This is a book about Mormons and American politics, a religious community and a subject that frequently elicit strong reactions. Some readers will have a negative perception of Mormons, others will have a positive view, and some will be Mormons themselves. Still others will not have a prior opinion one way or the other and are reading this book out of curiosity (or perhaps because it was assigned in a class). Since our readers will come to this subject with different backgrounds, let us explain ours.

We recognize that it is unusual to highlight authors’ personal, especially religious, backgrounds in a work of empirical social science. But owing to the fervent opinions Mormonism can engender, many readers will undoubtedly wonder about our connections to the faith. Readers who would rather not know our religious perspectives should stop reading this and skip to Chapter 1. Perhaps, upon finishing the book, they can try to guess our religions and then come back to find out whether they are right.

In the fall of 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York and surrounding areas. Within a few days of the hurricane, Mormon volunteers donned yellow vests with a “Mormon Helping Hands” logo and divided into small teams to help local residents begin to clean up. For the next several months, they spent weekends in “chainsaw brigades,” clearing fallen trees, removing mud and debris from homes, tearing out damaged walls and carpet, and disinfecting what remained (Trapasso 2012). The LDS Church estimates that 28,000 Mormons logged more than 275,000 hours of labor – a remarkable figure given that Mormons make up a very small share of the population in the region (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 2012a).

This vast volunteer effort was led and coordinated by the regional and local LDS leadership. Recall that in Chapter 1 we described the importance of religious authority within Mormonism. With authority comes hierarchy, which means a clear “chain of command” for activating Church members. For example, volunteers from the Princeton First Ward responded to a call from their stake president that was delivered through the ward’s bishop and other ward-level leaders such as the “Elders Quorum President” (the leader of a ward’s priesthood organization for men). Within a week of the hurricane, ward members were asked to attend or participate via conference call in an “all hands” training session to learn the basics of participating in the Mormon Helping Hands program. As part of ten- to twelve-person teams, the typical active ward member spent two or three weekends working from late October to late December. Nor was the volunteer effort limited to Mormons in storm-ravaged communities. Mormons from less-affected areas traveled to New York and the New Jersey shore, camping at LDS ward buildings while they worked for the weekend (Snell 2013).

On March 8, 2013, Dieter F. Uchtdorf, Second Counselor in the First Presidency of the LDS Church, joined a group of religious leaders in a meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss immigration reform. Upon leaving the meeting, Uchtdorf said that what the president said “was totally in line with our values.” While not endorsing any specific proposal, the LDS Church also issued a statement supportive of immigration reform that sounded a lot more like the platform of the Democratic than the Republican Party. “Public officials should create and administer laws that reflect the best of our aspiration as a just and caring society. Such laws will properly balance love for neighbors, family cohesion, and the observance of just and enforceable laws” (Canham 2013).

Some observers might be surprised at the common ground between LDS leaders and the Obama administration on immigration. As we have seen in Chapter 4, Mormons are more heavily Republican than any other religious group. Furthermore, Mitt Romney, President Obama’s opponent in the 2012 election, is a devout Mormon who took a hard line on immigration, even endorsing a policy of “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants. Yet Uchtdorf, and the LDS leadership more generally, are more in step with Mormons’ attitudes on immigration than Romney – notwithstanding Mormons’ overall conservatism and support of the Republican Party.

Just as the 2012 presidential race was heating up, the Pew Mormons in America Survey found that 68 percent of Mormons thought their fellow Americans did not consider Mormonism “mainstream.” But a nearly identical number, 63 percent, also indicated that their fellow citizens were becoming more accepting of Mormons. And 56 percent of Mormons said Americans were ready to elect a Mormon president. Simultaneously believing that they are viewed with suspicion and that the suspicion is waning reflects the Mormon paradox of being a self-consciously peculiar people who are also quintessential Americans. The belief that full acceptance by society will come one day undoubtedly stems from the optimistic spirit of the proselytizing people Mormons are.

Mormons have long sought their own promised land, where they can be both clearly distinctive and fully at peace with their neighbors. Or, as Mormons themselves often put it, they want to be in the world, not of the world – yet also accepted by the world. They would like to be counted among the “mainstream” faiths, grouped in the public mind with Protestants, Catholics, and Jews rather than, say, Scientologists or Wiccans. Mormons have earned a measure of such acceptance in many other venues, including business, sports, entertainment, literature, and academia. But in a democratic society, a key measure of acceptance is politics – an area that has produced mixed results for the Latter-day Saints. Old secular and religious tensions persist, even with new allies, and a Mormon has yet to break the stained-glass ceiling to win the White House.

