Latter-day Saints are having another political moment
The cascading number of what we previously called “Mormon moments” seem to be accelerating since the turn of the 21st century.
As another one seems to have arrived in the latter stages of the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, media members, pundits and academics will need a new term. “Latter-day Saints moments” doesn’t have the same alliterative, bisyllabic ring to it. Please fill my email inbox with your suggestions.
Regardless of what we call it, there is an obsession in the campaigns of both President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden to court the votes of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially in possible swing states like Arizona, Florida and Nevada.
The New York Times has written about the phenomenon twice in less than three weeks. Politico has covered it twice in six weeks. Something is afoot.
I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days, so I sought some historical perspective on these types of “Latter-day Saint moments” from Rick Turley, who served from 2008-16 as assistant church historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“There seem to be certain groups in America that focus on education and participation in community activities that as a result tend to draw more prominence than their size might suggest, and Latter-day Saints are one of those groups,” he said.
For example, while Latter-day Saints make up about 2% of the U.S. population, last week one of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee — for the hearings on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court — was a Latter-day Saint and one of the witnesses called to testify was a church member — Thomas Griffith, recently retired from what many consider the second-most important court in the nation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Turley credited the church’s outsized contribution to American institutions to its emphasis on the ideas that members should seek education and participate in the political process.
He steered through a series of historical moments when Latter-day Saints entered the national consciousness, something he said that really began in the 1830s when the young church was driven from Missouri.
“The refugees became part of the consciousness,” Turley said. “We have Joseph Smith’s presidential campaign in 1844, which certainly was significant. Likewise, in 1846-47 as the Saints left Nauvoo and then Winter Quarters and moved west, that became a topic of national conversation, which happened again with the Utah War in 1857-58.” |
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Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in 1862 launched a national campaign against polygamy that lasted until Utah statehood in 1896, a time when “Utah, and by extension the church, was constantly in the papers,” Turley said.
The Reed Smoot hearings in the first decade of the 1900s, which decided whether the Latter-day Saint would be seated as a U.S. senator, focused national attention on the church again.
“Then, interestingly, things begin to shift,” Turley said. “As Kathleen Flake points out, the decisions that grew out of the Reed Smoot hearings were essentially that the national government would grandfather in polygamous marriages as long as the church sanctioned no new ones and assimilated into American culture.”
Latter-day Saint women also played an interesting role in the suffrage movement in the United States, he added.
“By the time you get to World War I,” he said, “Latter-day Saints are seen as being part of the American fabric, unusual but weaving into that fabric.”
New attention came during the Great Depression when American disillusionment with the nation’s economic structure turned eyes west to Utah’s cooperative institutions, such as irrigation projects highlighted by John Wesley Powell’s landmark book on the West’s arid lands.
“Hollywood took notice, and that led to the film ‘Brigham Young,’ which premiered as the largest premiere up to that time of a film,” Turley said. “That film had important national actors in it and drew attention because suddenly these people in the West who had worked cooperatively were seen as having something that they could maybe offer the rest of the nation.
“By the time you get to World War II, and then the middle of the 20th century, the values of the church and the values of the nation align very, very closely. And so Latter-day Saints are seen as being the paradigmatic American citizen.”
That began to change again with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. American and church values began to diverge again.
Over the past 20 years, the church has leaped into the American national conversation for extended periods of time with the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney (when the term “Mormon moment” was coined), the controversial release of the “Book of Mormon” musical and, now, the reaction of church members to the Trump presidency. |
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| What I’m Reading ... My friend and colleague, Sarah Jane Weaver, launched the Church News Podcast this week with an interview of President M. Russell Ballard, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who turned 92 earlier this month.
The church has added Olympic gold medal gymnast Peter Vidmar, famed youth speaker John Bytheway and President Ballard’s son to the Young Men general board.
Don’t you love it when you find an incredibly insightful nugget in the most unexpected place? Like this from Sam Miller: “We all struggle sometimes with the question of what winning a baseball game or series actually accomplishes, what it’s for, why we care, why they care, and I’ve come to believe a win’s value is largely in providing grace to the teammates who failed. (Tampa Bay Rays infielder Joey) Wendle, a quietly valuable and versatile member of the Rays’ infield over the past three years, … has the Rays’ lowest win probability added this postseason, but instead of carrying that burden of failure around with him for the rest of his life, he got to celebrate and put it immediately and entirely behind him, 100% absolved thanks to the clutch greatness of friends. What sanctification!” I read everything Sam Miller writes for ESPN because he’ll sneak insights like that a simple piece that ranks all 56 players in the World Series.
This one is wacky. We’ve reached the 10-year anniversary of something I never knew happened, the day the Ohio University mascot attacked the Ohio State University mascot on the football field. The student inside the mascot suit had planned it for a long time and wasn’t even a student when it finally happened. As the headline says, it is legendary and laughable.
The official BYU Magazine explores the Black experience at BYU.
“How does serving a mission affect attitudes on global development? What one economist found out,” by LDS Living.
Who could resist sharing the best wildlife photos of 2020? From National Geographic. |
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 | | Facebook reminded me today that two years ago on this date I was in Bolivia to cover President Russell M. Nelson’s visit to that country as part of his ministry visits across South America. These two sister missionaries helped me find my way through the stadium in La Paz, where I cautiously climbed the stairs because of the high altitude (13,000 feet). |
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 | This old church logo and the brick on the side of a meetinghouse in Medford, Oregon, that I visited when covering the devastation of the wildfires there a few weeks ago reminded me of meetinghouses from my youth enough that I wanted a snapshot. |
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