Baptist drop-out vs. Mormon priest

Religious battle for the Oval Office

Will the real Republican candidate please stand up? It surely can’t be drag queen Giuliani or “Bomb, Bomb Iran” McCain. Fred Thompson’s act as a candidate is not very convincing, either. Thompson did not even make the Delaware primary ballot; he failed to locate even 500 registered Republicans who wanted him on the ticket.

Perhaps the real candidate is Mitt Romney. Sure, Romney is a slick corporate thug that should never be trusted with the presidency – but that’s just the sort of candidate Republican Party leaders want.

Now Mike Huckabee is finally getting some press. The former governor and Baptist pastor is everything conservatives say they want: anti-abortion, anti-immigration and anti-homosexual. Huckabee claims that “nothing in our society matters more” than heterosexual marriage.

Of course he is sold out to all the usual Republican lobbies. He wants to protect gun-makers from lawsuits, he scoffs at the idea that all Americans need healthcare, and he wants to dump more dollars into Iraq and other wars. Sounds like a perfect Republican candidate!

Yet Huckabee has been rejected by his own. Pat Robertson chose to endorse the drag queen instead of the Baptist pastor, revealing that politics are really more important to him than faith. Huckabee is gaining popularity now in spite of the snub.

Huckabee’s rise to the top may be short-lived. With public notice comes public scrutiny, and Huckabee just cannot pass muster. Already his campaign staff has had to defend the preacher’s repeated false claim of being “the only guy on that stage with a theology degree.” Turns out, Huckabee has no theology degree either. He dropped out of seminary after only one year.

Huckabee is also taking some heat for wondering out loud if Mormonism holds that Jesus and Satan are brothers. Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his followers characterize the comment as a religious smear tactic.

While I am hardly a Huckabee fan, I have to defend the preacher-turned-politician on this issue. Huckabee may have lied about his education, but it hardly takes a theology degree to perform a Google search. The official Latter Day Saints (LDS) website states “Both Jesus and Lucifer were strong leaders with great knowledge and influence. But as the Firstborn of the Father, Jesus was Lucifer's older brother. (See Col. 1:15; D&C 93:21.)”

As usual, Christians are asking the wrong question. A church’s theology on Satan is not a major criterion for inclusion beneath the Christian umbrella. The question is not what they do with Satan, but rather what they do with Jesus. Nearly everyone in the world believes that Jesus existed and was a good guy. Even Muslims accord him the status of prophet. The defining point of Christianity, however, is a belief that Jesus is in fact fully God.

Romney said in his carefully-crafted religion speech that Jesus is the savior of the world, hoping Christians would breathe a sigh of relief. However, there is an important theological distinction between the LDS church and those that are considered Christian churches. The LDS Church does not teach that Jesus is the eternal God. This is why Huckabee’s church and mine both consider the Mormon church to be a cult, not a Christian denomination.

You see, it is not enough to like or respect Jesus. According to the basic tenants of Christianity followed by every Christian church from the Southern Baptists to the Roman Catholics, Jesus is the eternal God who created the Universe. People who cannot agree with this statement are simply not Christians. They may be nice people. They may be intelligent, moral, strong, or even presidential. But they are not Christians.

According to LDS theology, Jesus was a created being who became God. Likewise, LDS men claim to be passing through mortal bodies on their way to becoming Gods. What we should be asking Romney is, “Do you consider Jesus God?” or even “Do you consider yourself God?”

As in Muslim theology, Mormons teach that women can only be saved through their husbands, not through faith in Christ. The LDS church no longer endorses polygamy – and yet, LDS writings claim that Jesus Christ himself was polygamous. If Christians were scandalized by Jesus’s fictional marriage to Mary Magdalene in“The Da Vinci Code,” how much more should we recoil from the Mormon claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany and her sister Martha all at the same time?

Mitt Romney would like for us to believe he is unaware of such teachings, as if he were just a lay member of the LDS church. What voters must understand is that the LDS church has no lay members. Every male who joins becomes a priest of Aaron, and with any sort of time and devotion, moves right on up the ecclesiastical ladder. Mitt Romney has, in fact, served as a foreign missionary, a bishop, and the Stake President of his region.

As Stake President, Mitt Romney commanded hundreds --maybe thousands -- of Mormons under his charge. (No one really knows, since this information has been kept from public view, as have Huckabee’s sermons.) Stake presidents sit in judgment and determine who should be excommunicated for failing to live up to LDS standards. The position is somewhat analogous to that of a Catholic Archbishop.

Mitt Romney certainly knows what the LDS Church teaches – including the bit about women having no salvation apart from husbands – because he was responsible for making sure that all those members in his care followed the teachings.

When John F. Kennedy gave his famous speech on religion, he quipped, “I am a presidential candidate who happens to be Catholic.” Romney sought to give a similar vague answer, shrugging off his Mormon beliefs as if they were coincidental, like being left-handed. But Romney is not a barely-practicing LDS member by accident of birth. Romney wants to be the first Mormon high priest in the White House.

Nowhere in our Constitution is it written that presidential candidates must be professing Christians. In fact, Article VI prohibits using a religious test as qualification for any office. In other words, it is perfectly constitutional to put a Mormon or a Muslim or an atheist on the ballot. The Constitution agrees with Mitt Romney that "one's faith should be no barrier to the right to vote, the right to run for office, nor the right to hold office."

What Romney implies is that we have no right to consider his religion when we go to the polls. This is patently false. It is the government, not the voters, who are prohibited from employing a religious test. Our own religious freedom mandates that we have the right to bring our personal convictions into the polling booth. We can vote against a candidate just because he is a Mormon or a Muslim or an atheist. That’s the First Amendment, Mitt, and neither your good looks nor your clever manipulation of words will wrest it from us.

