WASHINGTON -- A quarter of Americans in a recent poll said they are less likely to support a Mormon running for president, suggesting Republican Mitt Romney continues to have a "Mormon problem."
That was the conclusion of speakers at a Poynter Institute for Media Studies conference Thursday on "Politics and Religion: Getting it Right." The session was in part aimed at exposing false stereotypes about evangelical Christians and Mormons, with speakers explaining the sects and errors made in reporting about them.
Alan Cooperman, associate director of research for the Pew Forum, said the November poll results showed people free associate negative terms like "cult" but also positive terms like "family values" when asked about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
White evangelicals (46 percent) and white Catholics (45 percent) have the highest favorability rating for Romney, while unaffiliated voters have the highest unfavorability rating (55 percent), the Pew poll found. Republican evangelicals are more likely than other cohorts to see Romney's religion as an issue, Cooperman said.
The conference also heard from John C. Green of Pew's Forum on Religion and Public Life that a person's regular attendance at religious services is the second-best predictor of voting after race, and that regular attendance usually translates into conservative voting patterns. It's more of a predictor than union membership, education level, age, affluence or sex, Cooperman said.
Amy S. Mitchell and Jesse Holcomb of the Pew Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at the role of religion in mainstream news coverage in 2008 and so far this year found it generally followed controversies. They noted that President Barack Obama's Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, got a lot of coverage in 2008, as did the mistaken belief that Obama is a Muslim.
So far this year, only 6 percent of stories the project analyzed dealt with the candidates' religions, with Michele Bachmann getting the most coverage, the project found. Opportunities to cover the candidates' religious beliefs, such as Pastor Rick Warren's August 2008 invitation for them to speak at his Saddleback Church in California, have been largely missed when stories focus on strategy -- who won -- rather than how beliefs might translate into public policy or depth of character.
Both in 2008 and so far this year, reporters have declined to "dig deeper" into religious beliefs, Mitchell said.
Holcomb said a "tonal assessment" of blogs about the campaign displayed not so much an antipathy toward Romney's religion by the bloggers themselves but speculation that others would have problems with it.
"The notion that Romney's faith is a liability hasn't gone away," Holcomb said.
Rick Edmonds, researcher, of Poynter asked speakers whether Romney's recent ad, in which he says he's been married to the same woman for 42 years and has belonged to the same religion his whole life, was a subtle dig at Newt Gingrich's three marriages and his conversions from being a Lutheran to a Southern Baptist and now a Roman Catholic.
The perspective of evangelicals was explained by Michael Cromartie, director of Evangelicals in Civic Life who was appointed by President George W. Bush to the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom. He told a series of stories about working with reporters, including one from The New York Times who had never heard of the epistle to the Ephesians and asked him for the names of its author and publisher.
"It occurred to me that I was dealing with someone with an utterly different world view," he said. He said reporters should look at evangelicals' "plausibility structures" to understand what motivates their values.
Michael R. Otterson, public affairs director for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a former reporter, looked at each negative stereotype people list when asked about Mormons, including claims they are a cult, are not Christians, practice polygamy and are "weird." He asked participants with questions to "engage us directly."
Otterson noted that Mormons are the fourth-largest Christian denomination, after Catholics, Southern Baptists and Methodists, and that every Mormon worship service contains references to Jesus Christ and his divinity. He said polygamy is part of the church's history but polygamist sects that call themselves Latter-day Saints -- like the one in Texas led by Warren Jeffs, who was convicted this summer of sexually assaulting two girls -- are in no way associated with his denomination.
(Bartholomew Sullivan is the team leader of the Scripps Howard News Service's political coverage from Washington. Reach him at 202-408-2726 or sullivanb@shns.com.)
Comments