This book employed several special surveys conducted by the authors as well as secondary analysis of other data sets. The details are listed below. All links were live as of October 7, 2013.

Special Surveys Conducted by Authors

1. Peculiar People Survey 2012. Self-identified Mormons; YouGov online panel; N = 500; http://csed.byu.edu/Research/PeculiarPeopleSurvey.aspx.

2. Mormon Perceptions Study 2012. General population, pre- and post-election interviews; YouGov online panel; N = 1,349; http://csed.byu.edu/Research/MormonPerceptionsSurvey.html.

3. YouGov Daily Omnibus Survey 2014 (replication of feeling thermometer from Mormon Perceptions Survey). General population; YouGov online panel; N = 1,000; http://csed.byu.edu/Research/MormonPerceptionsSurvey.aspx.

4. Cooperative Congressional Election Study 2012. Akron, BYU, and Notre Dame pre-election modules; YouGov online panel; N = 3,000; http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces/data.

5. Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project 2008. Akron, BYU, and Notre Dame January modules 2008; YouGov online panel; N = 3,000; http://ccap.yougov.com/.

Methodological Note: YouGov online panel surveys employ a matching procedure to representative samples; see Jackman and Vavreck (2010) for the details of matching process, and Vavreck and Rivers (2008) on the representativeness of the samples drawn using this method. Overall, the results of these surveys are consistent with findings from telephone surveys.

Chapter 8 provided an overview of Mitt Romney’s political career and the role Mormonism has played within it. In this chapter, we dig deeper into voters’ reactions to Romney’s LDS faith. To do so, we begin with two incidents from his first and last campaigns that illustrate the Mormon paradox: peculiar people or quintessential Americans?

Romney’s religion was first used against him during his unsuccessful 1994 U.S. Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy. With Romney and Kennedy tied in the polls and the campaign heating up, Joseph Kennedy, Ted’s nephew and a member of the House of Representatives, played the religion card. He told reporters:

Kennedy later apologized, saying that he was unaware that the LDS Church had ended its racial restrictions in 1978 but, in doing so, nonetheless again reminded voters of the Church’s controversial history regarding race. Notwithstanding his nephew’s apology, Ted Kennedy himself entered the fray by once again raising the issue of the LDS Church and its pre-1978 racial policies. The Kennedy campaign was only picking up where Romney’s opponent in the Republican primary, John Lakian, had left off. He too had broached the issue of Romney’s religion, even referring to Romney as “Mr. Mormon” during a televised debate (R. L. Welch and Jensen 2007).

Like voters in the rest of the nation, Utahns of the 1870s had a choice between two political parties. Yet unlike elsewhere, the two parties were not the Democrats and the Republicans. Instead, they were the People’s Party and the Liberal Party, both indigenous only to the Beehive state. While in the rest of the United States, Democrats and Republicans debated the merits of Reconstruction and the state of the post-Civil War union, the Utah parties were divided by religion. The People’s Party was the Mormon party, organized under the auspices of the LDS Church; the Liberal Party was the non-Mormon, or “gentile,” party.

This was not the first time that Mormons banded together at the polls. In the infant days of the Church, Mormons in Missouri voted as a bloc, causing friction with their non-Mormon neighbors. Likewise, when they fled Missouri at gunpoint and settled in Illinois, church founder Joseph Smith was regularly courted by prominent politicians seeking the sizeable Mormon vote in the thriving city of Nauvoo. By the 1840s, Mormons had become “swing voters,” alternating between the Whigs and Democrats (Bowman 2012a). And in 1844, Joseph Smith ran for president as an independent candidate (see Chapter 8 for details).

Reed Smoot represented Utah in the United States Senate from 1903 to 1933. During his tenure, he became the most senior member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and the head of the equally important Senate Finance Committee. Within his party, Smoot was instrumental in seeing that Warren G. Harding secured the 1920 Republican presidential nomination, and was also a close confidant of presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft (Flake 2004).

