In return for this kind of progressive thinking, he was vilified and then assassinated by religious bigots and slaveholders who saw him as a political threat. In this sense, it is ironic to hear the Church that Smith formed criticized today for a temporary ban against blacks holding the priesthood that was lifted three decades ago. For more insight into this topic, try Robert C. Webb’s The Real Mormonism: A Candid Analysis Of An Interesting But Much Misunderstood Subject In History, Life And Thought. Don’t want to buy the book? Read the abundant excerpts at http://books.google.com!

In 1830, while some protestants in the United States were buying and selling slaves by the thousands, Joseph Smith was spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ informed, in part, by the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon, unlike the Holy Bible, clearly teaches that slavery is immoral. How was such a fundamental moral principle omitted from the Bible? Did its omission influence how American protestants viewed slavery?

Fast-forward 175 years to a small town near the Georgia-Florida boundary. In April 2007, Turner High School, in Ashburn, Georgia, for the first time in its history — extending at least into the early 1960s – sponsored a desegregated high school prom. In its write up of the event, a Reader’s Digest article noted how, in August 2007, “Gwendolyn Mathis, 49, associate pastor of a black [sic] church in Ashburn, still remembers being forced to sit upstairs in the balcony at the local movie theater in the 1970s, even after the schools were integrated. ‘When the theater burned down, it was never rebuilt because it would have to be black and white.’” Which religion predominates in Ashburn, Georgia? This much is for sure: there is no LDS congregation in Ashburn. Meanwhile, elsewhere across the South, hundreds of black protestant congregations have no white pastors.

In contrast, the LDS Church has thousands of black members and priesthood holders in the U.S. and in Africa where the Church has recently built three beautiful temples like the one shown below in Aba, Nigeria.

What do these costly temples say about LDS beliefs about the physical proximity of whites and blacks in heaven? You’d have to do more than visit a couple of anti-Mormon websites to get the right answer to this question.

LDS doctrine – found in The Holy Bible (KJV), the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price and teachings jointly approved by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles – emphatically holds today, as it always has, that people of all races are eternally equal in the sight of God who is our common Father. The Apostle Paul taught that we are all the offspring of God. As such, we share the ability to become as He is and to live eternally as He lives, in glory and happiness. We are all — regardless of our mortal skin color, finances or place of birth — equally eligible to live on the choicest real estate in the afterlife. Temples are the most powerful symbol of eternal life in the Church. They are, in a sense, gateways between Heaven and Earth.

Today, black and white members of the Church attend these temples side-by-side. Unlike things in Ashburn, Georgia, ain’t no white-only drinking fountains or restrooms in LDS temples, anywhere. Never in the history of the Church has there ever been a doctrine that blacks and whites would not live together in heaven. The temporary ban on black priesthood holders was always understood to be temporary; never was it a fact of eternal life.

Now, back to Mr. Edwards, Calvin, and Mike Huckabee. It is widely recognized, even by protestant scholars, that John Calvin’s regime in Geneva, Switzerland, shared disturbing features in common with a theocracy of more recent vintage, the Taliban. What with beheading, burning at the stake, and government-mandated given names, civil rights were not a priority under Calvin’s administration.

In contrast, LDS doctrine first enunciated by Joseph Smith, in 1835, teaches that while “religion is instituted of God,” “men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others” and that

“human law has [no] right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion; that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the freedom of the soul.”

One senses that Mike Huckabee, whose recent campaign spot used as a backdrop a slow-moving white cross (in the context of Huckabee’s aggressive emphasis on religion as one of his central qualifications for the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that this was just a coincidence), might find this doctrine difficult to live by.

No religious leader of the 1800s did more for the cause of civil rights than Joseph Smith. He and his Church were way ahead of their time. Today, no one feels the importance of civil rights any more viscerally than do the Latter-Day Saints.If the Paul Edwards of the world want to be taken seriously in a debate over religion and civil rights, they could start by distancing themselves from John Calvin. Alternatively, they might acknowledge that the world of politics, religion, and race is more complex and nuanced than Riley’s article pretends. If Joseph Smith’s critics had elected him President in 1844 and implemented his innovative proposal to end slavery, there likely would have been no Civil War.