I will not give you back your heart,
I’ve wooed and fairly won it,
And sooner with my life I’ll part,
You may depend upon it.

Not content with mere verse, Noyes would go on to turn his emotional anguish into a theological critique of the institution of monogamous marriage itself (or as he once called it, “Egotism for Two”). Condemning monogamy as “simple” and replacing it with a more heavenly, polyamorous version that he called “complex marriage,” in 1848 he founded a religious sect based on his teachings: the Oneida Community in upstate New York. There, people would be stripped as much as possible of their worldly “I-spirit,” and have it replaced with the godlier “we-spirit” of genuine Christian fellowship. Only with this kind of radical reorientation, Noyes held, could believers experience community, family, and marriage in the way that God had intended them.

You may be feeling down about a lack of romantic fulfillment or a recent break-up this Valentine’s Day, or its succeeding “Singles Awareness Day.” But as Noyes’ story illustrates, you are hardly alone, among your contemporaries in 2022, or throughout human history. Three 19th-century American sects—the Oneida Pantogamists as well as Shaker celibates and Mormon polygamists—waged wars against the so-called selfishness of monogamous marriage. All viewed romantic exclusivity as sinful, a hindrance to creating a more universal love for a community of fellow believers.

Monogamy, of course, won out. Experiments like Noyes’ commune now seem distant, strange, and historically specific. And yet, there is something familiar and universal in them. They revolved, as we still often do, around heartbreak. What can they teach us about love and sex today?

We all search for meaning in the universe, and we all long for human intimacy—to know our place in the bigger picture, and to share that story with someone. These dual human drives are as old as the human species. Take the book of Genesis, for example. Before God created Eve, Adam knew his cosmic significance, walked with his Creator in Eden—yet was still lonely and bummed out.

Noyes could relate. “The next thing that a man wants after he has found the salvation of his soul,” he wrote, “is to find his Eve and his Paradise.” When his first love renounced their shared faith and then announced her engagement to another man, his universe came crashing down around him.

“John Humphrey Noyes.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So he picked up the pieces and created a new one—without that sinful institution that had caused him so much pain: monogamy. Rather than becoming some kind of perpetual quasi-religious orgy, the Oneida Community was highly controlled. Prospective sexual partners had to arrange their liaisons—or “fellowships” as they called them—through the ministrations of a third party, sleep separately after the fellowshipping had concluded, and strive not to have the same partner too often in order to prevent the relationship from becoming exclusive. As Noyes knew from experience, the desire for exclusivity is one of the most powerful emotions that romanticized and sexualized human love can engender. Such passion could only bring spiritual ruin.

The Shakers, who were founded in mid-18th century England and reached the peak of their popularity in America between 1820 and 1860, similarly loathed the institutions of marriage and family for the sinful “natural affections” that accompanied them. Shaker villages were to be believers’ new families, complete with spiritual mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers all living together in harmony: worshipping the Lord, working hard for their bread, and waging a communal war against the flesh by abstaining from sex.

Over the Shakers, too, love’s pain hovered. Mother Ann Lee, the group’s founder, had tragic and traumatic experiences in childbirth, losing all four of her newborns—a fact to which later commentators point as the psychological source of her hatred of all sex.

The story of Steven Sutton, a new convert living in the Shaker village at Canterbury, New Hampshire in the 1780s, illustrates just how painful this struggle against exclusive love could be. His wife “was an amiable woman, and I loved her,” he wrote. But after joining the community, “now I must hate her … The leaders said, ‘She was my god.’” Separating the family proved to be too much for her, and when “she was buried,” Sutton continued, “I was ordered to cover the earth over her coffin, to show that I had no natural affections; this I did, when at the same time, I felt as though I should pitch into the grave with her.”

For Mormon polygamists the message was largely the same, even if the remedy was assuredly not, with religious leaders especially targeting women in their crusade against selfishness. “I am sure that, through the practice of this principle” of plural marriage, Elder George Q. Cannon wrote, “we shall have a purer community, a community more experienced, less selfish and with a higher knowledge of human nature than any other on the face of the earth.”

The words of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, plural widow of Joseph Smith and later apologist for Mormon polygamy, indicate that she had internalized this logic. Plural marriage “will exalt the human family,” she wrote in an 1882 letter, and “in the place of selfishness, patience and charity will find place in [plural wives’] hearts, driving therefrom all feelings of strife and discord.”

As with the Shakers and Oneidans, selfishness was the real enemy of the Mormon polygamists—an impediment to personal godliness and communal unity that could only be slain (for the plural wives) through the sacrifice of their exclusive claim to their husbands. These sacrifices were often truly painful for the adherents of all three sects, which is why leaders needed mechanisms of control to enforce the communities’ practices whenever individual discipline wavered. Although faithful, the believers struggled profoundly to extirpate the special love they had for others—a love they were told was selfish and sinful.

Why did Mormons, Shakers, and Oneidans all target even the exclusive romantic love found in the time tested, biblically sanctioned, and socially accepted institution of monogamous marriage?

Well, for starters, perhaps that institution was not so biblically bullet-proof as its defenders might have imagined. All three groups used the same verses from the Bible to attack it. “The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage,” Jesus proclaims in Luke 20:34-35, but those worthy to obtain “the resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.” Both the Shakers and the Oneidans referred to this straightforward proof text often in defending their decision to abolish monogamy.

For polygamous Mormon Saints, who place the institution of marriage and the obligation of reproduction through sex at the center of their story of eternity, it was a little different. They believed that more wives would mean more children for the paterfamilias both on earth and in the afterlife. Mormons countered those selfish, complaining, plural wives who wanted to be their husbands’ one and only with a heightened commitment to religious duty.

What also bound these three sects together was the time and place in which they rose, institutionalized, and fell, relatively simultaneously. In the 1830s, the federal government was weak, the American frontier seemingly endless, and the opportunities for sectarian start-ups equally boundless. By the 1880s, however, the federal government was strong and getting stronger, the frontier was rapidly disappearing, and the majority of Americans were increasingly intolerant of sexual and marital arrangements they believed corroded the nation’s morality.

By 1881, the Oneida Community had dissolved, the Shakers were losing members at an alarming rate (and obviously, failing to spawn new ones), and many Mormons were actively choosing monogamy over polygamy. The external environment that had once nurtured religious sexual experimentation had indeed turned from tolerable to toxic, and the internal desire of many sectarians to reject monogamy for something else had waned as well. Having originally condemned romantic exclusivity as sinful, over time more of them nevertheless wanted it.

