A Mormon President | Is America Ready For A Mormon President?

By Daniel Burke

(RNS) For all the political hubbub over Mormonism, you might have thought Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are the first Mormons to run for president.

In fact, 11 Latter-day Saints have campaigned for the White House, including the faith’s founder, Joseph Smith.

A barrage of bullets cut short Smith’s campaign in 1844. He was the first presidential candidate to be assassinated, according to historian Newell G. Bringhurst, author of “The Mormon Quest for the Presidency.”

Some of the obstacles Smith faced, however, live on.

In a July Gallup Poll, 22 percent of Americans said they would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate, a figure that has hardly budged since 1967. Earlier this month, a prominent pastor who backs Texas Gov. Rick Perry for president called Mormonism a “cult.” Romney shrugged off the insult, saying he has heard worse.

Joseph Smith heard worse, too. A study of his short-lived campaign demonstrates that anti-Mormon sentiment is rooted deep in American history.

“Quite ordinary people were roused to levels of hatred and fear they never reached at any other time,” writes historian Richard Lyman Bushman in “Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder.”

Six months into his presidential campaign, Smith was murdered by an angry mob in Carthage, Ill. Some historians believe his White House run incited fears of a looming Mormon theocracy.

“It was not a hatred of the alien,” writes Bushman. “It was more a fear of the familiar gone awry.”

Then, as now, it was theological _ not political _ disagreements that agitated many of Mormonism’s opponents, said Adam Christing, director of a documentary about Smith’s campaign.

Smith sought to dramatically change Christianity, introducing novel concepts and new scriptures, such as the Book of Mormon. Many Christians branded him a heretic.

“Some of the same language they were using in the 1830s about Mormons you still hear today,” Christing said.

In some ways, Smith was already a seasoned politician: the mayor, chief magistrate and militia leader of the Mormon settlement in Nauvoo, Ill.

But the self-described “rough stone” was a long-shot presidential candidate.

Smith was unschooled and unpolished, had been imprisoned for treason, and anti-Mormon mobs had chased his church out of Missouri. Rumors that he was a power-hungry polygamist followed him like feral dogs.

Still, Smith had the uncanny confidence of a prophet, and remained convinced that his candidacy would benefit the country and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After his church warred with Missourians, Smith and other Mormon leaders pleaded to President Martin Van Buren for protection. Van Buren declined to help, saying that he could ill afford to lose Missouri’s votes in his re-election bid.

Frustrated, Smith wrote to the leading presidential candidates in 1843, asking only one question: What would their Mormon policy be? Since none would commit to protecting the embattled church, Smith and other Mormon leaders decided he should run.

“I would not have suffered my name to have been used by my friends on anywise as president of the United States or candidate for that office if I and my friends could have had the privilege of enjoying our religious and civil rights,” he said.

Historians disagree about whether Smith thought he could win. Some say he only hoped to get some good press, gain Mormon converts and play kingmaker in Illinois, where the resettled Mormons were known to vote as a block.

Other historians argue that Smith committed all his church’s resources to a serious campaign.

“He really began as a protest candidate,” said Bushman. “But I think as he went along, like a lot of protest candidates, he began to have hopes that just possibly he could win.”

At a time when violent mobs ran roughshod over minority rights, Smith hoped to build a “coalition of the oppressed,” Bringhurst said. His platform was tailored to gain support from abolitionists, free blacks, Catholics and other hounded groups.

Smith favored neutrality in foreign affairs, absolute freedom of religion, abolition of slavery, low taxes and prison reform. He also wanted to cut Congress in half and grant the president “full power to send an army to suppress mobs.”

To spread the message, more than 330 Mormon missionaries fanned out across all 26 states and the Wisconsin territory with pamphlets bearing “General Smith’s Views.”

They spent as much time preaching about Mormonism as they did promoting Smith’s campaign, historians say.

“It’s hard to draw a distinction between when they were speaking in the name of the church and when in the name of their candidate,” said Richard Bennett, associate dean of religious education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Smith himself left little room between his roles as prophet and politician. “He was just totally insensitive to the separation of church and state,” said Bushman.

“He believed he was an instrument in the hands of God to restore God’s kingdom on earth,” Christing added. “He was almost a King David figure.”

While campaigning for president, Smith also established the Council of Fifty, a kind of shadow government that would lead Mormons to safer ground out West, where they would prepare for the Second Coming, which Smith expected to arrive soon.

It was an exercise in extreme cognitive dissonance: running for president while believing the end was nigh.

Smith never saw either vision realized. He was jailed for destroying a printing press run by Mormon dissenters and later accused (again) of treason. Local leaders feared his growing political and ecclesiastical power.

