The Tea Party movement’s first great scalp was three-term senator Bob Bennett of Utah.
Despite Bennett’s staunch conservative credentials, Tea Party activists came to view Bennett, who supported a healthcare compromise with Democrats, as a sellout and a RINO (“Republican In Name Only”). The GOP’s right wing targeted Bennett for a challenge in the primaries. In 2010 he was defeated and his seat in the senate was soon taken by a more hardline Republican.
In 2016 Bennett lay dying in a Virginia hospital, the victim of pancreatic cancer and a stroke that had left him partly paralyzed. In the last years of his life Bennett had become convinced that there was something ugly and malignant growing in the Republican party; as cancer ate away at Bennett’s own body, he watched nativism, triumphalism, and hatred of compromise eat away at the party and turn it into something he barely recognized. He was particularly disturbed by Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the United States, which Bennett saw as immoral and incompatible with the tenets of his faith.
An observant member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the scion of an influential Mormon political family, Bennett saw parallels between the historical persecution of Mormons, who were driven from state to state by anti-Mormon mobs, and Trump’s rhetoric toward Muslims and Hispanic immigrants.
“Are there any Muslims in the hospital?” the former senator asked his wife and son shortly before he died, in a scene first reported by the Daily Beast. “I’d love to go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump.”
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On Thursday, Mitt Romney was expected to announce his candidacy for US Senate from Utah – to the likely displeasure of President Trump, who reportedly worked the phones to try to block Romney, a frequent Trump foil, from running. (Romney announced on Wednesday he would delay his announcement in the wake of the Florida school shooting.)
One thing that Romney has in common with other conservative critics of the president? His religion. Mormon politicians have been some of Trump’s most vociferous detractors – from the right.
They include Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer and dogged Twitter critic of the Trump administration who ran as an independent conservative candidate for president in 2016. McMullin took 21.54% of the vote in Utah, the only place where a third-party candidate came within striking distance of Trump or Clinton. Arizona senator Jeff Flake, who recently announced his retirement with a floor speech condemning Trump’s attacks on the press, is also an observant Mormon, and even quoted a Mormon hymn in his speech.
Many of the first national Republicans to disavow the infamous Trump Access Hollywood tape were politicians representing “Mormon belt” states like Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona.
The Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper owned by the Mormon church, took the unprecedented step of calling for Trump to resign from the race. In an unusually strongly-worded editorial, the newspaper described the tape as oozing “evil” and called on Americans to “take a clear stand against the hucksterism, misogyny, narcissism and latent despotism that infect the Trump campaign”.
Mormon politicians were also among the first Republican politicians to condemn Roy Moore. While the national GOP poured money into Alabama to shore up Moore against competition from Democrat Doug Jones, Senator Jeff Flake proudly tweeted a picture of a check he had written – to Jones. (“Country over Party,” Flake wrote in the memo.) And Utah congresswoman Mia Love, an observant Mormon, self-described “Tea Party” Republican, and Haitian-American, condemned Trump’s alleged “shithole” remark about poor countries.
The willingness of Mormon-affiliated Republican politicians to publicly push back against Trump may seem surprising; members of the Mormon church, known for its conservative attitudes about sexuality and the somewhat austere personal conduct it expects of members, are, statistically speaking, the most dependably Republican religious group in the country. In 2016, Pew reported that 70% of Mormons leaned Republican; even the second closest of the groups polled, an evangelical Protestant sect, trailed at 63%.
That still appeared to be the case last month, when Gallup reported that 61% of Mormon voters nationally gave President Trump a positive approval rating, the highest of any religious bloc. In contrast, Trump’s Gallup rating among Americans as a whole has recently hovered between 36% and 40%.
“This poll raises an enigmatic question,” wrote Jack Davis, a student at the Mormon-affiliated Brigham Young University, in a recent op-ed for the Salt Lake Tribune. “How does a politician so antithetical to Mormon belief receive such a broad stamp of approval?”
“The difficult truth,” he lamented, is that “Mormons have [seemingly] decided that promoting a conservative agenda is more important than opposing Trump’s reprehensible behavior. It appears that they are now willing to ignore the inexcusable in order to see certain legislation promoted”.
But if anything that 61% number is actually surprisingly low. “With a normal Republican president, I would expect his approval among Mormons to be in the high 70s,” political scientist Quin Monson told the Deseret News.
Monson also criticized the poll’s methodology, which broke out “Mormons” as their own category but lumped all Protestant sects together, meaning that the responses of rightwing evangelical Protestants were averaged together with those from more liberal Protestant denominations.
The strange paradox is that Mormons somehow seem to be simultaneously Trump’s strongest supporters and his fiercest critics. How?
The Mormon church itself rarely intervenes in politics – the last time it did, in support of California’s Proposition 8 rescinding gay marriage, sparked a major backlash against the church and anger and distrust in the LGBT community that lingers to this day.
But during the 2016 presidential campaign the church took the unusual step of issuing a statement reiterating its support for religious pluralism. Although the statement did not mention Trump, it was widely interpreted as a condemnation of his proposal to ban Muslim immigration. The statement quoted Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, as saying in 1843 that he would die in defense of “any [religious] denomination who may be unpopular and too weak to defend themselves”.
