Which makes one wonder what Romney himself would think of the show. In public, he's been good-humored. In private, would he fume?
Or would he realize that The Book of Mormon, blasphemy and all, is precisely the kind of public-relations tool that Mormon candidates could use?
Mormonism looms over Romney's presidential prospects today, just as in 2008, except now there are two major Mormon candidates. For Romney and Jon Huntsman, the path to the presidency is: Appease evangelical Christians to win the nomination, then assuage social liberals in the general election. (In a recent Gallup poll, notes Southern Methodist University's Matthew Wilson, more Democrats than Republicans said they would never vote for a Mormon.)
So far, Romney and Huntsman have taken very different approaches. In his speech on faith in 2008, Romney defended his devoutness and argued that Mormons are not different from other Christians. Huntsman has played down his Mormonism, saying several faiths play roles in his life.
The nation's fourth-largest religion has been prominent of late. The church played a major role in supporting California's gay-marriage ban. It has been having a pop culture moment.
And when it comes to depictions of Mormon life, The Book of Mormon is, in some ways, the most accurate. HBO's Big Love and TLC's Sister Wives focus on polygamy, which the church has disavowed for a century. In The Book of Mormon, the subject doesn't come up. Robert Lopez, who cowrote the show, told me that it once had a single polygamy joke. It didn't get a laugh, so it was cut.
Yes, the show pokes fun at Mormon customs, such as the church's ban on coffee and tea. (In a raucous dream sequence set in hell, Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer dance with a pair of giant coffee cups.) It paints young Mormons as repressed in a tap-dancing number called "Turn It Off."