We still grab at the romantic ring today, and it is understandable that we do, especially coming out of the shared solitary confinement we have all been through for the past two years. Adam wanted an Eve. John Humphrey Noyes wanted his lost beloved. My wife wants me to up my romantic game. If this Valentine’s Day you, too, are feeling particularly fired up by romantic disappointment, you can always take a page from Noyes, and write a poem about it. Noyes’ verse continues:

You say your heart is still your own,
But words will never prove it.
What God and you and I have done
Will stand; the world can’t move it.

Or maybe try launching an entirely new religio-sexual community, complete with a cosmology, hierarchy, institutions, and disciplinary apparatus. And buy my new book, Sex and Sects. It will show you how.

The post The Sects That Rejected 19th-Century Sex appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 20th century, Samoans, native Hawaiians, and Tongans gravitated to the area to seek a different sort of refuge. They soon found direction from a new priestly caste—a cosmopolitan group of football coaches who crafted a micro-culture of football excellence at and around Kahuku High School.

Over the decades, Kahuku has developed hundreds of collegiate and pro players, including winners of several Super Bowl rings. Just since 1999, Kahuku has played in 12 of Hawai‘i’s 19 state championship games, winning eight times.

Along the way, football became the North Shore’s civic cement.

This is a sports story that began with a sugar plantation and a Mormon temple. As the Kahuku Sugar Plantation fired up its boilers in 1890 and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) built a temple in nearby La`ie in 1919, the area attracted an array of proletarian wayfarers, including Samoans, Tongans, and Mormons from Utah’s Great Basin. Driven by different agendas, plantation managers, and Mormon elders saw sport as a way to shape those they recruited to work and worship. These newcomers to the North Shore and their descendants embraced sport and built an ethos of their own.

Today Samoans constitute the most disproportionately overrepresented ethnic group in the NFL. This trend dates to the Samoans who began playing football on the North Shore before World War II, decades before their brethren in American Samoa adopted the game. Many were Mormons who came when the LDS decided to consolidate its La`ie beachhead with the new temple. Thirty-five miles north of Honolulu, the once aboriginal fishing village of La`ie sits between Hau`ula and Kahuku.

Hundreds of Samoan converts came to build the temple, making La`ie a close approximation of a Samoan village. They adapted on their own terms in a church-owned, plantation town, retaining a culture of fa`a Samoa—in the way of Samoa. The temple, the first dedicated outside the continental United States, became a gathering place for the faith’s South Pacific converts. One can hardly overstate its importance—a temple is the only place where the ordinances required for salvation can be conducted and redemption sought for family members who died before completing the sacraments.

The North Shore’s Samoan community expanded after the U.S. Navy closed its base in American Samoa in 1951, sending another wave of migrants to refuge in La`ie. Youth from the town of La`ie came together at Kahuku High with their counterparts from Hau`ula, Kahuku, and the more northern shorelines where the Banzai Pipeline attracts some of the most intrepid surfers in the world.

Football quickly became entrenched at Kahuku High. During the 1940s, coaches Mits Fujishige, a Japanese American, and Art Stranske, a Canadian expat, led the school to its first titles. And, in 1945, Alopati “Al” Loloati, born in Samoa and bred in La`ie, debuted with the Washington Redskins, becoming, with little fanfare, the first Samoan in the NFL.

The Polynesian wave that would reconfigure collegiate and pro ball was still decades away. But back on the North Shore, Kahuku’s teams were becoming more and more successful. In 1956, Kahuku won a state title under coach Harold Silva, a Portuguese American, who infused the program with a tough, principled athletic code and showed the community that its boys could compete with anybody in Hawai‘i.

With the sons and grandsons of earlier Samoan immigrants at its core, Kahuku became the first mostly Samoan squad anywhere in the world. As the sugar industry declined along the northern coast, football gave generations of boys a way to find their place in the world.

A few years after Silva retired, native son Famika Anae returned and became the first Samoan head coach at any level of the game. Famika was the son of a Mormon from Western Samoa who had answered the call to build the temple. Both Famika and his half-brother—that Samoan NFL pioneer Al Lolotai—were the products of La`ie’s tough blend of religion, fa`a Samoa culture, and football discipline.

Famika’s father was initially skeptical of the game’s value. “Can you eat the football?” he asked. Famika eventually would have an answer when the game took him to Brigham Young University, where he played on an athletic scholarship. Famika returned to Kahuku in 1966, believing that excelling at the game was a way for local boys to go to college.

Famika, who led Kahuku until 1972, won two titles and brought Samoan players to the fore. During the summer, he conducted clinics in American Samoa with Lolotai. Famika appreciated how growing up in Samoa readied boys for football. “A Samoan boy starts hard physical labor even before he reaches school age,” Famika explained. “He must climb a coconut tree 100 feet tall, barefoot and carrying a machete, tear the coconuts loose and even cut away the fronds… By the time a boy is ready for high school football, his muscles often are as defined as those of a weightlifter.”

For training and bonding, Famika took his Kahuku players to a nearby island, Lanai, which the Dole Company ran as a plantation. They picked pineapples for six weeks each summer and returned with money in their pockets, in shape to play. He knew how much that money meant to boys whose families lived so humbly.

Upholding fa`a Samoa on the North Shore was demanding. “It is very hard on a Samoan kid who doesn’t do well, or what his father thinks is well,” Famika acknowledged. “He is felt to have disgraced the family.” A tongue-lashing and beating were often his punishment. “A loss,” Famika said, “reflects on the parents, the chiefs, and the race.” As their coach, he channeled his boys’ fear of failure into a relentless attacking style. “Samoans are very physical people,” he underscored. “They simply can’t stand losing—either in sports or in life.”

Sport meant battle and players readied themselves for games by performing the siva tau, a war dance. Their younger fans made Kamehameha Highway, the only way out of town, a gauntlet for opposing teams, pelting buses with gravel and coral stones from the shadows.

In the 1990s, Kahuku often reached the championship but repeatedly lost to Honolulu’s Saint Louis School. To be crowned king of Hawaiian football, the school had to dethrone Saint Louis and its legendary coach Cal Lee, which had dominated state football for two decades.

In 2000, Kahuku was coached by Sivaki Livai, who had played for the school after migrating from Tonga. Thousands traveled to Honolulu for Kahuku’s championship game with Saint Louis. After Kahuku delivered a historic victory, a caravan of buses, cars, and pickups snaked its way northward past cheering crowds gathered along the black-topped road. The buses stopped in each town so that players could perform a siva tau. Arriving home after midnight, they were greeted by supporters basking in a sense of fulfillment.

