Mormon Media Observer: Mitt's curtain call

It�s been an interesting week to see how the nation�s media sized up the withdrawal of Mitt Romney from the presidential race, and its lingering effects on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The media�s conventional wisdom is this: Romney and members of the LDS Church did not understand how deeply rooted anti-Mormonism is, and that was the death knell for the Romney campaign.

Here�s a sampling of news and opinion:

A lengthy Wall Street Journal analysis had this as its lead paragraph: "Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency brought more attention to the Mormon Church than it has had in years. What the church discovered was not heartening."

It goes on to quote Democratic pollster Peter Hart. The LDS faith "was the silent factor in a lot of the decision making by evangelicals and others," Hart said, adding that the Romney campaign ran into "a religious bias head wind."

USA Today emphasized some of the anti-Mormon sentiment after Super Tuesday�s vote when it wrote: "Many evangelical Christian voters also were unwilling to overlook Romney's religion. It didn't help that he paused his campaign Saturday to attend the funeral of Mormon Church leader Gordon Hinckley in Utah. West Virginia GOP convention delegate Brian Bigelow said on Tuesday he would support 'whoever can defeat Mitt Romney. I don't believe that Bible-believing Christians should take part in the mainstreaming of Mormonism'."

New Republic columnist Peter Keating put it this way in a column: "But Romney probably wasn't going to earn those ballots (in southern states) anyway. Southern states have GOP primary electorates dominated by evangelical Christians, specifically by Southern Baptists. And many of those Southern Baptists are committed to blocking the ascension of a Mormon to the presidency.

"For the conservative pundits backing Romney who missed this story, ideology trumps theology. But for many evangelicals, it's the other way around. Southern Baptists and Mormons are not only two of the four largest religious denominations in the country, they are the most aggressive of American missionary faiths, and have been on a collision course for generations."

Keating claims the bias in the south has to do largely with the Southern Baptism anti-Mormon campaign bolstered since the 1980s.

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan also pointed to evangelicals for Romney�s demise. "Blame Christians," he wrote. "By significant margins, in poll after poll, in vote after vote a solid block of evangelical Christians said they would never vote for a Mormon. Since evangelicals made up nearly half of the Republican primary vote in some states, Romney was up against a deep well of distrust of a religion that many evangelicals still label a cult."

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