In 1570, Pope Pius V issued his bull Regnans in Exelcis, a pontifical act that seems to be creating problems for Mitt Romney and the Mormons. The bull excommunicated Elizabeth I of England. It was the last time that a pope would anathematize a sitting monarch, but as the Reformation historian Patrick Collison has pointed out Piusâ€™s act played a decisive role in shaping the English view of â€œPopery.â€ Thereafter, Catholicism was branded in the English psyche as the religion of sinister priestly control of politics. This conviction was helped along by Jesuit theologians of the Counter Reformation who constructed elaborate natural law arguments justifying the murder of a heretical monarch. When Guy Fawkes, a zealous English Catholic, made an unsuccessful attempt to blow up both prince and parliament in 1605, the English image of â€œPoperyâ€ was set. The Gunpowder Plot, as it came to be known, proved that ultimately Catholics were dangerous antinomians willing to commit political murder at the papal command. It is worth recalling that â€œRemember, Remember the 5th of November,â€ the rhyme about Guy Fawkes repeated recently in the movie V for Vendetta, originally included these lyrics:
A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!
Englishmen who crossed the Atlantic carried the fear and hatred of â€œPoperyâ€ with them. For example, Bostonâ€™s Sons of Liberty began their life as the rival north and south Boston gangs that engaged in annual brawls on Guy Fawkesâ€™ night organized around the attempt to capture and destroy the opposing gangâ€™s â€œpope,â€ an elaborate effigy of the hated religious tyrant. During the nineteenth century the fear of â€œPoperyâ€ gained new momentum as a flood of Catholic immigrants seemed to threaten WASP control of the nation. Mormons were swept up in this rhetorical surge. The Mormon Zion, with its priestly hierarchy and religious economic and political organizations, was nothing less than a home grown â€œPopery.â€ Of course anti-Mormon polemicists lingered over the foreigness of the Mormons with all of those immigrant converts from the degenerate slums of Europe. Still there was no denying the scandal that Mormonism had been born and flourished in the United States. Horror that good American Protestants could sink into such ignorance and tyranny was palpable.
During the Smoot Hearings in 1904, Joseph F. Smith repeatedly and emphatically denied the authority of Mormon prophets to direct the politics of Mormon voters or Mormon officials, in effect renouncing theo-political kingdom making. Regardless of the accuracy of President Smithâ€™s statements at the time, they provided what has come to be a more or less binding settlement. To be sure, Mormon prophets have reserved the right to speak out on â€œmoralâ€ issues, a usefully ambigious term that has included more than one question that has roiled the political waters. Likewise, they have flexed their political muscle (such as it is) to protect what they see as the institutional interests of the Church, most recently in their support for the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Yet in all of this they are, for better or for worse, acting much more like a Protestant denomination than like a religious state in embryo. It takes an enormous amount of historical obtuseness (or religious paranoia) to see the current political activity of the Mormon Church as covert theocracy building.
And yet Damon Linker is sounding the alarm in the pages of the New Republic that â€œunder a President Romney, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would truly be in charge of the country.â€ To be sure, Damon raises a nice point of Mormon theology: Under what circumstances is a good Latter-day Saint entitled to ignore the words of a living prophet? Over the years, Mormons have given various answers. Joseph Smith insisted that a prophet was only a prophet when speaking as a prophet, although he didnâ€™t provide a clear way of determining precisely when that is. Joseph F. Smith, James E. Talmage, and others who testified before the Smoot Hearings on behalf of the Church insisted that prophetic counsel was only binding when submitted to the Church for a vote. Joseph Fielding Smith taught that the (admittedly always expandable) canon provided guidance to the authority of prophetic statements. J. Reuben Clark insisted that prophetic statements only acquired prophetic authority for a believer when the Spirit bears witness to him or her of their truth. My own view, articulated in detail in a forthcoming article, is that Mormon doctrine and revelation is always in part an interpretive process where both history and the independent moral judgment of the interpreter play a decisive role. This is an important theological discussion, and to the extent that an accusation in one of Americaâ€™s respected opinion journals that Mormons are unfit for public office forces us to think about this question, we are indebted to Damon.
