from Tales from the Trail:
Romney’s religion still an issue for many Republicans
Mitt Romney might be looking to open up an unassailable lead over rival Rick Santorum in the 10 "Super Tuesday" nominating contests, but he still faces questions among many of his fellow Republicans about his Mormon religion, according to recent NBC/Marist poll results.
NBC/Marist found that large numbers of Republicans voters -- a range of 37 to 44 percent -- in two of the states holding primaries on March 6 - Ohio and Virginia - and others that voted last week - Michigan and Arizona - do not believe that Mormons are Christians, or are unsure whether they are.
The percentages were the same in Virginia, Ohio and Michigan, where 44 percent of likely Republican primary voters said they did not believe that Mormons are Christians or were not sure, and 56 percent said they do believe a Mormon is a Christian, according to the polls. Polling was done in all of the states before they held their primaries.
In Arizona, 63 percent of likely Republican voters polled before the primary believed Mormons were Christians, while 37 percent did not or weren't sure. In Florida, 60 percent of likely Republican primary voters said Mormons were Christians, and 40 percent did not or were not sure.
The polls found some correlations between those views and support for Mitt Romney, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the formal name for Mormonism, compared with his main rival, Rick Santorum, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania best known for his unflinchingly religious conservative views on issues such as opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.
In Ohio, the biggest prize among the 10 Super Tuesday states, NBC/Marist found that Romney led Santorum by 38 percent to 28 percent among likely Republican voters who believe Mormons are Christians. But among those who don't or who are unsure, Santorum led Romney by 41 percent to 24 percent. Santorum is not on Virginia's primary ballot.
from Tales from the Trail:
Romney on his work as a Mormon missionary: “We didn’t convert one person”
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Tuesday, where co-host Joe Scarborough asked him about his experience as a Mormon missionary in France in the 1960s. "Talk about your rejections as a missionary knocking on door, after door, after door in a hostile environment," Scarborough asked.
Romney recalled five months he spent in one French city, where he said near-constant brush-offs built his resilience:
"We knocked on doors from morning until quite late in the evening," he said. "We didn't convert one person in five months. So, you understand the rejection, you know that's a pretty high level of rejection and you get used to it. You say, 'okay, what do I believe, what's important to me,' and you don't measure yourself and your success by how other people react, but instead by how you're doing and how you feel about the things you care about."
Watch the clip below (Romney speaks about his experience as a missionary starting at the 2:00 mark):
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
“Mormon question” may again dog Mitt Romney’s U.S. presidential bid
Republican Mitt Romney has remade himself in a second run for U.S. president, with a leaner campaign apparatus and a message focused with laser-like precision on the nation’s economic problems. But the “Mormon question” still remains for the former Massachusetts governor: are Americans ready to put a Mormon in the White House?
Surveys suggest American voters are more accepting of the idea now than when Romney staged his first presidential run in 2008. But at the margins, many remain suspicious of Mormons. A Quinnipiac University poll this week found voters less comfortable with the idea of a Mormon president than having a leader of any religion other than a Muslim, or an atheist.
“The fact that less than half of voters have a favorable view of the religion is likely to be a political issue that Governor Romney … will have to deal with,” said Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Connecticut.
Romney has closer ties to Mormonism than other Mormons in U.S. politics, such as Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and Jon Huntsman, his possible Republican rival for the party’s presidential nomination. A fifth-generation member of the faith whose forebears were involved in the religion from the mid-1850s, Romney is a former lay bishop of Massachusetts’ temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But Romney, whose campaign message on jobs is gaining some traction with voters, is making an attempt to avoid being defined by religion. “I separate quite distinctly matters of personal faith from the leadership one has in a political sense,” the Republican said in an interview on CNN this week. “You don’t begin to apply the doctrines of a religion to responsibility for guiding a nation or guiding a state.”
Read the full story by Ros Krasny here.
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Tom, What you say is true that most evangelicals believe that Mormons are not Christian. This is more than a little puzzling because Mormons do believe in, follow the teachings of, and deeply worship Christ. If that is not Christian, then WHAT IS???
It is apparent that some evangelical pastors got together and made up their own definition of Christianity. It is in their own pastoral and financial interest to eliminate Mormonism from their own arrogant, narrow view of the teachings of Christ. For them to preach this misinformation is no less than spreading hate and bigotry. What is Christian about that?
Does FRC index underline weak link between faith and family?
The conservative Christian, Washington-based Family Research Council (FRC) has just released its first “Annual Index of Family Belonging and Rejection.” You can click here to see its full details.
The “Index of Belonging” is 45 percent and that of “Rejection” is 55 percent. The report’s author, Patrick Fagan, who heads FRC’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute, says the following:
“Only 45 percent of U.S. teenagers have spent their childhood with an intact family, with both their birth mother and their biological father legally married to one another since before or around the time of the teenager’s birth … 55 percent of teenagers live in families where their biological parents have rejected each other. The families with a history of rejection include single-parent families, stepfamilies, and children who no longer live with either birth parent but with adoptive or foster parents.”
