Turns out she — or someone on her staff — speaks Mormon pretty well. It’s easy for non-members to get LDS lingo wrong. Mormons have wards, not parishes, sacrament meeting, not mass, stakes, not dioceses. Even non-members who should know better often have trouble, as when, in an early episode of HBO’s Big Love, Harry Dean Stanton mispronounces “Palmyra,” Joseph Smith’s home town in upstate New York.

AD

AD

Clinton recognized and handled the challenge well. “We know that it so often takes a village — or a ward — working together to build the change we hope to see,” Clinton wrote (emphasis mine). She included a requisite reference to Mitt Romney. She also wrote of “generations of LDS leaders, from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to Gordon Hinckley and Thomas Monson.” Monson is the current LDS president, but no one has defined modern institutional Mormonism more than Hinckley, particularly for members of my generation — I was raised Mormon in the 1980s and 1990s. And, in a clever twist, Clinton quoted Sister Rosemary M. Wixom, who just finished a six-year stint as the general president of the Primary, the LDS children’s organization. Clinton included a female voice in a way that was not threatening to traditionalist Mormons, who generally disfavor giving women a large and meaningful role in the church hierarchy. Her biggest mistake is omitting the middle initials normally included in Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson’s names. Removing them preserved the parallelism with Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, but it was still jarring.

Beyond mere language, Clinton was careful not to pretend as though she is Mormons’ perfect candidate. “Americans don’t have to agree on everything. We never have,” she wrote. Instead, she highlighted common ground she and the community might plausibly share — basic religious freedom. “Listen to former Sen. Larry Pressler, who said Trump’s [Muslim ban] reminded him of when Missouri Gov. Lilburn Boggs singled out Mormons in his infamous extermination order of 1838,” Clinton wrote.

Mormons are less preoccupied with the contemporary culture wars than evangelicals; the church recently played a key role in the passage of a statewide anti-discrimination law for the LGBT community in Utah. But Mormons have a pronounced sense of history concerning more essential questions of religious liberty — such as whether governments allow minority religions to worship at all. The extermination order Clinton mentions is near-constantly referenced in Mormon wards.

AD

AD

This sensitivity to religious persecution is not just historical, but present, as Mormon missionaries face hostility from governments abroad. Clinton therefore stressed protecting minority religious rights, such as those of Chinese Christians, around the world.

Clinton also played into Mormons’ belief that the nation’s founding documents are divinely inspired, writing about the “infinite blessings we have received from the Constitution of the United States,” the text’s “sacred ideals” that “Donald Trump doesn’t seem to grasp” and the “sacred responsibility” presidents have to uphold them. Once again, Clinton reached out in Mormon terms without cheapening them with obvious pretense.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly made a fool out of himself pretending to be all sorts of things he isn’t — a gun nut, an anti-abortion crusader — in order to curry favor with conservative and religious voters unimpressed with his crude form of nationalism. He professed loving the Bible then infamously referred to “Two Corinthians.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews trapped him on abortion, getting Trump to say that he favors punishing women who terminate their pregnancies. This position makes logical sense if all you have heard from the right is “abortion is murder,” but even zealous pro-life advocates nevertheless consider it outre.

AD

AD

Trump suggested this week that “Second Amendment people” would rise up against the federal government if Clinton won and appointed Supreme Court justices. Reason Magazine’s Ed Krayewski pointed out on Twitter, “Donald Trump is what a Democrat might imagine a Republican is like. ‘Second Amendment people’ lol who says that?” And how many GOP gun owners are seriously contemplating armed insurrection? Once again, Trump sounded like he came to class having read a sentence out of a CliffsNotes — yet won’t stop talking. Despite his claim that he is sincerely conservative, he seems not to have spent much time speaking to anyone — or even thinking — about these issues.