Did Mormons Get A Bounce From Mitt?

After Mitt Romney suspended his presidential campaign yesterday, in a speech praising conservative values and criticizing such scourges as liberal judges and France, the question became:

So, was it good for the Mormons?

The Jews like asking that question about themselves. They asked it a lot after Joe Lieberman ran for vice president in 2000, and it was never quite resolved to everyone's satisfaction. (Others are easier. Monica Lewinsky: Bad for the Jews.) Can you blame any minority for asking such a question about themselves? Who doesn't want to be loved?

"Mormons were chased out of the Midwest in the 1840s, and ever since then they've been looking to America for approval," says Bengt Washburn, a Mormon who is also a full-time comedian. (There aren't a lot of those, by the way. In case you were wondering.) Washburn says Mormons he knows will constantly list examples of mainstream Mormons to outsiders. Gladys Knight is a Mormon! Steve Young is a Mormon! Donny! Marie!

It's as if to say, "'See? Mormons aren't weird,'" Washburn says. "Well, yeah, we're weird." But here's the thing, the comedian adds: "All theology standing next to logic is weird."

Maybe that was Romney's mistake, that he tried to make his religion sound palatable to evangelical ears, that he didn't just say that sure, some of my beliefs may sound incredible to outsiders, but then again, a lot of the doings in Bible stories sound incredible to outsiders. (And, as historian Jan Shipps points out, Mormonism is a young faith. The earliest Christians were reviled, too.) But politics doesn't permit that sort of honesty any more than it allows a candidate to say, "My faith is private, okay?"

The truth is, Mormonism is in many ways the epitome of what was considered normalcy, back before the '60s upended everybody's definition. With his handsome tanned face and white teeth, his five square-jawed sons, his gorgeous blond wife and daughters-in-law, his teetotaling ways, his corporate demeanor, Romney broadcast health, uprightness, a life spent on the straight-'n'-narrow.

His campaign put out an ad at one point of Romney jogging, all that fabulous hair slighty mussed. The message seemed clear: Now here is a man vigorous and disciplined. (Take that, John McCain!) Every morning on the campaign trail, he ate the granola his wife made for him herself. How consistent! How homey!

Was he too normal?

We'll come back to that.

Two big things happened to elevate the face of Mormonism in the last decade. One, of course, was Romney running for president. The other was the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002, which Romney took credit for turning around. During the Olympics, the Mormons were "wonderfully gracious" to visitors, as Shipps says, and everyone thought, wow, these Mormons aren't so weird after all.

"The result of this was that a lot of the stereotypes about Mormonism, the negative stereotypes -- that they were clannish, that they were secretive -- that sort of disappeared," says Shipps, who is one of the foremost non-Mormon scholars of the denomination.