The Mormon church also has a significant Hispanic membership, both in the US and Latin America. “The church itself has issued statements about immigration that are far more open to increased immigration and a more compassionate immigration system than the Republican party currently is,” said Jim Bennett, son of the late Senator Bennett.
Then there is the simple matter of Trump’s comportment as a politician and a human being. Trump’s lewd behavior, including the infamous Access Hollywood tape, “demonstrate a personal morality that is at odds with Mormon culture”, Bennett added. “I think the reason Trump’s approval rating [among Mormons] isn’t higher is because a number of Mormons remain disgusted by who Trump is as a human being.”
“Donald Trump is not a good husband, and that is a strong indictment in Mormonism,” professor Kathleen Flake, a scholar of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia, said. “He violates boundaries all over the place, and Mormons are very much about boundaries.”
She also noted that compared with conservative evangelicals, Mormons seem to be less focused on core rightwing issues like abortion or political dominance on the supreme court. “Politically, Mormons might just be more invested in the character of their leaders than they are in specific issues, and perhaps just generally less invested in the culture war,” she said.
Trump’s attitudes toward women also rub Mormons the wrong way. Mormon culture can be patriarchal, Jana Riess, a columnist at the Religion News Service, has argued, but that patriarchy manifests itself in holding “women on pedestals as sweet and wonderful”; in contrast, “Trump’s misogyny is hate-filled and obvious, like Trump himself”.
“When Trump brags about going after married women, and ‘grabbing’ them – well, there is a respect for women in Mormonism that is quite old-fashioned,” Professor Flake said. “That old-fashionedness can strike one as paternalistic and sexist, depending on the circumstance, but it also reflects a sincere ethic of care toward women. In Salt Lake City, people still open doors for women.”
Mormonism, particularly in the western states, strongly encourages self-reliance, preparedness, and frugality – traits which would seem to translate naturally into support for the free market economics associated until recently with the GOP.
“On the one hand Mormon culture tends to respond strongly to the Republican message that we don’t need government, we just need religion and strong communities and the righteous individual,” professor Flake said. “And Mormonism responds well in part because Mormons have historically had such a fraught relationship with government.”
But, she said, the flipside of that pioneer legacy is a belief in the importance of mutual aid and welfare provisions for the vulnerable. “I think a sense of social duty is very strong with Mormons,” she said – a kind of “biblical communitarianism”.
“In fact one of the distinctive features of the Mormon church is how much it redistributes wealth. All that tithing that goes into Salt Lake? A lot of that money goes to the half of the church that exists outside North America.”
That charitable instinct might be best exemplified by Jon Huntsman Sr, an industrialist-turned-philanthropist who died earlier this month. Huntsman – the father of Jon Huntsman Jr, the former presidential candidate and current US ambassador to Russia – gave at least $1.5bn to charity. He signed the “giving pledge” made famous by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, which pressures the mega-wealthy to give at least half of their fortunes away – but criticized the pledge for not going nearly far enough.
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“Never has a party so quickly or so easily abandoned its principles as my party did during the 2016 campaign,” Senator Jeff Flake wrote in Conscience of a Conservative, a recent book critiquing the state of the Republican party.
That line – as well as the book’s title, a nod to the famous manifesto of the same name by arch-conservative Barry Goldwater – seem to encapsulate the dilemma faced by Flake and other conservative critics of Trump. “Principled conservatism” is well and good – but does it still have a constituency? And is it possible to counter Trump, a political mud-wrestler, without being dragged down to his level?
For disaffected conservatives, Mormon and otherwise, the possibility of getting Mitt Romney into a Senate seat is a hail-Mary opportunity to pull the GOP back toward their vision of conservatism. As Kevin D Williamson, editor of the conservative National Review, has put it: “For a certain kind of Republican – an increasingly rare kind – Mitt Romney is the one who got away, a representative of what the Republican party might have become, post-Obama, if it had not become … whatever it is the grotesque and stunted political corporation still pretending to be the Party of Lincoln has become.”
But, Williamson suggests, it might be too late. “If Republicans were who they were ten years ago, a Romney renaissance might make perfect sense. But Republicans have changed.”
For some Mormon conservatives, the Republican party is too far gone.
McMullin, the third-party conservative who challenged Trump and Clinton in 2016, believes both major parties are going to move further and further to the extremes. He has started an organization, Stand Up Republic, which he hopes can pressure American politics to move back toward the mainstream or form the infrastructure for an eventual third party.
“We believe it is necessary for those who are not aligned with the far left or far right, people who are still interested in liberal democracy, in a free society, in an enterprising but inclusive society, to seek an alternative,” he said.
Jim Bennett, son of Senator Bennett, recently resigned his membership in the GOP to help build a local third party, United Utah.
“It was clear to me from my father’s example that you cannot remain loyal to the Republican party while Donald Trump is in charge of it,” Bennett said. “Other Republicans have reached a different conclusion – they think there are ways to separate the odiousness of the man from what, politically, the party can accomplish. But from my perspective – and, I believe, from my father’s perspective – the two are so intertwined that you can’t come away undiminished from an association with him.”
