The presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, left, and the FLDS polygamy scandal exposed the schism between Mormons and Christian extremists

Many people within the Christian right view Mormonism as a demonic cult, primarily because they believe Mormon dogma asserts that Jesus was the brother of Satan. So why then would Mormons donate half the $40 million budget of the Christian extremists’ Proposition 8 campaign to end the right for gays to marry in California?
By revealing their hateful, almost gleeful aggression toward gays, any inroads Mormons may have made with Christian extremists in this sorry episode could well come at the cost of hobbling their efforts to join mainstream society forever.
Some are suggesting that the Mormon leaders were attempting to align themselves with the Christian right after tensions were exposed between them and evangelicals during the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, a lifelong Mormon whose grandfather had five wives:

The Southern Baptist Convention website categorizes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a “cult” that is “radically” different from historic, biblical Christianity.

A faith guide issued by the influential Christian right group Focus on the Family declares that “God cannot be identified … with the Mormon religion’s notion of god.” And each year, evangelical organizers behind the National Day of Prayer bar Mormons from speaking at their proceedings…

“It would be extraordinarily hard for mainline denomination people in the South to openly and strongly politick or be involved in a Mormon’s run for office,” said Bobby Welch, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest non-Catholic denomination and a fixture of the Christian right.

The division was so pronounced that Romney was forced to give a speech about his faith — an effort that was compared to John F. Kennedy’s speech on his Catholicism during the 1960 campaign. Unlike Kennedy’s speech, however, Romney’s was not well-received, mainly because it was delivered with all the emotional impact of a Powerpoint presentation.

It also hurt the Mormon cause when, two months after Romney dropped his presidential bid, a scandal erupted in which the state of Texas removed dozens of children from a compound operated by the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a renegade polygamous Mormon sect. The visuals of the glassy-eyed “sister wives” in their 19th-century prairie dresses were a stark reminder of the Mormons’ history of polygamy, child sexual abuse and violence.

So did this spate of bad news lead the Mormon leaders to join forces with their Christian enemies, and, if so, was it a smart decision?

“The backlash is going on all over the country,” said Jan Shipps, a prominent scholar of modern Mormonism who is an emeritus professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “There are people who had a lot of respect for the Mormons who now say, ‘Well, they’re just like the Christian right.’ ”

That’s ironic, Shipps said, given that the Mormon Church has a more tolerant stance on homosexuality than some evangelical groups. The church has pointedly declined to state that homosexuality is a choice. And it has cautioned against programs that purport to “cure” same-sex attraction, even though Mormon theology holds that marriage is a divine relationship between men and women that continues into the afterlife.

Also, Shipps said, though the church had been riding high ever since the successful 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the gay marriage fight and other recent setbacks have forced the church to deal with skepticism over its faith and history.

First there was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination. Many in the church were shocked that Romney’s Mormon faith was a source of discomfort for some voters.

“Latter-day Saints were just amazed to think there was such bigotry in the country,” church spokesman Michael Otterson said.

And a raid on a polygamous breakaway sect in Texas last spring was a reminder of the church’s practice of multiple marriages in the 19th century, even though the Mormon Church has long renounced polygamy.

“That whole story in Texas was probably much worse for the church’s image than Proposition 8,” Monson said.

Some have suggested that Mormons might have been eager to cement partnerships with other churches, especially because evangelical voters were particularly distrustful of Romney’s faith.

But Otterson dismissed that possibility. “That kind of thinking would never even factor into the thinking of church leadership,” he said. “The church couldn’t remain silent on a pivotal issue like this.”

The reporter apparently did not ask Otterson why a church built on plural marriage “could not remain silent” on the marriage rights of others.

What the Mormons may have under estimated here is the extent to which the Christian right requires an atmosphere of paranoia in order to keep their followers in line. Without hatred and fear of “the other” — liberals, blacks, feminists, civil rights advocates, Jews, gays and, yes, Mormons — Christian fundamentalists have nothing to offer that their adherents can’t find in mainstream churches where ministries focus on Jesus’ actual message of love and acceptance. For this reason, Mormons will always be more useful to the Christian right as enemies than as friends.

In fact, by revealing their hateful, almost gleeful aggression toward gays, any inroads Mormons may have made with Christian extremists in this sorry episode could well come at the cost of hobbling their efforts to join mainstream society forever.

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