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“I prefer to think of Iowa as I saw it through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy,” Herbert Hoover, the only Iowan ever elected president of the United States, wrote at the beginning of his memoir. “Those were eyes filled with the wonders of Iowa’s streams and woods, of the mystery of growing crops.”

Planets! Tablets! Underwear! When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction.

Though Gingrich got clobbered in today’s Florida primary, his echoing of the US Bishops’ war on religion talking point is likely to make it all the way to the 2012 election.

Game Change reveals what no one else apparently has the chutzpah to say: that Sarah Palin was the opening salvo in the the dissolution and destruction of the Republican Party.

David Barton’s post, “ America’s Most Biblically-Hostile President,” details a theme that has become known to the public largely through the Gingrich/Santorum bloc: that Barack Obama has led the most actively anti-Christian administration in American history. But given Obama’s frequent Christian testimony—explicit enough to make most founding fathers uncomfortable with its public expression of private matters—how can this view be so widely held?

The Reagan era was supposed to have ended in November 2008—killed off by 30 years of flat wages and capitulation to Wall Street leading to a colossal financial crash. But today the Reagan era is enduring in stranger forms than ever.

Of course, in today’s pussy-footing, self-censoring public talk about religion, we never ask how Isabella feels about being the occasion for edifying “sacrifice” by the Santorums? It is fine for Rick Santorum to tell us how such sacrifice has deepened his faith, strengthened the bonds uniting their family, and so on. Good for him. Moreover, Santorum would want no pity from me. He identifies with the uplifting narrative of sacrificing for the sake of others, protecting the weak, championing “life,” building character by overcoming adversity, seeing blessing where others see only curses, and so on. But I find all this attention to the suffering and sacrifice of Rick Santorum more than a little self-centered—a kind of spiritual egoism.

“I think today’s anxiety about Mormonism can’t be compared to that of the past. The anti-Mormonism that was nearly universal during Smoot’s era is now a tradition maintained by a very small slice of the American population. The Republican primaries gave that small slice a megaphone: the artificial loudness of their voice makes people overestimate their number.”

Despite historic prejudices, Romney ahead in SC.

What’s the real story on 21st-century Mormonism? Visit the new Church-owned City Creek Mall on LDS General Conference weekend.