Since 2000, Kahuku football has maintained an almost unrivaled level of excellence. It’s become the story that many tell about their town to the world, a story about people who work hard and play harder, who lose but persevere, and in the end are heralded for their accomplishments. The flow of boys to college football has not slackened and many use football to gain an education and launch careers in and out of sport.

“I don’t think there’s a high school program in the United States that has benefited more from sport than Kahuku,” Dr. Allen Anae, son of the former Kahuku coach Famika Anae, argues. Eighty percent of its current student body participates in interscholastic sports. “Now we have parents thinking, if I support my kids’ football—and not only football but women’s sports—they can get a college education,” Anae observed. Maybe you can eat that football after all.

The post Why Samoans Are So Overrepresented in the NFL appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the Mormons’ unorthodox beliefs and practices had met with hostility all during their journey, and they found it in Illinois as well. Anti-Mormon violence culminated in Smith’s murder in 1844. A few years later, a fire destroyed the temple. Brigham Young led thousands of Mormons out of Illinois, leaving the bounds of the United States and settling in the far reaches of the Mexican Republic, in what is Utah today. With the temple in ruins and most Mormons gone from the area of Nauvoo, someone scavenged one of these sunstones and later donated it to a local historical society, which in turn passed it on to the Smithsonian. In light of that history, the sunstone might be seen as representing transience rather than stability, thwarted plans, and a vision unrealized. It is tempting to dismiss the Nauvoo temple for being momentary, unsuccessful, and frankly outside the mainstream of its day.

The sunstone in the Smithsonian collections intrigues me because it offers a powerful counterpoint to one of the most dominant views of America and Americans in the decades before the Civil War. At around the time the Mormons were leaving Missouri for Illinois, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville made his famous tour of America and remarked upon this country’s rampant materialism: “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question; how much money will it bring in?”

Many historians second Tocqueville’s diagnosis. Americans were competitive, individualistic, and ambitious in those antebellum decades. The nation was rapidly industrializing, muscling native peoples off the land, and extending the cotton kingdom deep into the South. Love of the dollar was getting things done, and need for the dollar—for security or for respectability—drove many people’s lives.

Given that view, the sunstone reminds us that if a preoccupation with material success was a dominant current of mainstream America at the time, it wasn’t the only one. Indeed, throughout the nation’s history the quest to establish a good or godly community has been a persistent American dream—even informing some of our country’s key origin stories. The 17th-century English pilgrims, who were so unhappy (and so unpopular) in the Old World that they packed their bags and set sail for the New England coast, created a colony as far outside the mainstream as any English man or woman of 1620 might easily imagine.

In the early 19th century, communitarian groups formed over 100 idealistic, utopian communities, Sydney Ahlstrom, a historian of American religion at Yale University, has noted. There were, for example, the Shakers, a communal group united by the belief that their founder, Ann Lee, was the second incarnation of Christ. Commitment to celibacy freed the community from family life and allowed women to serve as economic and religious leaders alongside men. At their height, from roughly 1830 to 1850, the Shakers numbered some 6,000 practitioners living in several communities.

Other religious groups emigrated from Europe to establish utopian settlements here. Bavarian pietists (who formed a movement within Lutheranism) founded Zoar, Ohio, in 1817, and prospered there until the end of the century. Similarly, the Amana Society fled from the German Rhineland to Ebenezer, New York, in the early 1840s, then relocated to Iowa in the decade before the Civil War. Known as “the Community of True Inspiration,” they pooled their wealth and possessions and organized labor around communal, rather than family, lines. By the middle of the century, place names mapped these and similar sects’ ideals onto the landscape: Harmony, Pennsylvania; New Harmony, Indiana; Economy, Ohio.

Then there were the secular socialists and their utopias. Welsh theorist Robert Dale Owen inspired experimental, cooperative communities in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and Tennessee. More than 40 short-lived “Fourier” communities replaced the confining family and work relations of early industrial society with more free and fluid “associations” of the likeminded. Still others mixed religion with socialism, as in communities established in Putney, Vermont, and Oneida, New York under the leadership of John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes was known for the controversial innovation of “complex marriage.”

And there were the famous Transcendentalists, whose writings may be part of the American canon today, but who set themselves apart at Brook Farm from mainstream wealth-seeking. They explicitly dedicated themselves to education, intellectual life, and egalitarian relationships. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the fervor around him in 1840: “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”

We should be careful not to romanticize these radical groups or privilege their various and conflicting points of view. And while the Mormons have flourished—we can hardly consider a religious group whose members include a candidate for U.S. president “outside the mainstream” anymore—most other utopian societies of the early 19th century were ephemeral experiments that only a sliver of antebellum Americans ever joined.

But the extraordinary proliferation of such communities reveals something important about the dominant society that those people left behind. That so many groups instituted changes in relationships between the sexes suggests that mainstream rules for marriage and family left a fair number of people unfulfilled. That so many adopted alternate forms of landholding suggests that the dominant rule of private property did not satisfy every American’s idea of what was fair, productive, and good. As always, the margins of society at a given time illuminate the center, setting in relief the particularity and partiality of what can sometimes seem the only “American way.”

The post Searching for Utopia in Illinois appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Thanks in part to the mommy lobby, the Utah State Legislature recently passed a bill to legalize the administration of Alepsia, a cannabis extract taken as oral droplets. Advocates celebrated earlier this week as Utah Governor Gary Herbert held a ceremonial public signing of the bill, ensuring the law will go into effect July 1. Alepsia contains ultra-low amounts (less than 0.3 percent) of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive element in marijuana, but high amounts of cannabidiol (CBD), a chemical that has demonstrated potential for significant seizure control.

Amelia experienced her first seizure when she was only 4 months old. One day, as my mother was holding her, Amelia’s leg and arm on one side began jerking mildly. By age 1, she was experiencing hundreds of little seizures—myoclonic jerks lasting just a few seconds—each day. The seizures would cause her to fall on her bottom. Undeterred, she just got right back up, over and over again. We playfully started calling them her little booms. “Ah, boom”—there she goes again. I was 9 years old, and the only thing I could do for Amelia was construct a stuffed animal fort to cushion her falls. As we grew up, my younger brother and I became trained in caring for her more seriously, and our three youngest siblings pitched in where they could. Abby, the youngest, for instance, would sit next to Amelia and stroke her hair while she seized.

