Political cartoonist Ted Rall captures the dilemma for Republican evangelical Christians posed by the possibility that Mitt Romney might be the Republican nominee.
In the churches of the southern Bible belt, Mormons are routinely disparaged as a cult. Amy Sullivan wrote [link fixed] back in 2008 when Romney made his first run for president that her own experience growing up in a Baptist church was that “Mormonism came somewhere between devil worshippers and Jim Jones.”
Of course, things can change in four years. Some evangelical voters seem to quite nimble in their thinking, able to change their views quite rapidly when they find a candidate who supports their other prejudices. But whether enough of them have changed to serve Romney’s purposes remains to be seen.
The Amy Sullivan link is broken.
Thanks. I fixed it.
Many evangelicals see the Mormon Church as a non-Christian cult. Amy Sullivan makes the point in her article:
I often wonder how Christians accept mormonism so easily but take such issue with Islam. I mean, in the end, both Mormonism and Islam went a wrote some revisions of their own to the story.
I guess golden tablets must be more acceptable than leaves and oral tradition…
Strange religionuts are strange.
I think they probably want Obama out badly enough that they’ll hold their noses and vote for either a Mormon or an adulterer.
For white Christians in the U.S., I think it’s that Mormons (in the U.S., and for the very most part) clearly share the same ethnic and cultural background. In a way, it’s just another step like Protestant-Catholic and Judeo-Christian tolerance -- the more local disagreements can be glossed over for unity against the more distant Other.
It’s not a stable arrangement -- it’s only a response to the perceived threat of something even less comparable. If irreligion waned again, interfaith conflict would flare right back up.