If anyone should be denouncing the GOP's bigoted rhetoric it should be Romney. But will he?

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,828391,00.html

04/19/2012

America's Religious Divide

Why Mitt Romney Is Hobbled by His Mormon Faith

By Gerhard Spörl

<snip>Mormonism is a young religion. It doesn't have 200 -- let alone 2,000 -- years of history behind it, and it's accustomed to encountering hostility. The Hinckley family is part of the religion's ancient nobility. Hinckley's great-grandfather joined Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the church, in 1839. The first large Mormon temple and settlement were established in the town of Nauvoo, Illinois. This was also the area in which the new religion suffered its worst catastrophe, when a mob murdered its founder in 1844.

Smith was a poor rural laborer who was barely able to read and write. He claimed that God, Jesus Christ and, later, the angel Moroni appeared to him, and that they had shown him the way to a book of golden plates on which the tenets of the new religion were written in an ancient Egyptian script. He claimed that God had instructed him to translate the text and had outfitted him with special spectacles to accomplish the task.

The Book of Mormon was published in 1830, and the new cult gained supporters with astonishing speed. It was a time of religious turmoil that also spawned other new movements, including those of the Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Pentecostals. Historians call the period America's "Second Great Awakening," a religious revolution that took place 50 years after the young country's political revolution.

Smith urged his supporters, including Hinckley's great-grandfather, to build a new Jerusalem in preparation for the second coming of Christ. The Mormons were hardworking settlers. They formed a community of work and prayer, helped each other out and considered themselves chosen. But, with their peculiar religion, they also incurred the wrath and envy of people of other faiths, such as the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians. These expressed their rage by burning down Mormon temples and houses, tarring and feathering the haughty Mormons and then chasing them out of Missouri and then Illinois.