Mormons have a very strong sense of the common good. I am part of a minority religion that has been abused, and I am not going to be party to telling anyone how they should or should not pray.” Hatch famously went on to work with Ted Kennedy for federally funded children’s health care. Then conservative Republicans proposed a school prayer amendment to the Constitution. In the 1980s, the New York Times didn’t know what to do with Orrin Hatch, who rode into the Senate as a conservative Republican Mormon. With the Moral Majority, it seems Mormons were crawling into bed politically with people who had a prejudice against them.
I headed off to the Mormon History Association national conference, and the group of scholars there are by and large Mormon, and they are not in any kind of political lockstep. That was the expectation I came into my research with. The Moral Majority reached out to Mormons, and because of that association, liberals tend to see Mormons as off-limits. There’s a tendency to see Mormons as a hegemony, as if they were en masse in thrall to church leadership. Polls ask, would you vote for a Mormon presidential candidate? People who self-identify as liberal have a tendency to say no. The other people who are uncomfortable with Mormons are socially and politically liberal Americans. So you had an increase in the amount of anti-Mormon propaganda coming out of religious communities. You had the rise of evangelical Christianity in politics, and for conservative Protestant Christians, Mormons are not Christians Mormons are a cult. I have gotten calls from friends and family who catch it on HBO and say, “I learned so much from that movie.” Why do negative images of Mormons linger? There was a film in 2007 called September Dawn, about the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857. There’s been a strong theme in the last 30 years in popular representations of Mormons of Mormon violence against non-Mormons, pioneer violence. Hutchison-Jones: I think a lot of what Americans think they know about Mormonism is wrong. BU Today: What do Americans in 2012 think of Mormons, and how much of what they think is accurate? A Pew Forum poll in July found 81 percent saying that they were comfortable with, or indifferent to, Romney’s faith.īU Today spoke with Hutchison-Jones about what prejudice against Mormons says about us and the prospects for Romney’s second bid for the White House. The negative images of Mormons far outlasted my expectations.” If voters’ self-description can be trusted, things may not be so grim. To her surprise, she learned that Mormonism remains “really problematic for a lot of people. Hutchison-Jones, a Harvard University administrator, is not Mormon, but an interest in religious intolerance led her to write her BU doctoral dissertation on “Reviling and Revering the Mormons: Defining American Values, 1890-2008.” (Those years marked the official Mormon abandonment of polygamy and Mitt Romney’s first run for president, respectively.) She began with the assumption that this would be another American story of a minority’s assimilation into, and acceptance by, the mainstream culture. Facts aside, Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has alarmed some conservative Christian voters pondering his run for president. In fact, she says, “no one has been more aggressive about prosecuting polygamists in this country in the 20th and 21st century than Mormons.” As for that underwear thing, she notes that other religions invest certain garb with sacred significance. And even though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamy in the 1890s (with the exception of a militant sliver), some non-Mormons suspect that “fundamentalist groups were somehow hiding in plain sight within the fold of the church,” says scholar Cristine Hutchison-Jones (GRS’11).
#ANTICHRIST MOVIE REDDIT FULL#
Photo by Austen HuffordĪ recent USA Today story highlights how many Americans are “uninformed” about, and “wary” of, Mormonism, put off by such practices as the wearing of blessed undergarments as the sign of full fellowship in the church. Twitter Facebook Why is this man smiling? Anti-Mormon prejudice could hobble Mitt Romney’s campaign, a BU-trained scholar warns.
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