“A Mormon candidate and a black candidate? Who would have thunk?”
— Professor Marguerite Driessen, a black Mormon, quoted last month in The New York Times
Who would have thunk indeed? We accept our miracles placidly these days, without wonder or wide eyes. So no one of white Protestant heritage will appear on the presidential ballot? Ho, hum.
And if Mitt Romney chooses, say, Marco Rubio as his running mate, not a single white Protestant will grace either ticket. The once unthinkable will have become a clean sweep.
No doubt almost any electoral breakthrough these days pales in comparison to the stunning watershed of Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. Still, the nomination of a Mormon who has a decent chance to win actually does count as a big deal given the history of the Latter-Day Saints and their persecution in New York, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois before their migration West.
“The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary, for the public peace,” declared Missouri Gov. Lilburn W. Boggs in 1838. Even the Irish Catholics who would flood into America in a few years would rarely encounter hostility as sinister as this.
The reasons for such murderous hatred are complex — polygamy didn’t become the bone of contention until Mormons landed in what would become Utah — but suffice it to say no other 19th century religious sect, no matter how offbeat, seemed to engender the same degree of animosity.
Even after Mormons tried to mainstream themselves by formally rejecting polygamy in 1890, hardcore suspicion lingered. Nor has it entirely dissipated to this day.
As recently as January, a Gallup poll reported that 22 percent of Americans said they would not vote for a Mormon, including 27 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of Republicans.
Those Democrats wouldn’t vote for Romney if he were Episcopalian, of course, but hesitation among Republicans and independents constitutes a genuine stealth threat to his bid. Still, what voters tell pollsters in a hypothetical contest is not necessarily the same as what they do when confronting an implacable choice at the polls.
As for evangelical Protestants with qualms about Mormonism, they’re apt to realize what Sen. Joe Lieberman said he learned while running as the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 2000, namely that “practicing Jews and Christians and Muslims often have more in common with each other than with their non-believing peers.”
We sometimes forget how far we’ve come in terms of religious acceptance. In 1928, when Al Smith was the first Catholic presidential standard-bearer, it was not uncommon to hear fulminations about his subservience to the “autocrat on the Tiber,” or how Catholics secretly despised individual rights and, to quote a fairly typical anti-Catholic minister, “everything that is essential to independence.”
As late as 1960, during my lifetime, John Kennedy was so alarmed by the religious divide in the primary in Wisconsin — he beat Hubert Humphrey but lost Protestant precincts — that he felt he had no choice but to tackle the issue head-on in Protestant West Virginia. So he did, with grace and eloquence, and took that state, too.
Kennedy’s triumph did not exactly open the floodgates to non-traditional candidates, although Michael Dukakis (Eastern Orthodox) and John Kerry (Catholic) received a Democratic Party nomination. And then of course Obama broke the mold again, leaving most of us remarkably blase this time around.
Still, a Mormon and a black man as the only choices for president? Who in his right mind would have thunk it?
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter
