His fellow Mormons were proud of Romney and excited about his candidacy not only because he is a co-religionist, but like most of them, a Republican. But they learned a bitter lesson from his campaign. Anti-Mormonism in American society is anything but dead.

When I asked an LDS friend to tell me how the people in his ward (parish) responded to last summer’s news that more a third (37 percent) of the citizens of the U.S. would never vote for a Mormon, he said that they interpreted that as an example of presudice against the Mormons. As for the particulars from pollsters that an equal number of Americans are convinced that Mormonism is not Christian, they fail to recognize that this could be a legitimate doctrinal position for Trinitarian Christians and regard all questions about MOrmons being Christian as as “anti-Mormon bigotry.”
While a great many Saints framed this disagreeable information in just this way, it was not just Mormons feeling that they were being ill-treated. Some negative identity profiling is clearly going on when people conclude that just because someone is a Mormon, he or she ought not to occupy high public office in the United States.
A main reason that the downbeat and off-putting public reaction to Mormonism that accompanied the Romney campaign was particularly distressing to the Saints is that as the campaign started they continued to bask in the post-Olympic Games glow that cast a truly positive light on the Saints. This had put them in a good mood, especially as they were being led by a genial prophet whose message to his followers as well as to the world was that the Mormons are not weird.
They almost expected admiration. As a result, they simply were not prepared, for example, for Al Sharpton’s declaration that Mormons do not believe in God (). Mike Huckabee’s query that seemed to indicate that Mormons must worship Satan as well as Jesus appeared to hit not just below Romney’s belt, but their own as well.
During their time in the public eye during the Olympics, the Saints had been perceived as gracious hosts, as an attractive native population with wonderful families who lived in a gorgeous fresh and uncontaminated environment. The weird folks were the Baptists who were walking around the LDS temple with placards charging that the Mormons were not Christian.
As the members of a modern LDS church, the Saints were hoping that the Olympics had dispensed with negative Mormon stereotypes. Consequently, the intensifying intimations of their having odd (even bizarre) beliefs and strange worship practices that accompanied the Romney campaign gave the Saints “whiplash,” as one observer put it. At the very least, the message about the Saints that emerged from the past few months was mixed.
Some Saints blamed the media for making too much of Romney’s faith and too little of his success as a husband and father of an exemplary family. Having spent much of their own lives characterized as cookie-cutter church members whose religious institution was as standardized as MacDonald’s or Colonel Sanders, they were dismayed to see one of their fellows characterized as plastic–a plaster Saint, as it were.
Despite the solidity of the Republican strength in the Mormon culture region, Mormons are by no means all conservatives of the dittohead variety. Consequently, the disappointment of many Latter-day Saints about Romney’s suspension of his candidacy is mitigated by their appreciation of his decision as an effort to prevent dissonance and disharmony within the Republican Party. In addition, it is possible to discern LDS pride in Romney’s smarts in suspending his candidacy rather than entirely removing himself from the race. It lets him keep his standing as a player at the Republican Convention when decisions will be made about the party’s platform—and perhaps as a player in a McCain administration.
A judgment of “enough already” was surely not widespread. Yet the Saints’ pride in the success of one of their own had increasingly become combined with enough worry that the campaign was reflecting badly on what being Mormon means to make at least some of the Saints, including some leaders of the faith, relieved to see the end of the Romney candidacy.
At Monday’s press conference announcing the leadership of the church who had been put in place upon the death of Gordon, B. Hinckley, the new president, Thomas S. Monson, ducked a question about the negative perceptions of Mormonism emerging from the Romney campaign. In that setting, turning the AP reporter Eric Gorski’s question aside was possible. Perhaps it was even appropriate.
Some very good reporting on Mitt Romney and Mormonism (including Ryan Lizza’s piece on Romney in the New Yorker, Noah Feldman’s essay in the New York Times Magazine, and Alan Wolfe’s article, “Mormons and Money,” in the New Republic) has appeared during this campaign. These articles and much of the other recent writing about Mormonism can be the basis for a realistic reconstruction of modern Mormonism in the public mind. But for that reconstruction to endure, the LDS church and its members will need to deal with the questions about Mormonism that materialized during Romney’s presidential campaign.