Amelia’s neurologist reassured us that kids often outgrow seizures, but it became clear early on that my sister was experiencing developmental delays. At age 2, Amelia had a full-body convulsion that lasted for 45 minutes. Realizing she wasn’t going to stop convulsing on her own, my parents rushed her to the hospital. A massive dose of Ativan stopped the seizure but sent her spiraling into respiratory arrest. With a respiratory therapist squeezing a bag, pumping oxygen into her lifeless lungs, my parents stood by, helpless. After 20 minutes, my terrified mother braved a question: “Do you ever get … tired?” He paused for a moment. “Yeah. Sometimes.” It was the wrong answer.

Treatments went nowhere. Amelia tried basically every FDA-approved anti-convulsive medication, and even surgery, with little success and often experienced major side effects. One drug did not let her sweat, causing her to overheat severely. Another triggered a life-threatening allergic reaction that required a 12-day hospital stay.

The only treatment that had any noticeable effect on her seizure control was a high-fat, high-protein regimen called the ketogenic diet. Amelia’s daily seizures fell from the hundreds to just a few dozen. But she stopped eating. After other medications failed, my parents eventually decided to give the diet another shot. Truth be told, I found this annoying. All the careful measuring and weighing that made the diet work sometimes made dinner late. Worse, to make Amelia feel like we were all in this together, my mom adapted her dishes for the whole family—which meant I had to eat quiche. Luckily for me (at least I selfishly thought back then), the diet did nothing for her seizures this time around, and I could go back to eating things like burgers and pizza.

Amelia’s seizures have evolved; she seldom convulses for more than a few minutes at a time now. But her developmental delays have become increasingly pronounced, and she has fleeting myoclonic jerks hundreds, even thousands of times a day. Soon those ubiquitous seizures garnered their own pet names: Little seizures became “blinkies,” and full-body ones were dubbed “big ones.” But what’s more difficult sometimes for my parents and me is her zombie-like post-convulsive state, in which, exhausted, she sleeps, drools, and then stares off into nothingness for an hour or two. In other words, she gets “zoney.” I once forgot the real names, telling a stranger that Amelia had “a bad spell in which she had several ‘big ones’ in a row and then was basically ‘zoney’ for two days.”

My parents have struggled mightily to fend off discouragement, mostly by engaging the enemy that is this disorder. My mother, who had planned on giving up her previous work to care for her young family, soon found herself mobilizing full-time on Amelia’s behalf. Exasperated by the lack of answers from doctors, she checked out every medical textbook on epilepsy in our local university library to become an expert on neurology. She diagnosed Amelia with Dravet syndrome three years before a real neurologist confirmed the diagnosis. My father supported her activism, using his vacation days to hold down the fort when she traveled to conferences a few times a year. After working with the Epilepsy Association of Utah for four years, my mom helped found a national nonprofit support group for other families like ours, Dravet.org.

But most of her time today, as it has been for the past 19 years, is spent taking care of Amelia’s needs—from administering rectal Valium (an emergency drug Amelia takes three times a day) and making sure she doesn’t fall too hard when she’s seizing (which has happened a number of times) to bathing and dressing her each day. Amelia will live under the care of parents or siblings for the rest of her life—we just have very little idea how long that might be. As the oldest sibling, I had to bring up the real possibility of eventually needing to care for Amelia before I could propose to my (now) wife.

It’s surreal how routine seizures have become for us after all these years. When Amelia has a convulsion in the tub now, instead of panicking, my mom just keeps bathing her. But if ubiquitous seizures have somewhat desensitized us, they have also opened our eyes to a different world. When a family from out of town with a child with disabilities sat in the pew behind us at church, the mother was touched when my brother and I actually talked to her son. My first job in college was working with adults with disabilities.

Occasionally Amelia has good days, too. She smiles and teases, and we catch fleeting glimpses of her radiant personality, of what might have been. She once appointed herself the language police of the household. “We don’t say ‘stupid’s or ‘shut up’s,” she would chastise her older brothers. She loves spinning, twirling, and being tossed upside down, so naturally, theme parks are her heaven. After so many seizure-related injuries, she rarely feels pain and has no fear. She thinks roller coasters are hysterical—and everyone loves sitting by her because she laughs the whole time.

Cannabis isn’t a substance my family—under just about any circumstances—would have an interest in legalizing, but what we call normal keeps changing. Alepsia has emerged as a source of legitimate hope for Amelia. Currently, 80 percent of children being treated with Alepsia in Colorado have experienced at least a 50 percent decline in seizures. Although still preliminary, those results vastly outstrip all the FDA-approved medications Amelia has tried. Other states are taking action, and that’s a good thing. While Alepsia won’t “save” Amelia, it might mean more days smiling and laughing, and fewer sitting on the couch drooling. And it might mean a new routine for my family—which would be more than enough, for us.

The post Why My Mormon Mom Joined the Cannabis Lobby appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The church’s reaction to this Mormon moment has been especially uneasy, and therein, perhaps, lies the exhaustion. During the Winter Olympics, Gordon B. Hinckley, the president of the church, declared that his church would welcome the world and make “no attempt whatever to create a perception that these were the Mormon games.” He hoped simply to prove that the Mormon Church could be warm and hospitable. This fit nicely with one of Hinckley’s priorities during his 13 years as church president (which ended in 2008 with his death): to make his flock better neighbors, more open to the world, less clannish and insular.

On the face of it, Romney handed the church an opportunity to further precisely this goal. Romney’s run was supposed to help erase misconceptions and show that Mormons are worthy American citizens. Instead, Mormons have been distressed to learn how odd the rest of the country seems to believe they are, and the church has faced a delicate dance as it negotiates the politics of one of its own making a credible bid for the presidency.

To understand the first complication, one must grasp the extent to which Mormons do not usually feel out of place in America. While a small number of Mormons might long for a revival of the faith’s 19th century communitarianism and cultural differentiation, the late 20th century saw the Mormons embrace thorough assimilation into the mainstream consumerist, capitalist culture. Mormons write bestselling vampire novels; they play in the NBA; and they buy their white shirts and skirts at Nordstrom, the Gap, and J. Crew. Many conservative Mormons believe that their faith teaches them to embrace American capitalism; many Mormons of all political persuasions believe Joseph Smith’s teachings that the American Constitution was divinely inspired. We’re a religion of hyper-Americans.

This is why it was so jarring to suddenly realize that the rest of the country still seems to think of Mormons as “other,” if not to say downright weird. Every few weeks this year there was a media spasm about one Mormon peculiarity or another: proxy baptisms for the dead, the church’s ongoing struggle with racism, its possession of significant financial investments, Mormon underwear, the idiosyncrasies of Mormon theology. To be sure, many of these things warranted a serious look. But they did not mean that Mitt Romney as president would seek to alter the United States in any fundamental way. (And maybe too bad that he wouldn’t: many of Mormonism’s flaws—its vulnerability to the prosperity gospel, its comfort in making absolutes out of its own cultural insularity, its lapses into jingoism—reflect those of the nation.)