That said, however, his political concerns are ultimately ridiculous. Politics is a practical arena in which questions of what might or might not be theoretically possible are subordinated to what is actually likely to happen. Once we move from the world of ideological speculation to the realm of practical politics, history and experience are much more reliable guides than theological logic-chopping. What history teaches us is that Mormon leaders today will not try to dictate to Romney, nor would they use a Mormon in the White House to create an LDS theocracy. To be sure if Romney is elected President and Gordon B. Hinckley calls the White House, Romney will take the call, but it will not contain his political marching orders. As for the Mormon hierarchyâ€™s retained right to speak on â€œmoralâ€ issues, it has almost certainly already had whatever influence on Romney it is going to have. The Mormon prophets are socially conservative. They are hostile to liquor, gambling, most (but not all) kinds of abortion, and gay marriage. Romney, as an active Latter-day Saint, probably shares these basic instincts. His record, however, shows that he is willing to waffle and compromise on all of them. Furthermore, thus far his waffling and compromise havenâ€™t resulted in any formal or informal ecclesiastical sanctions. This comes as no surprise to students of Mormonism. One might not realize it from reading Damonâ€™s piece (or CES curriculum), but there actually is a history of good Mormons ignoring Church counsel on â€œmoralâ€ issues when it turns political. An good example of this is Utahâ€™s vote to overturn prohibition despite the pleadings of then-church president Heber J. Grant.
Given the ultimate silliness of Damonâ€™s concern as a practical, political matter, weâ€™re left with the question of what is going on here. Why is this an issue? Perhaps Damon has an abstract interest in Mormon theology, and he thought the publicity around Romneyâ€™s run provided a nice opportunity to force a theological conversation that he was interested in. In this case, we ought to thank him for his interest and talk with him about the theological issues that he raises. I suspect, however, that there is more happening here than a theological symposium masquerading as political commentary. Perhaps Damon believes that the theological niceties actually drive politics and history. Ideas, of course, have consequences, but they are always complicated. Logic is no more the life of politics and religion than of the law. Certainly judging the actual political consequences of Mormon beliefs requires more historical nuance than Damonâ€™s piece demonstrates. Perhaps Damon recognizes the necessity of embedding the understanding of ideas in history, but he is simply ignorant of Mormon history. In which case, he just needs a reading list.*
I suspect, however, that a large part of what we are seeing in Damonâ€™s article is the half-submerged memory of â€œPopery.â€ Four hundred years of fear and loathing is not easily forgotten. The image of zealot subversives in our midst acting on orders from shadowy religious hierarchs has much older roots than 9/11. In the nightmares of some Americans, the echoes of almost forgotten political tropes can still be heard. In these dystopian dreams, Mitt Romney is cast as Guy Fawkes, and Gordon B. Hinckley is Pius V. The irony, of course, is that Damon is not an anti-Catholic. Far from it. He is at pains to laud the Catholic natural law tradition, and as far as I know he is an observant member of the Roman Church. Indeed, I suspect that the appeals to Catholic natural law are made precisely because Damon realizes that he is playing off of old fears about â€œPopery.â€ Or perhaps not. After all, Damon recently authored a book about a Catholic priest at the center of a vast conspiracy to undermine the foundations of the country. It is a story line that, whatever its substantive merits in the case of Damonâ€™s Theocons, has deep roots in Anglo-American history. It is also, alas, a prefabricated plot line in which Mormonism seems destined to be crammed.
*For understanding the shift from the theo-political kingdom making of nineteenth-century Mormonism to the more denominational Mormonism of today, I would start with Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance (1986), Thomas Alexander, Mormonism in Transition (1986), and, especially, Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2004).