An intact family is one defined as one in which “a child’s birth mother and biological father (were) legally married to one another since before or around the time of the child’s birth.”
One thing that really strikes me about the index, which draws on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, is that while it gives charts and breakdowns in a detailed appendix based on ethnicity, state, region, by region and ethnic group, by the country’s 26 largest cities, and other geographical criteria, there is no chart that gives a breakdown on faith lines.
This is interesting, not least because of FRC’s overtly conservative, evangelical outlook on the world. Indeed, the report says that the task of repairing the country’s families — which it says lies in the “restoration of the husband-wife relationship” — must be “led primarily by the institution of religion (church, synagogue, mosque and temple) and aided by the institution of education (schools, universities and media). These three—family, church and school—are the prime shapers of relationships.”
The FRC report does not show a weak link between faith and family, it shows a weak link between evangelicalism and faith. Asians, probably in part because of the South Asian Muslims (as the author notes) have high “belonging” percentages as do Mormons. That fact of the matter is that the findings are a critical commentary on the lack of conservatism in the evangelical world. They are very worldly people who are quite immersed in the secular culture and accept many of its values with a Christian veneer. I could say the same for many of my fellow religionists in America (Eastern Orthodox). The more socially conservative (not “evangelical” or “Catholic”) a group is, the greater the index of belonging. The trouble is that most Christian denominations do not use cultural pressure, including excommunication, in order to enforce standards. The utter hypocrisy will continue until they decide to do so.
Guestview: “Almost Christian” teens challenge U.S. parents and churches
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Elizabeth E. Evans is a freelance writer, columnist and priest-in-charge at St. Marks Episcopal Church, Honey Brook, Pennsylvania.
By Elizabeth E. Evans
A large-scale study charting the religious habits of American teenagers has quietly been underway for almost a decade but has received relatively little media attention until now. As the data from the longitudinal analysis performed by the National Study of Youth & Religion is released, (NSYR) it could and should stimulate unsettling questions for Christian parents and churches alike.
Featuring phone interviews with 3,300 teens and their parents and three-hour interviews with close to 300 of them, the NSYR research random sampled feedback by kids from any tradition – or none.
Impassioned and articulate, NSYR research team member Kenda Creasy Dean has distilled her reflections on the findings into a volume that is both a critique of “status quo” Christian practice and encouragement to take faith more seriously.
In Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church, the Princeton Theological Seminary professor mines the NSYR information to examine a virus she believes is currently wreaking havoc with American denominations — “moral therapeutic deism.” Coined by NYSR chief investigator Christian Smith, a Notre Dame professor, the term symbolizes the view that “religion is about being nice, feeling good about themselves, and that otherwise God pretty much stays out of the way — unless you need to call upon God to serve your needs,” says Dean.
Bus tours journey into U.S. polygamist town run by breakaway Mormon group
A peek inside a polygamist community and their isolated way of life is now just a bus ride away for sightseers from around the world.
Billed as the “Polygamy Experience,” the four-hour, $70 tour takes visitors through the middle of the polygamist enclave Colorado City on the Utah-Arizona border. Children play in yards, families picnic in parks and teenage boys gallop their horses away from the guests. Women with old-fashioned braided hair and pioneer dresses usher the little ones out of eyesight.
Holm says tourists have come from France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Norway and throughout the United States. He added that the tour idea is growing slowly as local people start opening up.
Colorado City is the headquarters of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS). It is where their prophet and leader Warren Jeffs once ruled. The FLDS is a breakaway from the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormon faith, which is centered in Salt Lake City and once practiced plural marriage but renounced it over a century ago.
Atheists, Jews, Mormons top U.S. religious knowledge poll
Atheists and agnostics may not believe in God or gods but they know a thing or two about them, according to a survey of religious knowledge among Americans released on Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
“On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 … Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers,” Pew said. It found Protestants answered 16 correctly and Catholics on average 14.7.
“While previous surveys by the Pew Research Center have shown that America is among the most religious of the world’s developed nations, this survey shows that large numbers of Americans are not well informed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own,” said Pew, which is based in Washington.
Highlights of the survey include:
- More than four-in-10 Catholics do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion actually become the body and blood of Jesus.
- About half of Protestants cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person who sparked the Protestant Reformation.
- Less than half identified Buddhism as the Dalai Lama’s religion, 51 percent knew that Joseph Smith was Mormon and 54 percent correctly said the Koran is the Islamic holy book. More than 80 percent knew that Mother Teresa was Catholic.
