Mormons want to save the Republican party's soul. But is it too late?

The Tea Party movement’s first great scalp was three-term senator Bob Bennett of Utah.

Despite Bennett’s staunch conservative credentials, Tea Party activists came to view Bennett, who supported a healthcare compromise with Democrats, as a sellout and a RINO (“Republican In Name Only”). The GOP’s right wing targeted Bennett for a challenge in the primaries. In 2010 he was defeated and his seat in the senate was soon taken by a more hardline Republican.

In 2016 Bennett lay dying in a Virginia hospital, the victim of pancreatic cancer and a stroke that had left him partly paralyzed. In the last years of his life Bennett had become convinced that there was something ugly and malignant growing in the Republican party; as cancer ate away at Bennett’s own body, he watched nativism, triumphalism, and hatred of compromise eat away at the party and turn it into something he barely recognized. He was particularly disturbed by Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the United States, which Bennett saw as immoral and incompatible with the tenets of his faith.

An observant member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the scion of an influential Mormon political family, Bennett saw parallels between the historical persecution of Mormons, who were driven from