Why Trump Personifies What Mormons Don't Believe In

This keen sense of what’s it like to be confined to the margins of the nation helps to explain why Mr Trump’s calls to ban Muslim immigration, and build a wall to keep Mexicans out, have little appeal for the LDS. “I feel like Mormons can sympathise with the current refugee crisis, because their story was ours not too long ago,” says Curtis Sudbury, a 25-year-old follower of that faith who studies medicine. He cites a line from the Mormon scriptures: “He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me…” Another Mormon student, Noriko Millham, says her co-religionists take seriously the command of Jesus Christ to “love thy neighbour as thyself” and they discern no such quality in Mr Trump. “Supporting somebody who is not selfless” in the presidential race would go against the collective grain. As Ms Millham adds, her country already seems worryingly close to the state of affairs described in the Book of Mormon, her faith’s sacred text, when a society in the New World perished because selfishness abounded and people mistreated the land and one another. Under a President Trump, that trend could be exacerbated in a “scary” way.