“The fact that he ran for president was like the final straw,” Bringhurst said.

Source:Religious News Service

Billy Hallowell, a journalist with The Blaze wrote recently about A Mormon President. His story generated more than 500 online comments. He took some time to talk to the director, Adam Christing on the film and explores Adam’s reasoning for making a documentary on the Mormon founder Joseph Smith. In their conversation, Adam stated, “As a kid I was enamored with Joseph Smith. A few years back I started reading more and more about Mormon history. I made a mock-umentary for fun a few years back. After that, I said ‘hey I’ve got to find a way to fuse my passion for film with interest in Mormonism.’” From this idea, “A Mormon President” was set into place.

To read Hallowell’s article on the film, click here.

The producers of A Mormon President learned many interesting facts of history while filming the documentary.  One of these things is this:  There are many “Mormon” churches.  Some experts say there are as many as 200 to 400 different Mormon splinter groups. Each one traces itself back to the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith.

3 of the largest groups are:  The LDS church based in Salt Lake City, Utah, The “Reorganized” LDS church–now called Community of Christ–based in Independence, Missouri, and The Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints with followers in Utah, Texas, Colorado, and Arizona.

These groups all agree that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.  They believe in the Book of Mormon.  But they differ on many issues of doctrine and history including the question of polygamy.  The LDS church stopped practicing it.  The RLDS church never practiced it.  And many of the Fundamentalist believers still practice polygamy.

This video is a recent reporter’s story about the Temple Lot Church of Christ, yet another Mormon splinter group.

Joseph Smith and the Mormon Faith: MyFoxMEMPHIS.com

For more information about the history of Mormon sects, see Scattering Of The Saints: Schism Within Mormonism by John C. Hamer

Officially entering the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination: Mitt Romney in Stratham, N.H., on June 2 and Jon Huntsman at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, N.J., on June 21

With two Mormon candidates in the 2012 Republican presidential primary race, will it be easier or harder for one of them to win the nomination?

When Mitt Romney ran in the G.O.P. presidential primaries in 2008, his religion caused discomfort among some conservative voters who objected to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The controversy lead him to give a speech in December 2007, in which he asserted his Christian convictions and played down his Mormon beliefs.

In the 2012 race, he has been joined by a fellow Mormon, Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and ambassador to China, who has dismissed his religious beliefs in the past. (“I can’t say I’m overly religious,” he told Fortune magazine last year.)

Is it a greater risk for Mormon politicians to play down their religion, or will this alienate the party faithful more than the candidates’ embrace of their faith? Or do Republican voters care more about their candidates’ policies this time around than their religion?

Source: NY Times

www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/04/are-republicans-ready-now-for-a-mormon-president

Death Masks of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith

Joseph Smith Jr.

June 27th marks the anniversary of the 1844 assassinations of Joseph Smith Jr., the Mormon founding prophet, and his brother Hyrum Smith at the Carthage Jail in Hancock County, Illinois. It is usually a day of remembrance for those claiming the legacy of Smith and the religious group he founded. The murders occurred late in the afternoon of the 27th, when conspirators engineered an attack on the jail. Although they killed only the Smith brothers, Mormon Apostle John Taylor was also seriously wounded while Willard Richards survived essentially unscathed.

This event set in motion a series of tumultuous changes, leading to the succession of Brigham Young as the head of the majority group of Mormons. He, of course, led them to Utah where they became a powerful force religiously, economically, and politically. Other groups also emerged; there occurred a splintering of the church as constituted in the era of Joseph Smith into at least ten identifiable groups. The fights were over theology and doctrine, polity and personality, pettiness and provocation. My own religious home among this panoply of groups, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (which changed its name to Community of Christ in 2000), coalesced around the leadership of the prophet’s son, Joseph Smith III, a bit later.

How the Smiths came to be in the Carthage Jail, for me, is the most interesting part of the story. Perhap the greatest mistake of Joseph Smith Jr.’s, life—certainly it was the most costly—was the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor newspaper, published by Mormon dissidents in June 1844. They exposed Smith as an authoritarian leader who controlled everything in Nauvoo. They challenged his leadership, his practices—especially plural marriage—and his militarism. Smith pushed the Nauvoo city council to declare this newspaper a “nuisance” and ordered it destroyed.

In another time, in another circumstance, Smith might have gotten away with the destruction of the Expositor. Not this time. The dissenters Smith sought to destroy this time had been a part of Mormonism’s middle class, persons who had known both power and influence—especially William Law, a successful businessman and a counselor to Joseph Smith in the First Presidency for a time in the early 1840s—who immediately filed charges for Smith’s arrest. He was ensconced in the Carthage Jail, along with brother Hyrum and other lieutenants, on the afternoon of the 27th when armed conspirators assassinated the Smith brothers.

