Growing
Mormon-Catholic
Alliance: Quiet Partners
Behind Christian Right’s
Religious
Discrimination
Agenda
While Tony Perkins, Brian Brown, Bryan Fischer, and other
Christian Right pundits of the more shrill variety may be
easy to ignore as they demand a right to discriminate on
Fox News, there is a more dangerous coalition emerging. One
of the primary drivers of the movement to corrupt and
redefine religious freedom isn’t someone in a shouting
match on cable news, but a decades-long alliance of top
Mormons and Catholics.
While Mormons and Catholics may seem like unlikely allies,
from a political perspective they bring complementary
strengths to their partnership. The Mormon Church has an
amazing amount of wealth on hand (it’s estimated to be
worth over $40 billion – gathered from real estate and
commercial holdings, mandatory tithing collections from
members, and even a theme park in Hawaii) and a world-class
grassroots mobilization and recruitment force. The Catholic
Church and related groups, on the other hand, enjoy a much
higher approval rating with the American public (62
percent) and thus can put a more popular face on public
political campaigns.
The political allegiance between Mormons and Catholics
dates back at least to the 1990s in Hawaii, during the
first U.S. battle over same-sex marriage. As I previously
reported, while the Mormons could—and did—provide funding
and volunteers to that campaign, the more popular Catholic
Church acted as the coalition’s public face. The Catholic
Church and other visible allies would thereby absorb any
public backlash directed towards the coalition, while the
Mormons could push their agenda without any serious
consequences to their public image. The strategy was
effective, and one they repeated during California’s
Proposition 8 fight.
The alliance grows stronger with each passing year.
Epitomizing the relationship is Princeton professor Robert
P. George, one of the most influential Catholic
conservative activists in the country, who partnered with
the Mormon Church to create the National Organization for
Marriage (NOM). He also joined the editorial advisory board
of the Mormon Church-owned newspaper, the Deseret News.
George is also the founder of the Witherspoon Institute
(responsible for the debunked Mark Regnerus study – which
was reported first by the Deseret News), was the primary
author of the anti-LGBTQ Manhattan Declaration, and is one
of the top national strategists leading the charge to
redefine religious freedom into a sword religious
institutions can use to force their doctrinal positions on
individuals. This week, Mormon Church-owned Brigham Young
University awarded George an “honorary Doctor of Law and
Moral Values” degree, calling him “one of the most able and
articulate advocates of the proposition that faith and
reason are not incompatible.”
Dallin H. Oaks, one of the Mormon Church’s 12 Apostles, has
been deeply involved in the effort to redefine religious
freedom. He sits on the board of the World Congress of
Families, an international culture-warring collection of
Religious Right organizations that works all over the world
to use (redefined) religious freedom arguments to enact
anti-LGBTQ and anti-reproductive health laws (such as the
Russian law that criminalizes any positive speech about
homosexuality). In recognition of his work with WCF and
frequent speeches before conservative groups extoling the
benefits of using one’s faith as an excuse to dodge pesky
civil rights laws, Oaks received the 2013 “Canterbury
Medal” for his “defense of religious liberty” from The
Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a conservative Catholic
legal organization responsible for the Hobby Lobby ruling
at the Supreme Court and one of the top groups in the
Right’s religious freedom campaign.
Speaking earlier this month at the Mormon Church’s semiannual General Conference to all 15 million members
worldwide, Oaks quoted a speech given by Philadelphia
Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput at Brigham Young
University. “Speaking of ‘concerns that the LDS and
Catholic communities share,’ such as ‘about marriage and
family, the nature of our sexuality, the sanctity of human
life, and the urgency of religious liberty,’ he [Chaput]
said this: ‘I want to stress again the importance of really
living what we claim to believe. That needs to be a
priority—not just in our personal and family lives but in
our churches, our political choices, our business dealings,
our treatment of the poor; in other words, in everything we
do.’” Chaput continued, in his speech to BYU, “Religion is
to democracy as a bridle is to a horse.”
Another of the Mormon Church’s top leaders, Henry B.
Eyring, met with Chaput and Pope Francis in November 2014
at the Vatican. Eyring described their strengthening
alliance and mutual dedication to opposing civil liberties
for LGBTQ people and women, saying “I think the thing was,
even with other faiths, they have exactly the same feeling
that the root of good society is good families.” Another of
the Mormon 12 Apostles, D. Todd Christofferson, will be one
of the featured speakers later this year at the Catholic’s
anti-LGBTQ World Meeting of Families, where the Pope will
also be speaking.
The crowning, and perhaps most insidious, achievement thus
far of the Mormon-Catholic alliance is the much-hailed Utah
nondiscrimination/religious freedom law. While the
Christian Right’s state-level Hobby-Lobbyized RFRAs (with
their overt anti-LGBTQ intentions) have generated a
significant national backlash (particularly in the cases of
Indiana and Arizona) and are susceptible to court
challenges, the Utah RFRA “lite” law actually won
endorsements from LGBTQ groups. The Mormon Church enlisted
the help of Christian Right operative Robin Fretwell
Wilson, who works closely with right-wing Catholic groups
like The Becket Fund and Alliance Defending Freedom, to cowrite the law. The end product was a bill written in such a
way that LGBTQ groups hungry for a “win” in a Red state
could claim victory in the form of a watered-down
nondiscrimination law. The price—knowingly or otherwise—was
the endorsement by high-profile LGBTQ groups of the Right’s
false contention that religious freedom is somehow at odds
with LGBTQ rights, requiring a compromise – or, as some
LGBTQ groups described the creation of Utah’s law, “a
collaboration.” Such endorsements have set a dangerous
precedent for the advancement of RFRAs and other efforts to
corrupt actual religious freedom in various state
legislatures. Right-wing groups can (and do) point to LGBTQ
support in Utah as a means of mainstreaming their agenda
and deflating their opposition.
Catholic news agencies have hailed the “Mormon law” as a
model to be repeated across the country. If that happens,
we may well see more such pyrrhic victories, in which gains
in non-discrimination legislation are overwhelmed by the
emerging “right to discriminate” on the basis of religious
convictions.. This is where compromising on the true
meaning of religious freedom could lead. We may also see
the Mormon Church emerge as a more prominent—albeit less
public—partner of the evangelical and Catholic elements of
the Christian Right as they continue their quest to corrupt
the meaning of religious freedom.