Mormons, for the most part, genuinely believe that they are Christian, genuinely believe that their theology is clearer and more rational than traditional creedal Christianity, and genuinely find baptism for the dead a touching expression of their church’s confidence in the importance of family and community. That other Americans are more skeptical—and that they express it with such vehemence, even in the generally restrained pages of The New York Times—has been a rude awakening. It inspires an instinctive, tribal defensiveness. I know many left-leaning Mormons who didn’t plan to vote for Romney and yet winced on his behalf whenever he got thumped.

And now Romney has been nationally thumped. There are plenty of reasons why Romney didn’t prevail yesterday, and Mormonism wasn’t necessarily an important one. But it’s no longer possible to believe that his campaign made the national campaign trail more alluring to future Mormon candidates. If anything, awareness of Mormonism’s cultural difference seems only to have been heightened by Romney’s quest.

Certainly, things could be worse. In the 19th century, everybody from the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to the dull Democratic president Grover Cleveland was convinced that the Mormons were creating a degenerate and tyrannical society in Utah that should be quashed with military force if necessary. Today most Americans simply find Mormons nice—if rather naïve, stiff, and a bit too comfortable with authority.

But the bright view darkens dramatically as soon as Mormonism is seen as having any role in politics. Cleveland sent federal marshals to Utah in the 1880s—not only because of outrage over polygamists, but also because of fears that Mormonism was turning Utah into a theocracy. Mormons have long since reduced their hold on government, but every now and again the leaders of the church weigh in on some aspect of politics—such as the anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California in 2008 (which the church supported) to an Arizona-style immigration bill under consideration in the Utah state legislature (which the church opposed). And when the church does weigh in, it always generates backlash—on the left, in the case of Prop 8, and on the right, in the case of the immigration bill. And both of those issues were simply state laws. If the church had weighed in on policy during a Romney presidency, imagine how much more backlash it would have faced.

Because Romney had such broad Mormon support, it’s worth remembering here that there was a significant, and vocal, minority of Mormons who disagreed with his politics, worried about his impact upon the church, or simply disliked the fact that he embodied so many of the stereotypes that the church has worked so hard to drop—of being awkward, stiff, white-suited, businesslike, aloof. They voted for Obama. But even among Romney supporters, there was concern that having Romney piped into Americans’ homes for the next four, or eight, years might perpetuate, rather than alleviate, that sense that Mormons are different.

Romney’s candidacy was a watershed, and a majority of Mormons undoubtedly wanted him to win. But, just as surely, some large faction of Mormons are breathing a sigh of relief that one of their own had to give a concession speech—that the spotlights are being turned off and packed up.

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But when Matthew Bowman, a religious historian and scholar of Mormonism, heard Romney invoke his wife in that manner, he thought something else: How Mormon.

Within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which Romney is an active, engaged member, there is a patriarchal structure in which men hold the important leadership positions, assisted by a women’s auxiliary called the “Relief Society.” Each ward–a congregation of several hundred people–has a bishop, or lay male leader, who selects the relief society president for his ward. “The president is the head woman in the ward,” explains Bowman, and when the bishop wants to know what women of the ward are thinking, he will go to the head woman and ask her. So when he heard Romney channel Ann on what America’s women are concerned about, Bowman could not help but think: “Ann is the Relief Society president for America.”

This interesting observation raises a familiar yet surprisingly unanswered question: the extent to which Romney’s views on women–and his policies affecting them–are influenced by his Mormon upbringing and beliefs, consciously or even just instinctively. So far, it’s hard to know because Romney doesn’t get into specifics about his religion or, frankly, about women.

For voters who are interested in gender issues, it’s fair to say that at this point there is only one presidential candidate whose positions are pretty clear. Looking at Obama, you can easily discern his take on, say, working women. Repeatedly, the president and his proxies talk about how more and more women are breadwinners in their households; how women often are supporting dependents on less than a man might make; and how we need, therefore, a government push for gender pay equity, paid sick leave, Pell grants, and other measures that will keep women in the workplace and enable them to earn more money. You may or may not agree with the president’s activist-government approach, but you know where he stands.

With Romney, you don’t, or not so much, which is all the more reason it seems natural to wonder whether we are to ascribe to his worldview the very specific roles his church promotes for men and women.

The Mormon church has historically maintained that men and women have distinct functions, and in the mid-1990s made this separate–spheres philosophy explicit by issuing a proclamation on the family stating that the chief role of the father is to preside, provide, and protect, while the role of the mother is to nurture children. Despite some recent liberalization, the view holds sway; according to the Pew Research Center, nearly 60 percent of Mormons say the best marriage is one in which the husband works for pay and the wife stays home, an opinion held by fewer than one-third of Americans overall. Kristine Haglund, a Mormon feminist and editor of Dialogue, an independent academic quarterly, says: “Mormons in all kinds of surveys since the 1960s tend to have reasonably egalitarian views about women’s capacity and whether women should be educated and whether women can do certain jobs. But for whatever reason, Mormons tend to think that children will suffer if they’re not with their mother in the home when they’re small.”

Does Romney agree with the church’s mothers-should-be-home directive, which certainly prevailed during his time as a church leader in Boston? If so, would a Romney presidency bring a dialing back of efforts to close the gender wage gap or even a campaign to quietly drive women out of the work force by, discouraging paid childcare? Would Romney decline to hire women with small children as staffers? Or, in a Nixon-goes-to-China scenario, might this pragmatic candidate do more than you might expect to help working families? Might he pressure employers to provide longer maternity leaves and to give moms their jobs back when they return?

One of the strengths of the Mormon church is not only the emphasis it places on family life but the belief that there is more to life than paid employment: The belief that, even as he is providing, a Mormon father should be engaged, available, and caring, and that men and women should volunteer to help the needy. Might a President Romney coax employers to let workers dial back hours in the office, provide more flexible time, offer telecommuting, and create more opportunities for working mothers–and fathers–to spend time with children and communities?

Maybe that’s all a stretch for a laissez-faire business Republican. But the point is we can all play this parlor game–speculating on how Romney’s Mormonism would affect his outlook and policies as president–because he hasn’t told us. And that’s partly because we haven’t really been asking him.

