As the 2012 presidential election draws near, the debate thus far has been anything but civil. Attack ads from all sides have been fact-checked and found wanting. A recent Pew poll found that 17% of registered voters still think President Obama is a Muslim and only 49% said he was Christian. Only 60% of registered voters are aware that Republican challenger Mitt Romney is Mormon. Of those who know Romney is Muslim 19% admit they are uncomfortable with his affiliation. To the extent religion matters, and anyone who thinks religion does not matter in American politics needs to think again, both the current Vice-President Joe Biden and the Republican candidate Paul Ryan are Catholic.
For voters in the Bible Belt this puts the choice on November 6 between a rock and a hard place, making it a hard sell for those who sing “The Rock of Ages” in Sunday morning services. Growing up decades ago in a proudly “fundamentalist” Baptist church in northern Ohio, I was told that Mormons were a cult, the Catholic church was Satanic and Muslims were obviously bound for hell along with all the others who were not born-again Bible believers. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were Baptist, but as astute politicians they did not promote the more extreme beliefs of their faith just as John F. Kennedy did not mandate Catholic doctrine. The last time around Obama was attacked for having belonged to a church of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Both Obama and Jon McCain submitted to a religious litmus test in a televised forum hosted by Rick Warren, senior pastor of the one of the largest Protestant churches in America. This time, however, religion is taking a back seat to the economy, but the religious faith of each candidate is still the elephant in the room.
Obama is clearly not a Muslim, but for the extreme right wing in our country he might as well be. Romney has tempted fate by declaring that Obama has declared a war on religion in one of his August ads. The target of the ad is clearly a Catholic audience, including the supposedly still voting Reagan democrats and independents that any Republican needs to win a national election. But the last thing Romney needs is attention to his own religion. The Church of Latter Day Saints, which dominates politics in Utah and Idaho, has come a long way since its origin in 1830. Its founder, Joseph Smith, was hounded out of upstate New York and Ohio and eventually murdered in 1844. His claim to have received a new revelation, which you can read by your bedside in a hotel room of the Marriott chain, did not set well with the main Christian sects. Ironically, the Mormons were considered the “Muhammadans” of America, in part because of their legitimizing polygyny, but also in claiming a divine revelation that superseded the gospels. Abandoning plural marriages was the price the church had to pay for entry into the United States in 1896.
The big question in the Red State-Blue State tug of electoral war this time around is what will happen in the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt, which overlap in critical states. Evangelicals, who make up around a quarter of the population in the United States, were not enthusiastic about John McCain in 2008 and Romney is clearly not their first choice in 2012. While the election is obviously about the economy, a debate both sides have welcomed, the final tally may depend on how many in the Bible Belt pull the lever for a Mormon and a Catholic. In 2008 McCain received about 85% of the vote from “White” Evangelicals who attend church weekly; Obama only had 15%. I suspect that a fair number of these attend churches where Mormonism is thought to be a cult. While some prominent televangelicalists like Franklin Graham have said they will vote for Romney, others like Bill Keller insist a vote for Mitt is a vote for Satan. Keller also asserts that Obama is not a Christian but an “enemy of God.” So it seems the only safe choice for Evangelicals this time around is a “Vote for Jesus” as a write-in candidate. God only knows who he would choose as vice-president if he did win, but I wouldn’t put your bets on Joe the Plumber.
Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Middle Eastern Studies at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Since 1978 he has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Yemen, Egypt and Qatar. His latest book is Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (University of Washington Press, 2007). He currently serves as editor of Contemporary Islam and Editor-in-Chief of CyberOrient (www.cyberorient.net), the online journal of the Middle East Section of the AAA. His regular blog is Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East (www.tabsir.net).