By Bill Leonard
After all, Joseph Smith, the prophet/founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been gunned down in Carthage, Ill., 13 years earlier, the same year he declared his candidacy for president of the U.S.
A remnant of Smith’s followers struggled their way to Utah territory, but in 1857, their new leader, Brigham Young, was replaced as governor by a non-Mormon appointed by President James Buchanan. Government encroachment had begun in the “Kingdom of the West.” That action helped spark a new “Mormon War” including the massacre of a group of westward-bound immigrants at the hands of Mormon militia.
Also in 1857, the Supreme Court issued the “Dred Scott Decision,” ruling that no person of African ancestry, slave or free, could claim citizenship in the United States of America. African-Americans could not run for president since they were not legitimate citizens.
Only two years earlier, Louisville’s infamous Bloody Monday witnessed the death of 22 persons when Protestant mobs descended on Irish Catholics in a riot that pitted Democrats against the No-Nothing or American Party, a strong anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant coalition.
In short, as the vast majority of 19th century Anglo-Saxon Americans saw it, Mormons, African-Americans and Catholics were unfit for full U.S. citizenship, and consigned to lives of chattel slavery, exile in a polygamous Utah wilderness, or second-class status in the righteous empire of Protestant America, all with appropriate biblical justification.
Today, anyone who thinks that elements of such racism and religious bigotry no longer exist has failed to listen to talk radio, watch cable television or surf the Internet. Racist Obama “cartoons” inundate the Web; prominent Protestant pastors label Mormonism a “cult” and assorted evangelical college students target their “lost” Catholic suitemates for evangelization in dormitories across the American South.
Yet, irony of ironies, it appears that the presidential election of 2012 will involve a political confrontation between African-American Democrat Barack Obama and Mormon Republican Mitt Romney.
Such irony was compounded last week when a group of prominent Protestants, opponents of both Obama and Romney, endorsed the candidacy of Rick Santorum, one of the most doctrinally rigorous Roman Catholic candidates ever to seek the presidency. The conservative religionists gathered in Texas (of course) at a ranch near Brenham (home of Blue Bell Ice Cream) owned by Baptist/Republican Judge Paul Pressler, widely known orchestrator of the fundamentalist/conservative takeover/course correction that banished moderates/liberals from the Southern Baptist Convention.
It seemed quite natural that Judge Pressler should have them over to the house; he has been busing people to meetings to vote on rightwing issues for over 30 years. (Some of us have long believed that the infamous “SBC Controversy” had as much to do with Washington as it did with Nazareth.)
Nonetheless, these conservative Protestants selected a Roman Catholic candidate as their last and only hope for stopping an African-American “socialist” and a Mormon “moderate” from claiming the nation’s highest office. What seemed unthinkable in 1857 is now reality. Is this a great country or what?
What might this mean? Perhaps this:
1) Pluralistic democracy prevails, in response to or in spite of ideologies right and left. Slaves are free; Jim Crow is dead; polygamy is (mostly) illegal; and the Supreme Court has a Catholic majority.
2) America tends to “civilize” religious ideology, moderating some (though not all) of the most hidebound dogmatists. This “religion of civility” as John Murray Cuddihy called it, “instructs us in the ways of being religiously inoffensive, of giving ‘no offense,’ of being religiously sensitive to religious differences. To be complexly aware of our religious appearances to others is to practice the religion of civility. Thus, civil religion is the social choreography of tolerance. It dances out an attitude.”
3) Or, perhaps political expediency simply creates strange “pew-fellows.” Religious convictions shape political decisions, and vice versa, in every new election with every potentially electable candidate. Texan Rick Perry, the most publicly but least electable evangelical of the Republican candidates, illustrates the point.
Through it all let’s celebrate this: we don’t live in 1857. African-Americans, Mormons and Catholics run for office, and as Obama, Romney and Santorum illustrate, actually get elected.
Who knows, if Jesus tarries, maybe Judge Pressler will invite an ex-Southern Baptist like me to the ranch for a bowl of double chocolate Blue Bell Ice Cream. I’d bring a pint of Ben & Jerry’s AmeriCone Dream just for fun. (“Taste the truthfulness.”) Is this a great country, or what?