This line of questioning shouldn’t be taboo. Romney has been more involved with his church–as a missionary and a leader–than any president in recent memory has been involved with any church, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, whose push for human rights was very much grounded in his personal Christianity. And yes, whether fairly or unfairly, the church in question, and its beliefs, are less familiar to most Americans than mainline Protestant denominations or Roman Catholicism.

Romney might want to fill us in. So far, the candidate has deflected questions about his faith, dealing with it only in controlled settings; in a 2007 speech, for example, he said he would not let church authorities influence his decisions as president. In interviews, though, he tends to avoid further inquiry. To a certain extent it’s understandable, given how skeptics tend to go for the low-hanging fruit. “For many people, you hear ‘Mormon’ and there are all these questions about polygamy and whether Jesus and Satan were brothers and about Mormon underwear, and all of this esoterica, arcane stuff,” says Bowman, a professor of religion at Hampden-Sydney College and author of The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith. Himself a Mormon, he understands why Romney might want to steer clear of talk about revelations and prophets. This seems eminently fair: All religions at a certain point veer into the irrational–burning bushes, impregnation through the ear–and no churchgoing politician needs to enumerate ad nauseam what he believes and what he doesn’t. But given that Mormons, as Bowman observes, are more prescriptive than theological–more likely to sermonize about how to live a good life than engage in niceties of scriptural interpretation–it’s fair to ask how these prescriptions would play out politically. We accept that there are Catholic politicians who depart from their church over abortion, for instance, but we also expect them to make this departure clear.

Romney is not only an active Mormon but a veritable aristocrat of the faith. A growing number of Mormons are recent converts, but Romney, whose great-grandfather maintained a polygamous household in Mexico, is from what you might call one of its ancestral families. “Mitt comes out of the polygamous tradition; in Utah, that’s a proud tradition, that’s sort of the cultural elite of Utah. That’s the aristocracy,” says O. Kendall White, Jr., a professor emeritus of sociology at Washington and Lee University. Equally to the point, Romney’s wealth places him among the upper class of Mormons, a fact that adds even more resonance to the gender question. In past decades, Mormons have experienced all the social changes that America has gone through: Mormons divorce, Mormons are single mothers, Mormon women work, including Mormon mothers, who scramble for day care like anyone else, without much help from their church. But the more affluent a Mormon family, the less likely the wife is to work outside the home, and the more children she is likely to have. In contrast, among the general population, stay-at-home moms are more likely to be low-income. So the fact that an affluent wife like Ann Romney does not work outside the home makes her unusual among American women but usual among Mormons.

Intriguingly, there’s one force for gender liberalization within the church absent in Romney’s life: a daughter. “I know so many dads who blithely sat through sexist meetings with their wives, but then when their five-year-old daughter says, ‘When do I get to pass the sacrament, when can I give blessings?’ they have this mini-awakening,” says Haglund. Liberalization tends to come about as men react not as husbands but as fathers, seeing their daughters navigate a changing cultural landscape.

This is a point of difference between the candidates: As a father of daughters, President Obama cited the influence of Sasha and Malia in describing his journey to support of same-sex marriage. In contrast, Romney has sons, and invokes their boisterous presence to underscore that Ann Romney did plenty of hard labor at home.

During his tenure as a church official in Massachusetts, Romney counseled many couples. Among them, according to a New York Times article by Jodi Kantor, was a couple who wanted to adopt through the church, but were stymied because the church did not countenance adoption by working mothers. (It has since loosened that stricture.) Romney’s response was to help them figure out a budget that enabled the woman to stay home. But, Heglund points out, during his tenure, Romney also experienced the impact of a second-wave Mormon feminist movement that was especially vocal in the Boston area. At first, she says, he reacted “in mostly the way you would expect a Mormon patriarch to do,” which is to say with annoyance and exasperation: “some combination of not taking it seriously, of thinking that this wasn’t appropriate, the disapproving finger-wagging approach that Mormon men tend to take toward uppity women.” But over time, she says, he began genuinely listening, and responding with real seriousness, telling the women who came to him which reforms he felt were viable and which were not. “I know a couple of quite progressive women who worked for him in the statehouse in Massachusetts, who really felt that he did great with women as colleagues.” She doesn’t find this hard to believe: Among Mormon men, she says, there is this “dual strain of thinking” in which patriarchal power is important, but so is fairness and gentle behavior. She’s fascinated by young Mormon couples who adhere to the men-should-earn-and-women-nurture idea, yet when the men walk through the door, they instantly take the babies and immerse themselves in the life of the family. Within the patriarchal structure, she says, “there is always that space for relatively egalitarian relationships between men and women.”

When asked whether Romney should talk more about his faith, and whether doing so might benefit him, many Mormon academics say no: There is no good way. It would be too easy to get bogged down in talk about angels and golden plates, which might put off secular voters. At the same time, Romney has to woo evangelicals, who tend to be skeptical of Mormons–and compete with them for converts. But Romney’s faith could help him fend off the elitism label. “He has more personal experience with poor people than anybody gives him credit for,” says Haglund, pointing out that the congregations he led included some devastatingly poor neighborhoods, and that Mormons have a sturdy tradition of volunteerism and active charity.

Romney clearly feels he checked “Mormon speech” off his to-do list during the last election cycle, and that he shouldn’t be asked to do so again; that doing so would amount to some prejudiced double standard against his faith. The media largely seems to agree; at no point in those endless primary debates was the candidate asked if he embraced his church’s proclamation on the family, or the concept of separate spheres for men and women, or what he learned from his congregation service in Boston.

It’s unfortunate for so much to be off the table, rendering Romney a blank slate in many ways–a cipher with so little to talk about besides Obama’s economic record that he’s reduced to reciting patriotic songs or talking about the height of Michigan’s trees to fill air time.

Hiring a president is not like hiring a corporate manager, whose spiritual life needn’t concern us. It’s not even like hiring a governor. We deserve to know our presidential candidates, to have them explain to us their formative experiences, associations, and influences. Mormonism has clearly been important to Romney throughout his life. What that means for a Romney presidency is a legitimate question: one we shouldn’t be left to draw our own conclusions about.

Liza Mundy is a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love and Family, which was published in March.

*Photo courtesy of BU Interactive News.

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Members of Jason LaBau’s LDS Church

LDS congregations are divided along fixed geographical boundaries. A local congregation, known as a ward, will encompass 100 to 200 active Mormons, those who show up to church most Sundays and share the load of making the Church function at the local level. Some five to 12 wards are grouped into larger geographical divisions called stakes. In Utah, a ward may encompass only a few city blocks, but in other areas of the nation with smaller concentrations of Mormons, ward boundaries can be quite large. Where I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, our ward boundaries for many years were two miles by two miles in size.

