PBS will be running a four-hour documentary on the Mormons on April 30 and May 1. According to Alex Beam’s column today,
It’s vintage public broadcasting, plodding at times … and cloyingly fair-minded. And there’s the rub. The shows do not paint a flattering portrait of what filmmaker Helen Whitney calls “one of the most powerful, feared, and misunderstood religions in American history.”
The Salt Lake City-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons call themselves, cooperated with “The American Experience” and “Frontline,” the show’s co-producers. Whitney in turn pays the church the compliment of taking its faith very seriously indeed. The positives are there for all to see: the Mormons’ triumph over persecution in mid-century America; the dramatic “exodus” from Illinois to Utah, the “country no one else wanted,” according to Wallace Stegner, a great admirer of the Mormon pioneers; the devotion to family and community.
But also on view are doctrines and practices that most Americans would view as strange.
It’s great that PBS is doing this. Here’s hoping it’s as “cloyingly fair-minded” as Beam says.
Beam also has an interesting take on the way the whole Romney/Mormon issue has been covered in the press so far (emphasis mine).
By now, almost every newspaper in America has published an analysis of Mitt Romney’s presidential aspirations titled “Can a Mormon Be Elected President?” The stories follow a preordained path to arrive at the politically and socially desirable answer: Yes.
These set pieces serve mainly to make the not particularly religion-savvy political commentariat feel good about themselves. The writer appears unbiased, and the article inevitably validates the cherished American myth about our tolerance for diversity.
Can a Mormon be elected president in 2008? No.
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Romney would do well to refuse “to be drawn into an extensive discussion of Mormon doctrine and practices,” because any such discussion inevitably raises more questions than it answers.
Well, that’s one view.
should be interesting.
and I don’t recall reading (or remembering in Udall’s case) any talk about whether a Mormon could win the Presidency. They are as credible as Mitt is today (that is…marginal), yet no Mormon speculation? Why…or am I wrong?
…George (Romney) might very well have become at least the Republican nominee for president were it not for his “brainwashed” statement.
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But that was at a time when candidates weren’t wearing their religiousity on their sleeves. Times have changed. Abortion rights and equal rights for Negroes and faggots has intervened (/tic) which has brought out the worst in American religionists.
He was done in by his goofy songs.
…I was unaware that Mo Udall was a Mormon. (He did not wear his religiousity on his sleeve.) If memory serves, he has a son in politics in Colorado. I’ve heard him speak on the radio, and I’ll wish him well.
On Udall, Wikipedia has this to add:
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“During the Michigan primary, the Carter campaign had Coleman Young, the mayor of Detroit, accuse Udall of racism for belonging to the Mormon church, which at the time, did not allow blacks to serve in the church’s priesthood (since changed in 1978 by revelation to the Mormon prophet, Spencer Kimball). Young’s attack was at least somewhat unfair, since Udall had been a longtime critic of that church policy, and had ceased being an active member because of it.”
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Udall ran to the left of Carter in the Democratic primary. His son, Mark, is a Congressman from Colorado running for Senate but he has “no religious affliation.”
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To the dismay of most of MA, Romney is a more credible candidate than either Udall or his father. He is also running as a religious conservative, unlike either udall or his father.
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Different times.
whether Mitt Romney ever made any murmurs about the church’s racially exclusive rules. He was, after all, a grown man of 31 by the time the policy was changed in 1978, and his family was not without influence in the church. Just curious.
A quick Google search finds this nugget:
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“Although BYU is held in high regard by many employers, there is a good deal of antagonism toward BYU both from inside and outside of the Mormon community. The LDS Church’s racial policies attracted a great deal of protest in the 1960s, with African-American athletes frequently boycotting athletic events at which BYU competed. (The most notable examples of this were a football game forfeited by the heavily black University of Wyoming team in 1969, and the refusal of Texas El-Paso long jumper Bob Beamon-who set a world record in the long jump at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City-to participate in a track meet against BYU in the spring of that year.) While the LDS church’s 1978 declaration of doctrine regarding those of African descent and the Priesthood eliminated most of this hostility, traces of lingering resentment against the school remain in many African-American communities. “
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We might be on to something here. Mitt Romney was valedictorian of BYU in 1971. So ought to have played a leadership role on this simmering issue. Anyone know if he did a valedictorian speech?
But wasn’t the church teaching that blackness is the Mark of Cain?
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That’s a pretty significant “change of doctrine.”
To congratulate the change from racism of past than to criticize that it ever happened?
is whether Mitt Romney, as a young-ish man, had the fortitude to speak out against an obviously unjust practice within his church. That would tell me something interesting about his character, and the man is running for president, after all.
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What the elders of the church ultimately decided to do in 1978, and why, is sort of off topic (unless the “why” turns out to have involved Romney).
Lowell History:
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Connell O’Donnell has but together a website and history of Lowellian, Walker Lewis/ Lewis was one of only a handful of Black Mormon Priests. It is a great story.
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http://people.ucsc.e…
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+ + +
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Many members of the Lowell Branch of the the Mormons LDS Church were Mill Girls and most of them travel west in the 1840s and 1840s to Salt Lake Valley, Utah.
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http://people.ucsc.e…