This reminded me a survey I conducted several years ago. The purpose was to find out how much our university students know about Stalin. Here is the description of the results:
According to one professor most MSU students do not know who Stalin was. I was very surprised and decided to survey my students. Of 23 present only 13 raised their hands indicating they knew who Stalin was. Was my small sample a good representation of the student population at our university? This was a statistics class, composed mostly of non-science students. As an exercise in data gathering I asked each student to conduct a survey in another class on campus. Find the fraction of students declaring “I know who Joseph Stalin was.” I now have 19 samples based on 439 students. On the average 72% of polled students think they know who Stalin was. The actual results are shown in the following table . . .
Ludwik Kowalski (Ph.D.)
the author of “Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality,” at
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/life /intro.html
It is an autobiography illustrating my evolution from one extreme to another–from a devoted Stalinist to an active anti-communist. This testimony is based on a diary I kept between 1946 and 2004 (in the USSR, Poland, France and the USA).
from India Insight:
The Mormons in India
– Sonya Fatah writes for the GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. –
Their voices rang out, echoing in the nearby passageway. "Count your many blessings," they sang. "Name them one by one. Count your many blessings. See what God hath done." And so, the women, some 25 of them, members of the Sisters Committee at one of the six churches of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in New Delhi, closed their Sunday post-service meeting.
"Let us all work together so we can have a temple here,” urged the chair of the meeting, eliciting head nods and verbal assents all round.
There are almost 7,500 Mormons in India, according to the LDS Church, one of the most organized religious bodies in the world. Like all religious groups keen on increasing their numbers, the church is now looking eastward, toward India to share Joseph Smith’s message.
On numbers alone, conversion in India hasn’t happened as quickly as in Latin America, but that isn’t holding back the missionary fervor of those who have already embraced the church’s teachings. Ever since elders from the Quorum of the Twelve, while visiting Bangalore in 1992, announced a "prophecy" that New Delhi would have a temple, serious efforts are underway to get there.
Anuradha Yadav, 24, is one new Mormon who is dedicated to seeing a temple in New Delhi. Born into a traditional Hindu family of the Yadav caste, Anuradha recalls questioning her faith early on, when she was 14 years old.
“I kept asking questions, and I started visiting churches. In all I visited 30 churches.” One year of church shopping later, Anuradha was even more confused. Then in 2006 she bumped into two young elders on the street who shared the Book of Mormon with her.
Just for the record — readers who compare posting this article to advertising for Christianity or proselytism do not understand why we put it up there. Mormonism is a U.S.-based church that is expanding around the world and information about its activities outside the U.S. should be of interest to readers of this blog. The fact it deals with India is incidental — we would have been just as ready to post an article about Mormonism growing in, say, Brazil or South Africa. Some readers also seem to feel India gets undue notice in religion news. It wouldn’t if it weren’t so religiously diverse and religion were not such a public issue there.
Pew Forum report details changing U.S. religious affilations
The folks at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have come up with a new bit of intriguing number crunching. This time round they have taken a more detailed look at how Americans change religious affiliations in a new report entitled “Faith in Flux.” You can see the report here. It is a follow-up to Pew’s huge U.S. Religious Landscape Survey which was conducted in 2007.
Among the highlights which underscore the fluid nature of American faith:
* It finds that 44 percent of the U.S. adults do not belong to their childhood faith.
* Among the 56 percent who belong to their childhood faith, one in six say there was a point in their life when their religion differed.
* Faith-switching is most appealing for the young: Most of those who left their childhood faith did so before reaching age 24; a large majority say they joined their current religion before they turned 36.
* But very few report changing religions after reaching the age of 50.
* When asked in an open-ended question to explain in their own words the main reason they are no longer part of their former religion, roughly half of former Catholics give an explanation related to religious and moral beliefs. The same is true of roughly four-in-ten former Protestants who have become unaffiliated.
Apostles or Apostates?
Chambers dictionary defines an apostate as “someone who rejects a religion, belief, political affiliation, etc. that they previously held.” So it’s easy to imagine the horror among Mormons if it were applied, even by mistake, by a Mormon-owned newspaper to the second-highest presiding group within the Mormon Church.
But that’s what happened at The Daily Universe, a newspaper at Brigham Young University.A photo caption in Monday’s edition read in part: “Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote…”
Er, make that “Apostles”.
The newspaper scrapped 18,000 copies (the entire printing) of its Monday edition after discovering the typo.
Its editors issued an apology and published an article to explain the error, which would have caused great offense in a school owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints where students are required to behave in line with LDS teachings — from abstinence to dress and grooming standards.
The cause? Deadline pressure and the spell-checker, said Rich Evans, editorial manager for The Daily Universe.
“Our copy editor in charge of the front page, who was under deadline pressure, was using spell check on her page and had misspelled the word apostle,” Evans said.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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it is not a religion it is a anomaly… ungodly and wrong… voting for obama is better than this christian raider…