Its been an interesting week to see how the nations media sized up the withdrawal of Mitt Romney from the presidential race, and its lingering effects on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The medias conventional wisdom is this: Romney and members of the LDS Church did not understand how deeply rooted anti-Mormonism is, and that was the death knell for the Romney campaign.
Heres a sampling of news and opinion:
A lengthy Wall Street Journal analysis had this as its lead paragraph: "Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency brought more attention to the Mormon Church than it has had in years. What the church discovered was not heartening."
It goes on to quote Democratic pollster Peter Hart. The LDS faith "was the silent factor in a lot of the decision making by evangelicals and others," Hart said, adding that the Romney campaign ran into "a religious bias head wind."
USA Today emphasized some of the anti-Mormon sentiment after Super Tuesdays vote when it wrote: "Many evangelical Christian voters also were unwilling to overlook Romney's religion. It didn't help that he paused his campaign Saturday to attend the funeral of Mormon Church leader Gordon Hinckley in Utah. West Virginia GOP convention delegate Brian Bigelow said on Tuesday he would support 'whoever can defeat Mitt Romney. I don't believe that Bible-believing Christians should take part in the mainstreaming of Mormonism'."
New Republic columnist Peter Keating put it this way in a column: "But Romney probably wasn't going to earn those ballots (in southern states) anyway. Southern states have GOP primary electorates dominated by evangelical Christians, specifically by Southern Baptists. And many of those Southern Baptists are committed to blocking the ascension of a Mormon to the presidency.
"For the conservative pundits backing Romney who missed this story, ideology trumps theology. But for many evangelicals, it's the other way around. Southern Baptists and Mormons are not only two of the four largest religious denominations in the country, they are the most aggressive of American missionary faiths, and have been on a collision course for generations."
Keating claims the bias in the south has to do largely with the Southern Baptism anti-Mormon campaign bolstered since the 1980s.
New York Times columnist Timothy Egan also pointed to evangelicals for Romneys demise. "Blame Christians," he wrote. "By significant margins, in poll after poll, in vote after vote a solid block of evangelical Christians said they would never vote for a Mormon. Since evangelicals made up nearly half of the Republican primary vote in some states, Romney was up against a deep well of distrust of a religion that many evangelicals still label a cult."
The Independent of Dublin, Ireland, had this to say: "He (Romney) was also dogged by the question of his Mormonism. His religion, combined with doubts about his conservative bona fides, allowed Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, to win Iowa unexpectedly on the back of evangelical support."
Many of the nations newspapers picked up an article by AP religion writer Rachel Zoll talking about the dismay LDS members had with the electoral response to Romney. Two quotes capture the tone:
"It is prejudice," said Richard Bushman, an emeritus professor at Columbia University, who is a leading historian and devout Mormon. "Underlying all these questions is that these beliefs are basically crazy so you've got to explain them to us."
"I was surprised at the level of intensity and sometimes flat out animosity," said Lowell C. Brown, a Los Angeles attorney who is Mormon. "I had no idea. I'm in my 50s, I've been a Mormon all my life, I've lived in L.A. for 25 years, and it floored me."
On the positive side, Columnist Frank Mickadeit at the Orange County Register talks about how the Romney campaign brought together an evangelical Christian, a Catholic and a Jew as senior advisers. But in the end, Mickadeit observes, the nation is not ready for an LDS president.
Adam Probolsky, the aforementioned Jewish campaign worker, told Mickadeit: "Before I met Gov. Romney, I had several LDS friends, so Romney's religion didn't faze me at all. Every Mormon family I know is successful, happy and generous. They have never tried to convert me or anything.
"Jewish friends have expressed concerns to me about Romney's faith — suggested that Mormons have some very weird practices. I draw the comparison to our own traditions that appear strange to the outsider, and that usually gives them pause."
LDS Bishop Jeremy Grisel in Lufkin, Texas, found the Romney campaigns end an opportunity to clear up some misconceptions about church beliefs in a Lufkin Daily News article.
In Manhattan, The New York Times poked fun at LDS missionaries who didn't realize that Mitt Romney has dropped out of the presidential race. In my book, it's an unfair piece, particularly the headline: "Missionaries spread the news, but dont read it."
The Boston Globe gave op-ed space to Whitney Johnson, a Latter-day Saint and co-founder of the investment firm Rose Park Advisors in Cambridge, Mass., to write about what the Romney campaign ending meant to him. "Instead of keeping our identity on the down low, it was brought into relief, potentially undermining a century's worth of work to feel fully accepted by our neighbors and co-workers," Johnson wrote. "In fact we have worked so hard to assimilate, we have even been able to convince ourselves that we are accepted. With Romney in the national spotlight, it has became all too clear we aren't. This is a discovery we would have preferred not to make."
Even I was interviewed by a Washington Post reporter wondering whether rank-and-file church members felt Romney's campaign was boon or bane. I think I was in a minority when I said in the long run I think it was a good thing. I invoked Brigham Young's quote I remember hearing when I was a kid: "Every time you kick Mormonism, you kick it up the stairs."
I am still convinced it's not as bad as the media says it is. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I subscribe to what President Gordon B. Hinckley once said about negative media coverage: this will be a blip. But it has opened a door of opportunity. Latter-day Saints do have our work cut out for us. We can no longer circle the wagons in grand pioneer tradition and hope the media goes away. Latter-day Saints need to reach out in our communities, on the Web and in the nations media and be part of the discussion and dialog.
(Joel Campbell is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at BYU. He was a reporter and editor at the Deseret Morning News for 15 years and has also worked in corporate communications. He holds a master's degree from the Ohio State University and a bachelor's degree from BYU.)