LDS Political Identity

LDS Political Identity

A political identity can be defined as “any identity that significantly shapes our political decisions, especially when it is the most important identity to do so.” (Hawkins Kirk, Class Lecture). With that being known, is there a distinct LDS political identity in the United States? To adequately answer that question, I will analyze the size of the LDS community in Utah and compare and contrast it to the percentage of those LDS members that voted republican in the 2008 presidential elections.

With much research, I failed to find the exact data that would show the exact percentage of “Mormons” that voted republican or democrat in the previous presidential elections. Since I was unable to find such data, I analyzed the percentage of “Mormons” in Utah and contrasted it to the percentage of Utah citizens that voted republican in the previous presidential elections. With 62.2% of Utah’s population belonging to the LDS faith, it is the highest concentration of members of the LDS faith on a statewide basis in the United States (sltrib.com). Ironically enough, in the 2008 presidential elections, 62.2% of the total population of Utah also voted republican (en.wikipedia.org). Although I do not believe that every person that voted republican in the 2008 elections was of the LDS faith, these numbers do in fact show that in a state with a high LDS population, the overall percentage of republican voters was very high. This shows us that a specific political identity does in fact exist within the LDS faith.

We are now faced with a new question, and that is ‘what causes the presence of such political identity within the LDS faith?’. I have found that many “Mormons” have been born and raised in a place where most of their neighbors and friends also belong to the same faith. This creates an atmosphere of uniformity and lack of diversity. This uniformity causes the adolescents to subconsciously absorb and repeat behaviors and ideologies that they have seen and lived. Also, I believe that a large contributing factor in the political identity of the LDS faith is the republican views of pro-life and anti-gay marriage, which is doctrine taught by the LDS faith. In 2008, the LDS church pushed members to support Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage and many faithful members came to the rescue.

That being said, it is evident that there is a premordialist argument present in the LDS political identity. The primordialist argument is defined as, “An approach to understanding identity that assumes that identity is something people are born with or that emerges through beep psychological processes in early childhood, given one’s family and community context.” (Samuels, 155)  Although not all faithful members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints would fit under this category, I believe that the majority would. There are many members of the Church that live outside of Utah that are not as influenced by this kind of pressure. Members that live in areas where the church is small would be more likely to be affected by the constructivist argument that is “an approach to understanding identity which assumes that political identities are malleable, even if they often appear to be primordial, and suggests that we think of identity as an evolving political process rather than as a fixed set of identity categories.” (Samuels, 155).

This leads me to believe that one’s political identity is based on both the primordial argument and the constructive argument. As for the majority of LDS members in the United States (that live in Utah), they are more influenced by the primordial argument because of the way and place that they were raised. Although I do believe that one’s political identity is definitely malleable (at least a little), I believe that primordialism is a more sound argument of where and how members of the LDS faith develop their political identities.

Sources:

                Samuels, David J., Comparative Politics, Jersey. Pearson, 2011

                Census: Share of Utah’s Mormon Residents Hold Steady, Matt Canham, The Salt Lake Tribune,

April 17, 2012

                Utah Politics, Wikipedia.org.