When I lived in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, I belonged to the Hollywood Ward in the Los Angeles Stake. The ward boundaries encompass the neighborhoods of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, East Hollywood, Larchmont, and Hollywood, plus significant parts of West Hollywood, the Hollywood Hills, Fairfax, and Hancock Park. Latter-day Saints who live in that area go to church together in a little building on Normandie between Sunset and Hollywood. Those attending services each Sunday reflect the diversity of those areas, with a mix of English and foreign-language speakers, the native and foreign-born, the working poor and the wealthy. The broader Los Angeles Stake includes an even greater mix, stretching from Bel-Air to South and East L.A.

LDS wards are led by a bishop, a spiritual and administrative leader chosen from among the congregation to serve for a period of four to seven years, on a voluntary basis. For part of the time I was in the Hollywood Ward, the bishop was an Argentinean immigrant. He and his wife joined the LDS Church in Argentina in their early adulthood. When he was 35, they decided to begin a new life in the United States. They moved to New York, entered the restaurant business, and chose to attend one of the Church’s optional Spanish-language congregations. When his businesses later collapsed, he and his wife drove to Los Angeles to start a new life. This time they decided not to join a Spanish-language congregation so they could improve their English proficiency. He never imagined that in his late 60s he would be called to lead a ward. But for a ward reflecting the diversity of Los Angeles, he was the perfect choice.

While in the Hollywood Ward, I taught a Sunday school class for those joining the LDS Church, or returning after a period of non-attendance. The class also had plenty of active church members who wanted to reach out and support those joining us. In a class of about 25, we regularly had about a dozen languages swirling about, and it wasn’t unusual to have half a dozen countries of origin represented. Employment was just as varied, from day laborers to small business owners, from students to professionals (and always, of course, an aspiring actor or two). Across these many lines we shared some of our deepest personal experiences.

Now I live in a ward that includes much of Pasadena and Altadena. Most Sundays, my wife and I give a ride to some neighbors from around the corner: a single mother from Mexico and her son. We sometimes also picked up a young man who recently left for two years to do missionary work, an immigrant from Jamaica. Both the woman and the young man are converts to the LDS Church and the only members of their families to join. I’m not sure in what other context I, from a middle-class white family in suburban Phoenix, would be driving in a car with people of these backgrounds. But they have become good friends and an essential part of my community.

In the Hollywood Ward you would be hard-pressed to find a stereotypical Mormon family with a professional father, a stay-at-home mother, and a gaggle of well-dressed white, English-speaking children. You’d be more likely to find immigrants struggling with their English, many of whom joined the LDS Church as opposed to being born into it.

In Pasadena, the stereotypical “Romneyesque” Mormon family would be easier to find. But there’s still plenty of diversity. In just a few months, the Pasadena Ward will be supporting three local young men in their missionary work. All three are converts to the Church who immigrated from Africa or the Caribbean.

Of course, the LDS Church’s record on diversity is not perfect. The Church could do more to own up to its past policies excluding those of African descent from equal status. The LDS Church sometimes struggles to show its genuine care for its neighbors beyond a desire to win them to the faith. But in more subtle ways it is already promoting diverse interactions internally, with profound effects.

Consider, for instance, this little-covered aspect of Mitt Romney’s experience: his service as a local bishop and stake president in Boston. In those positions, he volunteered his time as the spiritual and administrative leader of all the Mormons within his congregational boundaries, areas that included as much class and social diversity as is found in Los Angeles.

This was the one part of Romney’s life where he could not have remained comfortably embedded with the wealthy elite. Instead, he would have spent most of his time ministering both individually and collectively to those in need. It may not have come naturally, but he spent a lot of years working on it, for reasons that had little to do with financial gain or courting voters.

I am not personally fond of Mitt Romney’s politics, especially not this primary season’s version of them. But I have at least this hope: If he does become the next president of the United States and does seek to represent all the people, he can draw on his daily experience in the LDS Church. In my experience, it is a church that not only declares that we are all children of God but reinforces that declaration by bringing us together each week to reach across our other divisions.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book about the history of Republican politics in Arizona.

*Top photo courtesy of waltarrrrr. Interior photo courtesy of Jason LaBau.

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The race for the seat of retiring U.S. Senator Jon Kyl has sparked a Mormon primary contest. Jeff Flake, an active Mormon and U.S. Representative from Arizona’s 6th congressional district, entered the race several months ago. Flake is a staunch fiscal conservative, a principled opponent of earmarks, and a leading conservative voice in the battle over the federal budget. He’s also an internationalist who has distanced himself from immigration hardliners, and his libertarian orientation has turned him into a strong critic of trading and travel restrictions on Cuba.

In August, Wil Cardon entered the race to challenge Flake for the Republican nomination. Cardon is a fellow Mormon, family friend, and former political supporter of Flake’s. In fact, as McKay Coppins reported in The Daily Beast, the two attended the same Mormon congregation for a time. Cardon, though, is running as a nationalist, adopting a hard-line anti-immigration stance and courting Tea Party backing. Both men will seek the support of their fellow Mormons, who account for less than 10 percent of Arizona’s population but still constitute an influential constituency in the Arizona Republican Party.

The second intriguing race getting national attention is the heated recall election of State Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, the chief sponsor of SB 1070, the controversial Arizona law that made illegal immigration a state crime and directed local police to investigate residents’ immigration status. The law has since become a model for other states. But Pearce’s outspoken views have upset enough constituents back at home to earn him a spirited battle for his job.

Pearce’s recall challenger is Jerry Lewis, a local charter school administrator. Lewis has held prominent local leadership positions in the LDS Church and served as a religious instructor at both the high school and college levels, making him well-known among the area’s Mormons. Though conservative, Lewis is more moderate than Pearce on immigration, favoring the Utah Compact. That document, endorsed by the LDS Church, calls for “a humane approach” to the reality of immigrants’ presence, a recognition of the positive economic contributions of immigrants, and an effort to keep families together.

The LDS Church’s statements in favor of more moderate immigration legislation in Utah have become something of a hurdle for Pearce, who must avoid the perception that he is at odds with his Church. When asked at a recent town hall meeting whether his views conflicted with the Church’s position, Pearce defensively stated that he had consulted with LDS leaders in Salt Lake City and been assured that they did not oppose his approach.

Because the Church has declined to comment specifically on SB 1070 or Pearce’s recall, its members will have to decide for themselves how to reconcile their religious and political views. With immigration serving as the main distinction between the Mormon candidates, the recall will provide the clearest indication yet of whether the Church’s immigration stance is swaying its members without a direct institutional effort to command their obedience.

