Andrew O'Hehir: Long before Mitt Romney and "Big Love," Mormons were demonized

Almost a hundred years before Mitt Romney, Harry Reid and"Big Love," Mormonism had its first big pop-culture moment. It was not a happy one. In the early days of cinema, more than 30 films were made featuring villains drawn from a new and controversial sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons were generally depicted as bearded, depraved and violent cultists who abducted wholesome American women into polygamous marriages.

In fact, the Mormon church had repudiated the practice of multiple marriage in 1890, although it continued in secret at least into the first decade of the 20th century. Needless to say, that didn't stop the pop-culture juggernaut from spewing out bigotry and misinformation, culminating with H.B. Parkinson's huge 1922 hit"Trapped by the Mormons," which produced a sequel ("Married to a Mormon") the same year and has now spawned a 21st century parody remake, starring a drag king as a seductive Mormon vampire. ....

In his introduction [to his new book, People of Paradox], [LDS historian Terryl] Givens speculates that Mormonism is on the path toward becoming"the first new world faith since Islam." That may be premature, since the global ratio of Muslims to Mormons is roughly 115 to 1. Still, the longer you consider the parallels between these two faiths, the more provocative they become, which I'm pretty sure was not Givens' intention. Most obviously, both religions involve divine revelations directly communicated to a charismatic latter-day prophet, who rapidly attracts followers but is widely viewed by outsiders as a huckster, a fake or even a madman.

To their respective followers, Mohammed and Joseph Smith are not the inventors of new denominations but restorers of the original, uncorrupted monotheistic tradition of Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Even the language of the two faiths' central tenets is strikingly similar. In reciting the Shahadah, or principal declaration of faith, Muslims may say:"There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His Messenger," or"I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God." One of the most frequent forms of"testimony" in a Mormon meetinghouse comes when a worshiper rises to declare:"I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God." Both religions make claims to absolute and universal truth, and those declarations are meant to reflect knowledge rather than belief in the ordinary theological sense, which may be tinged with doubt. In answering the oft-asked question,"Are Mormons Christian?" one might ask, only half facetiously, whether Muslims are Christian too. ...