December 3, 2007

Mitt's Mormon Moment

Just finished speaking with WWTN radio talk host Michael Delgiorno (on 99.7 FM in Nashville) about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's upcoming speech on his Mormon faith, and how it compares to John F. Kennedy's speech on his Catholic faith back in 1960. I commented on the show that, in 1960, Kennedy's speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Alliance, in which he sought to assuage a common fear among the Protestant electorate that Kennedy would let the Vatican dictate U.S. policy, came a time when Catholics were 22 percent of the American population. I said that Mormons, by contrast, represent a much smaller percentage of the American population today, with about 15 million members.

Turns out that number - pulled from foggy memory - was way high. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a/k/a the Mormon Church, has about 13 million members worldwide, including an estimated 6.3 million in the United States, of which about 2.87 million are adults.

While the LDS church is the 10th-largest religious group in America, it is only a small percentage of the overall eligible voting-age population. The American Religious Identification Survey by researchers at the City University of New York puts Mormons at just 1.3 percent of the U.S. adult population. That's only slightly larger than the percentage that are members of the denomination I grew up in, 1.2 percent, and no one thinks of the Church of Christ as a big political force nationally.

By contrast, Catholics today are about a quarter of the U.S. adult population, and Baptists are 16.3 percent.

My point? That the religious/political "math" is different for Romney than it was for JFK when it comes to convincing voters to support him despite their views regarding his chosen religion. Kennedy's fellow Catholics were simply a much more "known" quantity to non-Catholic Americans than are Romney's fellow Mormons today - and a much-larger potential voting bloc to boot.

That said, I don't vote for, or against, any candidate based on their religious affiliation.