Today I saw two related stories, one awful, but also inspiring, the other disgusting, but expected. I will make two separate posts from them, but they belong together

The disgusting-but-expected one is the current dust up between Southern Baptist minister and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and stepford candidate Mit Romney concerning whether Mormons believe Satan is Jesus’ brother. Romney had just given a speech where he argued that those with faith were part of the national community and those with none were not. His message was in most respects the opposite of the one Jack Kennedy gave in his famous speech discussing the role his Catholicism would play were he elected President. As David Brooks, with whom I usually disagree , noted:

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press.

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

Romney wants to be president so badly he does not care what he is unleashing against his own people by these tactics. Mormons such as Romney constitute the smallest part of the current theocratic alliance against the American constitution. Therefore they need to avoid doctrinal issues beyond whether or not someone is “religious.” So long as we stay at the level of slogans about “faith” they are safe. When doctrine comes up, they will be the first casualty. Their founder, Joseph Smith, was lynched by a Christian mob in Missouri.

Mike Huckabee, bless him, was happy to bring it up, thereby reminding his crowd that Mormons are a cult, and only seem to be Christian. Not that Huckabee’s own brand of Christianity has much to recommend it to anyone who takes Jesus’ admonition to love one another very seriously.

Romney deserves it. In spades. Were these monsters ever to get their theocracy they would immediately go at one another’s throats. For conservative Protestants, Catholics are the “whore of Babylon” mentioned in Revelations. For one contemporary Protestant discussion, see here. Protestants of course deny the jurisdiction that these Catholics believe the Pope legitimately has over Christian practice. Conservative Catholics disagree. As for Jews, see the next post…

A few hundred years ago, when this kind of mentality dominated as it seeks to dominate today, millions of Europeans were slaughtered over issues of faith.

Happily, in a relatively free society such as ours, the poison they spread in the body politic is so strong that its noxious fumes begin to demonstrate their poison before they attain the power they seek, as Romney and Huckabee demonstrate. We are warned.