Blog 5

            People assume that being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints gives you a distinct political identity. It is often assumed that all members will vote for the same candidate. People sometimes think that because we have a prophet we will all blindly follow what he tells us about political issues like the pope in times past. We as members know that this is completely false and that our church leaders strive to keep their messages away from political issues unless morals are concerned. This is a reasonable misunderstanding of those outside our church. If you didn’t know much about us it seems a bit intimidating. We are supposed to listen to the prophet but they don’t know how far he’s going to get into our political lives.  As members we are encouraged to think about the issues and decide for ourselves. In a way we don’t have a political identity that is; we don’t have an LDS political leader deciding what our policies are in politics.   

            This whole thing is a particularly important issue this year because Mitt Romney is running for president under the Republican ticket. In Utah he has a high approval rating. Even Utah Democrats have a favorable opinion of Romney; the percentage goes up when looking at LDS Democrats. (Utah Data Points) This is interesting. It does make it appear that Latter-Day-Saints favor another Latter-Day-Saint. But does this information go so far as to show that members have a distinct political identity? They don’t plan on voting for him but they have an unusually high “favorable” rating simply because it is natural to sympathize with people who have a common religious background.

            There are two different theories presented in the reading about cultural and political identity. One is primordialism. This theory assumes that identity is something people are born with or that emerges through deep psychological process in early childhood. (Samuels 153) This does seem to fit some of our LDS cultural ideas. Many people in the church are born in the church and have been raised from their childhood to live within this identity. This theory fails to include converts and leaves out the opportunity most people have of adding new ideas to their existing political identity. This is where the next theory comes in: constructivism. Constructivism assumes that political identities are malleable and suggests that we think of identity as an evolving political process rather than a fixed set of identity categories. (Samuels 153) This would let us include any new statements made by the First Presidency into our political spectrum of ideas.

             In my opinion we do have a certain LDS identity. This only becomes a political identity when it comes to moral issues. When the prophet goes out and out and tells us to vote against proposition eight, against gay marriage, we should do what the prophet tells us. However the church did not make this a worthiness test for membership. Having a political identity doesn’t mean that we’re all Republican or are all going to vote for Mitt Romney come November. Latter-Day-Saints do have a lot of the same ideas about government taught from our scriptures and doctrines such as caring for the poor and self-reliance but we definitely don’t all have to agree on how all of these ideas should be implemented.

Little, Daniel, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. San Francisco: Westview Press.

Monson, Quin, “Do LDS Dems Like Mitt Romney?” Utah Data Points, entry posted August 22, 2012. http://utahdatapoints.com/ (assessed October 8, 2012).

Samuels, David J., Comparative Politics.  University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: Pearson Education Inc. 1967.