evidence: Many Americans weren’t so sure. In the Republican primaries, Romney encountered skepticism from conservative evangelicals such as the megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, who declared Mormonism a "cult" from the "pit of hell." On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell sneered that Romney’s Church had been founded by a guy who "got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it." In Slate, Jacob Weisberg argued that no one who believed in "such a transparent and recent fraud" as Mormonism could be trusted with the presidency. Meanwhile, Romney’s all-American persona—cultivated by generations of assimilators—proved to be a political liability. With his Mormon-dad diction (all those hecks and holy cows and goshdarnits) and his penchant for reciting "America the Beautiful" on the stump ("I love the patriotic hymns"), Romney seemed like a relic—a "latter-day Beaver Cleaver," as one Boston Globe writer put it. To those familiar with Mormon history, the irony was notable. "It is now because Mormons occupy what used to be the center that they fall into contempt," wrote Terryl Givens, a Latter-day Saint scholar.