A murder conspiracy developed only on the afternoon of the 27th as men called together by the local militia leadership near Carthage were dismissed without any official mission. As they returned to Carthage, they gradually dwindled to no more than 75, but some began to assert that since they were gathered together that they should, according to John Hay, who grew up in the area, ”finish the matter totally. The unavowed design of the leaders communicated itself magnetically to the men, until the entire company became fused into one mass of bloodthirsty energy.” George Rockwell placed the best possible light on the conspiracy by telling his father soon after the event that those involved were “unwilling to be trifled with any longer, [and] they determined to take the matter into their own hands, and execute justice before they [the Smith brothers] should succeed in making their escape.”

Thomas Halman was present in Carthage at the time of the mobbing. A little more than a month after the murders he wrote to a friend, George Weston, about the episode. His account provides an interesting perspective on the conspiracy: “About four o’clock on the 27th of June the jail was surrounded by a mob disguised, who demanded the prisoners. The guard told them to desist—fired and wounded some, but before they had time to do more, they were being held down by the mob (taking good care not to hurt them) whilst others of the mob were making quick but thorough work of the object they had in view. They reached up stairs, Hyrum closed the door upon them and received his death wounds thro the door. Jo fired upon them, from some unknown cause raised the window on the cast and jumped from it. But received a number of balls before he reached the ground. They both expired immediately!”

Artist’s depiction of the asassination of Joseph Smith.

William R. Hamilton was one of the youngest members of the militia at the time of the Smiths’ murders in 1844. Later a judge in the county, he was the son of Artois Hamilton, who owned the hotel in Carthage. Hamilton described his experiences of the murders in a letter to Foster Walker, a resident of Pontoosac, in Hancock County. Hamilton noted that the mob approached the jail from the north, streaming on either side to completely surround the building. “The guards were quietly sitting in front and in the hall below,” he commented, “all of whom were captured without much trouble or danger. Just a little suspicion might be attached to the officer in command. Yet it might be presumed he thought his only duty was to keep the Smiths from coming downstairs.”

Hamilton wrote that he sprinted to the site of the murders ahead of his company. “When about fifty yards away I saw Joseph Smith come to the window and fall out.” Then he added:

One of the men went to him and partially straightened his body out beside the well curb. Just at this time I got up amongst the men and heard him say, “he’s dead,” when all the mob immediately left. I went to where Smith was lying and found that he was dead without doubt. I then went up to the room where they had been quartered, where I found Hyram Smith lying upon the floor on his back, dead. No person was in the room, or came while I was there. He was stretched out on the floor, just as he had fallen after being shot. The shot that killed him was fired through the door panel by one of the mob, while in the hall, and struck him in the left breast; he falling backward. There were in the room at that time four persons the two Smiths and Elders Taylor and Richards. Taylor was wounded, being hit several times—all flesh wounds—and was the same night taken to Nauvoo. Richards was not hurt and immediately after the mob left the hall, carried Taylor into the cell department of the jail, which was done just before I went upstairs.

Hamilton also described how the Mormons had tried to secure the door when the mob came upstairs and how Smith had fired an old English pepper-box revolver through the doorway. He then commented that “After I had satisfied my curiosity, seen and been among the mob, seen the prophet shot, and seen the dead men, it occurred to me I ought to go home and tell the news. When about 200 yards from the jail I met the company coming ready for business. Nothing was to be done but to “about face,” return to camp and be disbanded; which was promptly done in good order, as their prisoners were dead and not likely to run away.”

As soon as the murders were done the mob disappeared. John Hay remarked of this: “They went home at a killing pace over the wide dusty prairie. Warsaw is eighteen miles from Carthage; the Smiths were killed at half-past five; at a quarters before eight the returning crowd began to drag their weary limbs through the main street of Warsaw,—at such an astounding rate of speed had the lash of their own thoughts driven them.”

They were concerned that the Nauvoo Legion would march but it did not. While the women and children were ferried across the river to Missouri, the “men kept guard night and day in the hazel thickets around the town.” But nothing happened. The Mormon leaders called for patience and mourning but not revenge. They sent a delegation to Carthage to retrieve their dead. The bodies of Joseph and Hyrum Smith were returned to Nauvoo the next day and buried on June 29.

This blog post is from historian Roger Launius from the Smithsonian. Roger was interviewed at length and is featured in A MORMON PRESIDENT.  Roger is a renowned expert on Mormon History and the events that led up to the murder of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum Smith on June 27, 1844.