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.