The contest for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat is also likely to become a referendum on immigration policy, testing the strength of nationalism and internationalism, both among Mormons and within the Republican Party more broadly. Since the Republican primary victor will probably become Arizona’s next U.S. Senator, the outcome will have a more direct impact on future federal immigration legislation.

Mormons promoting a hard line on immigration can find some support in their church’s history and theology, even if they are out of step with their current church leaders. The Book of Mormon, the faith’s foundational scripture, proclaims a favored role for the United States as the chosen land. Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture, was among the more outspoken Mormon conservative nationalists to maintain that God had set the United States above all other nations as an instrument of His divine plan. More recently, Mormon convert Glenn Beck has been active in spreading this religious nationalism to his Tea Party audiences.

If the American nation is a sacrosanct instrument of God’s will, it isn’t a stretch to then consider preserving the nation’s essence, not to mention its territorial integrity, a spiritual–as well as a political–imperative. This is a starkly different worldview from the one espoused by contemporary Mormon leaders, who are less likely to view the rest of the world as a threat and more likely to see in it an opportunity for future growth. The LDS Church explicitly supports legislation allowing undocumented immigrants “to square themselves with the law and continue to work” in the United States and claims such a policy approach flows from the church’s moral teachings to love thy neighbor.

Watch the election returns next week out of Arizona to see whether those teachings have much sway among conservative Republican primary voters.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book project, Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo courtesy of More Good Foundation.

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The Tea Party movement, with its rejection of Chamber of Commerce-type Republican elites, rose-tinted view of America’s past, and belief in self-reliance and small government, has reinvigorated isolationist nationalism within the GOP. Though much of the movement’s rhetoric has lately focused on public spending, suspicion of all things foreign–be they immigrants, overseas military missions, or Obama’s family roots–is one of the Tea Party’s animating forces.

At the same time, we’re in the midst of a Mormon political moment, with two active Mormons vying for the Republican presidential nomination. Though conservatives, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are internationalists whose backgrounds suggest they must find it very distasteful to have to pander to the isolationist crowd in their own party.

The notion of a political elite that is more cosmopolitan than party activists is far from a new phenomenon in American politics, but what is startling about the emerging tension within the Republican Party, particularly in the West, is that the counterweight to nativist rancor isn’t exclusively the business elites–but the Mormon church itself.

This makes sense from an institutional point of view. Based on the scale of its enterprise and its future growth prospects, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)–the official name of the Mormon church–has more in common with a multinational corporation like Coca-Cola or IBM than it does with local evangelical Christian congregations or state-based political activist groups. A president (regarded as a prophet), his two counselors, and a body of twelve apostles may lead the LDS Church from its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, but they recognize that the Mormon doctrine needs to have a global appeal for the enterprise to flourish.

Partly because of the religion’s missionary zeal, Mormons as a whole tend to be more worldly than most Americans. Companies needing multilingual workforces often head for Utah; the CIA has long relied on Mormon hires because so many of them are bilingual (in addition to their straight-arrow reputation). Jon Huntsman is fluent in Mandarin not because he was President Obama’s ambassador to Beijing, but because he did his LDS mission as a young man in Taiwan. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, did his mission in France, though he is as unlikely to reminisce about that on the campaign trail as he is to extol his family’s Mexican roots.

Of the church’s 14 million members, more than half live outside the United States, including a large portion in Latin America who have a personal or familial stake in America’s immigration debates. From Salt Lake City, Church leaders face the difficult responsibilities of managing a global church, and caring for some members living at the margins of U.S. law. Strict enforcement of U.S. immigration policy has disrupted the Church’s internal affairs and upended the lives of some of its members.

Young men and women in the United States who volunteer for missionary work but lack proper documentation cannot safely cross the nation’s borders. Laws designed to discourage illegal immigration can limit the religious freedom of Church members, many of whom came to the United States as children.

In June, two Utah men were arrested and deported, the first to El Salvador along with his family and the second to Guatemala without his family. Both men were serving as the spiritual leaders of their local Spanish-speaking congregations. For a Church that relies on a lay clergy and places special emphasis on family relationships, deportations like these are doubly wrenching.

In this political context, the LDS Church leadership has supported a more permissive approach to immigration policy than that promoted by many other conservatives. The Church endorsed the Utah Compact, a declaration of five principles for a moderate state immigration policy. The Church also played a role in the passage of legislation that grants undocumented workers driver’s licenses and the right to work upon paying a fine. And it went a step further in explicitly tying that endorsement to Mormon religious principles.

This isn’t to say that all Mormon politicians are falling into line: the author of Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant legislation S.B. 1070, State Senate President Russell Pearce, is a Mormon, and plenty rank-and-file church members in Utah wish their state had followed Arizona’s example. It will be increasingly interesting to see how far the Church goes in flexing its institutional muscle on behalf of a more progressive approach to immigration.

The LDS Church leadership has a proven capacity for motivating its members to take political action on specific policy matters, sometimes across party lines. Though the Church has an official policy of partisan neutrality, it reserves and exercises the right to become involved in specific policy issues. When it does so, the Church can draw on its influence over the beliefs of individual members and on the strength of its corporate structure.

The most recent evidence of the Church’s political power came in the fight over California’s Proposition 8. Here the LDS Church joined with other groups in seeking to outlaw same-sex marriage. In addition to lending support to the coalition at the highest levels, Church leaders mobilized its local members in a coordinated effort to raise funds, get out the vote, and persuade others.

In the process, the Church demonstrated its ability to transform its membership into a highly motivated, local, grassroots political movement almost overnight. And it did so successfully, outside of Utah, in the most populous state in the nation. Though already-conservative members formed the bulk of activists, the Church was also able to draw more moderate members into its efforts. On immigration, and possibly down the line on issues like foreign aid and trade, an internationalist Church leadership would presumably be more at odds with many in its flock than it has been when touting a socially conservative agenda.

The Republican Party is torn these days between its corporate base, which still clings to a more internationalist outlook, and its socially conservative base, which is embracing a more insular worldview–turning first against immigration and trade, and more recently against foreign military interventions as well. It’s surreal to think that, not long ago, a conservative Republican president, George W. Bush, was pushing for comprehensive immigration reform.

His push was ill-fated, but an intriguing question in coming years will be whether Mormon political activism may have an unexpected moderating influence on the right, insofar as the Church allies itself with business elites to push back against the xenophobic politics of the Tea Party.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book project, Phoenix Rising: Arizona and the Enduring Divisions of Modern Conservatism.

*Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore.

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