Smoot’s career, however, had an inauspicious start. Upon arriving in the nation’s capital, there was vehement opposition to his seating in the Senate. The question of whether his religion disqualified him from service in the U.S Congress was debated in the Senate, and around the country, for years. That Smoot was a Mormon was controversial enough. But Smoot was also a member of the Mormon hierarchy – a “prophet, seer, and revelator” – and, as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, one of a small number of men in line to become the Church’s president. At the time that Smoot was elected by the Utah State Legislature, Mormonism still met with widespread disapproval nationwide. Polygamy – which had not yet been fully extinguished – remained controversial, but that did not exhaust the concerns raised about Mormonism. What did Mormons do in their temples, out of public view? Did they place loyalty to their Church over fealty to flag, country, and constitution? Would Smoot be a puppet controlled by the president of the LDS Church?

On January 29, 1844, Joseph Smith launched an independent campaign for the White House (Garr 2007). The first member of the clergy to run for president, Smith was described as a “prophet, priest, and king.” These titles reflected Smith’s concept of “theo-democracy” and his combined roles as mayor and general of the militia in the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois (Wicks and Foister 2005, 105–7). The Church was central to the operation of the campaign: his vice-presidential running mate, Sidney Rigdon, was also a Mormon leader; the effort was managed by a newly founded “Council of Fifty”; and nearly 600 missionaries, elders, and apostles were dispatched across the country to campaign (Robertson 2000). These activities, plus the possibility of a Mormon “bloc vote” determining the outcome in Illinois, gave the campaign potential influence in the close presidential contest.

Styled as “General” Smith in his campaign, the candidate was described as “an independent man with American principles,” in contrast to his major party rivals, Democrat James K. Polk and Whig Henry Clay (Wicks and Foister 2005, 127). In this regard, Smith offered a broad agenda of reform that cut across major party lines, including western territorial expansion, the abolition of slavery, founding a national bank, and the end of penitentiaries. One of his most controversial proposals was the use of the federal army to protect religious minorities. The campaign argued that Mormons could no longer be “oppressed and mobbed under a tyrannical government” and compared their mistreatment to that of Catholics, abolitionists, and African Americans (Bringhurst and Foster 2011, 43).

In 1996, Time magazine named Stephen R. Covey one of the twenty-five most influential Americans. His best-known book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1990), has long been a staple of bookstores and best-seller lists, having sold more than 25 million copies. Covey built a self-help empire teaching executives how to employ his habits to make an effective business. When he passed away in 2012, his New York Times obituary noted that “more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies” had sought his advice (D. Martin 2012). Covey also consulted with political leaders, winning praise from Democrats like President Bill Clinton and Republicans like Newt Gingrich. His advice even extended beyond the boardroom to the family room with a follow-up book on creating highly effective families (Covey 1997). With his bipartisan appeal, folksy wisdom, and sunny disposition, Covey was part Norman Vincent Peale, part Dale Carnegie.

Covey was also a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Far from merely a peripheral aspect of his life and work, Covey’s Mormonism served as the foundation for his famous seven habits. Fellow Mormon and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen told the Economist that “the seven habits are essentially a secular distillation of Mormon teaching” (Economist 2012). Indeed, prior to writing The Seven Habits, Covey published a book for a Mormon audience, The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (1970), which employed many of the same concepts.

Most people do not take kindly to being described as “peculiar,” finding the term pejorative and perhaps even insulting. Not Mormons. In a national survey of Latter-day Saints we conducted, 79 percent agreed that they can be described as a “peculiar people,” echoing the frequent use of this phrase within LDS circles. If the willing adoption of peculiar as a label seems, well, peculiar, we should note that the phrase is biblical, used in both the Old and New Testaments to describe God’s people. The apostle Peter speaks of converts to Christianity as “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9), echoing the language in Deuteronomy describing the Israelites as “a holy people . . . a peculiar people” (Deuteronomy 14:2). In this context, peculiar does not mean strange so much as “chosen.” Mormons often use the term with a hint of wry humor, while also relishing the differentness that comes with being a practicing member of their faith.

Mormons’ self-perception of their peculiarity is empirically accurate. As we will detail in the pages to follow, Mormons are highly distinctive in many ways – religiously, culturally, and politically. In this chapter, we argue that Mormons are an example of an “ethno-religious” group – one of many in American history and society – characterized by a distinctive subculture. The Mormon subculture is peculiar: it has the high level of group solidarity typically associated with ethnicity, nationality, or race, but this ethnic-like character is the product of religion. We call this subculture the “sacred tabernacle.” However, high solidarity with insiders comes at the price of high tension with outsiders. This trade-off is the theme of this chapter and, indeed, this whole book.