America and the meaning of a Mormon president

SALT LAKE CITY — When asked how Joe Lieberman's Jewish faith would affect his campaign, a U.S. senator from Louisiana said, "I don't think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday."

The senator had forgot that Lieberman, a practicing Jew, worships at a synagogue, not a church, on Saturday, not Sunday. The comment was an example of an ignorance about religious minorities that can sometimes lead to religious bigotry at the polls. Mitt Romney's candidacy may be a sign things are changing.

Many Americans believe Barack Obama's inauguration marked a rejection of racial prejudices in America. Some feel the election of a Mormon president could mark a rejection of religious prejudice, at least of Mormons.

"Obama's election in 2008 and inauguration in 2009 represented the advancement of America in racial dialogue and relationships," said Keith Hamilton, an adjunct law professor at Brigham Young University and BYU's first black law graduate. "If a Latter-day Saint were elected president, it would represent another example of how America has grown up about these issues."

"The LDS Church has suffered greater religious persecution in its history than any other religious group in American history," said Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, a practicing Jew. "For a member of the LDS Church to be elected president, or honestly even just to come close, would represent in some important way a repudiation of (anti-Mormon) prejudice."

"And make no mistake about it," Feldman warned, "that prejudice is real."

Prejudice against Mormons began when their founding prophet and president, Joseph Smith, claimed heavenly visions in upstate New York. Subsequently, he and his followers were driven from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. After Smith's violent death in Illinois, more persecution prompted a mass exodus to the Salt Lake Valley. The flight to the Utah Territory didn't stay American prejudice; it continued with the Utah War and the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which dictated the incarceration of polygamists and the federal confiscation of Church land.

Even after Utah's incorporation as a state in 1896, the U.S. House of Representatives still refused to seat the recently elected Mormon, B.H. Roberts. In the early twentieth century American-Mormon relations began to turn a corner, but only after Reed Smoot's Congressional hearings. Reed Smoot (a Mormon Apostle) was elected to the U.S. senate in 1903, yet his seating faced a three-year-long Congressional debate that included a three-day-long interrogation of Mormon Prophet Joseph F. Smith.