The next day, in Washington, I visit the Huntsmans at their house in Kalorama. Given that they had bought it when they were still in China and moved in only two months ago, it’s not surprising that it looks a bit like an ambassador’s residence, with a series of reception rooms and some large canvases depicting migrant Chinese workers that Huntsman bought to decorate the American Embassy in Beijing. The governor paces on the patio out back while talking on the phone. Mary Anne, in jogging shorts, is headed out to pick up lunch. She falls into the conversation I am having with her mother about the family’s approach to religion. Mary Kaye has been telling me that both Episcopalianism, the denomination in which she was raised, and her husband’s Mormon heritage are important to them. “I draw from both,” Mary Kaye says. “I think my children have drawn from both. We are a family that combines two, and it works for us.”
I ask her daughter Mary Anne how she might identify her religion on a census form. “Mormon and Christian,” she says. “Every person is different in the way they feel spiritually.” Her mother adds that spirituality, which the family strongly feels, is more important than the tenets of a particular faith.
People tend to see Mormonism as a binary, you-are-or-you-aren’t question, but Jon Huntsman is something more like a Reform Jew, who honors the spirit rather than the letter of his faith. He describes his family on his father’s side as “saloon keepers and rabble rousers,” and his mother’s side as “ministers and proselytizers.” The Huntsman side ran a hotel in Fillmore, Utah’s first capital, where they arrived with the wagon trains in the 1850s. They were mostly what Utahans call “Jack Mormons”—people with positive feelings about the Latter-Day Saints church who don’t follow all of its strictures. “We blend a couple of different cultures in this family,” he says.
You’d never hear a phrase like that from Romney, who has raised his sons as Mormons and sent them on missions. Nor would you see Tagg, Matt, Josh, Ben, or Craig Romney in a hotel bar, sipping a glass of wine, as you might see one of Huntsman’s adult children. The difference in attitudes between the two Mormon candidates is encapsulated in the football rivalry between Brigham Young, where Romney went to college, and the University of Utah, where Huntsman went (before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania). BYU is an institution grounded in Mormon theocracy. The University of Utah is a state school that happens to have a lot of LDS students.
Here is the link to the full article: http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/j ... -outsider/