The Golden Compass: Pointing kids to atheism?

A really dangerous series of books has become popular. The first book is so innocuous that many people give it to their children. The tale begins with a couple of innocent kids exploring the simple goodness of the world around them. Soon they find out that humans are not alone in the universe, and that there are other realms we cannot see. They discover that their world is full of warring factions, evil spirits, armies of good and bad angels, conniving witches, greedy kings and corrupt religious establishments. The series reaches a furious climax with the characters committing the most heinous act you can imagine: They kill God.

Perhaps you received an email titled “Do not see The Golden Compass!” According to the apocalyptic warning, the movie and the books are a trap designed to tear children away from the bosom of Christ. But the above passage is not a review of “The Golden Compass.” It is a summary of the Bible.

Yet it is not the Bible that has people up in arms. The Catholic League is boycotting “The Golden Compass” for fear that it may encourage children to read the author’s books.

League president Bill Donohue wrote, “Atheism for kids. That is what Philip Pullman sells. It is his hope that ‘The Golden Compass,’ which stars Nicole Kidman and opens December 7, will entice parents to buy his trilogy as a Christmas gift.”

Donohue’s statement almost sounds like a plug for Pullman’s work – complete with celebrity name-dropping and opening date. In an age of X-box and continuous television programming, a movie that makes children want to read is a godsend. A movie that inspires parents to buy books rather than lead-tainted toys for Christmas would normally be greeted with eagerness.

But are the books really atheism for kids? In a 2002 interview with Huw Spanner of Thirdway, Philip Pullman said, “I’m not making an argument, or preaching a sermon or setting out a political tract: I’m telling a story.”

What a rich, vibrant story he tells! I’ve read the award-winning trilogy with my family. When I say “with my family” you should picture mild bickering over who lost whose place, mad chases around the house, and excited dinner conversations that invariably end with, “Don’t tell me! I’m not there yet.”

The movie is based on the first book, The Golden Compass, but the dire warning is directed at the third book, The Amber Spyglass. According to the email circulating through millions of inboxes, it is in the third book that the characters kill God.

For the sake of argument, suppose they really do kill God. Any movie with God as a character cannot be atheistic. Atheists, by definition, do not believe that God exists. Thus The Tale of Peter Rabbit is more atheistic than The Golden Compass.

Should Christians be offended by the killing of God? Our entire religion is based on it. Remember Jesus? The Bible plainly and repeatedly asserts that God came to earth in human form and we killed him. All Christians, by definition, believe that people killed God.

Actually, the characters in this book do not kill God. The Authority is in fact an angel, not the immortal Creator. He is very old and ready to die, but is being used by the Church for its own purposes. When two children release him, his angelic body dissolves back into the universe.

Paul talks about The Authority in Romans. He calls it the law. According to Paul, the law was good for teaching us right from wrong, but it became a yoke of slavery because of our inability to comply. The law brings death. Christ came to bring us life, freeing us from the law of sin and death. Jesus greatly disrupted the religious establishment of that day, which was based on the law.

Pullman’s trilogy is theologically provocative, but none of the three books attack true Christianity. In fact, his tale reflects the biblical story of humankind. Will and Lyra explicitly represent Adam and Eve – not only in the fall from grace, but also in redemption. The Apostle Paul calls Jesus “the second Adam.” Adam is the original transgressor, but Adam is also the bringer of salvation.

There are other parallels as well. In the third book, Lyra and Will descend into the underworld to free those souls who have been trapped by death. In order to do so, they must be willing to be torn away from their very spirits, undergoing a sort of death. This is similar to the torment Jesus experienced on the cross when he was separated from the divine to descend into hell and destroy death for our sake.

Pullman may not profess a literal belief in the Bible, but we find biblical themes running throughout his literature. This is not surprising, considering that he was raised by his grandfather who was an Anglican rector. Pullman names Milton’s “Paradise Lost” as one of the works that inspired the trilogy.

These books are not a consistent parallel to the Bible by any means. Neither are The Chronicles of Narnia, which Christians everywhere praise, study, and use as the basis of English curriculum.

Likewise, The Lord of the Rings has been embraced by the same people who battled to censor the magical Harry Potter series. Although The Lord of the Rings contains a similar mix of myth and magic, its defenders claim it holds a Christian message. Author J.R.R. Tolkien adamantly opposed such an interpretation during his lifetime. He said, “I dislike allegory whenever I smell it.”

Why do Christians defend some fantasy books as harmless magical tales while others are condemned as occultist books? Michael D. O’Brien, Catholic author and fantasy critic, makes this distinction: The Lord of the Rings is acceptable for Christians because the magic exists within a distinct hierarchy. Harry Potter’s magic is anti-Christian because anyone can obtain it through education and exercise. In other words, the Catholic Church does not really mind your child reading about witches or warlocks. That’s a clever ruse to oppose any books that don’t tow the line regarding ecclesiastical hierarchy. Given this distinction, it is clear why Pullman is drawing Catholic ire.

The Golden Compass portrays a very corrupt church that wields unchecked political power. In an interview, Pullman gave the Taliban as a real-life example of such a church. The term “Catholic” is not used in the book or movie, so any church that identifies with the depiction is essentially condemning itself.

The Vatican claims Roman Catholicism is the only true church, so its visceral reaction is to spin any criticism of itself as an attack against God. It’s difficult to imagine that a mere storybook could mar a reputation which already includes hundreds of years of church-sanctioned slaughter, inquisition, witch-hunts, slavery, pedophilia and misogyny.

The emails urge me to pass on the message, so I believe I will: Don’t see this movie! At least not until you’ve read the book. You certainly should not see it this weekend, because you might get ahead of me in line.