An Unholy War

It certainly lived up to its billing. Hailed as “the most exciting meeting there is in Washington”–the testimonial is from former Education Secretary Bill Bennett–the Values Voter Summit is a kind of Station of the Cross for Republican presidential candidates. The gathering at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in early October produced more than its share of excitement when Robert Jeffress, a Dallas Evangelical megapastor, introduced Rick Perry and then told reporters that Mormonism–the faith of Mitt Romney, Perry’s chief rival–is a “cult” and that “those of us who are born-again followers of Christ should always prefer a competent Christian to a competent non-Christian like Mitt Romney.”

In the world according to Jeffress, Perry is a “follower of Jesus Christ” but Romney isn’t, and that alone–note that Jeffress concedes Romney’s competence–should disqualify him from receiving Christians’ votes. The pastor is thus doing something the founders refused to do: he is trying to impose a religious test on American politics.

Which is about the last thing on earth we need at the moment. (Why should we be talking about Job instead of jobs?) Coming in October 2011, some three months before Iowa and South Carolina, the episode suggests that Romney is gaining, not losing, strength–and, perhaps more important, that American believers may have to step up to save religion from the religious.

If I were Romney, I would feel flattered and validated by the assault at the Omni Shoreham: Jeffress’s attack is a sure sign that the former Massachusetts governor is the front runner for the Republican nomination. In 2007, Romney sought to defuse the issue of his faith with a speech at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas, in which he made clear that as President, he would be loyal to the country and the Constitution, not his church. Still, the religious conservative Mike Huckabee took Iowa, foreclosing the possibility that Romney might emerge as the main alternative to John McCain. Since Romney faded relatively quickly, there was no major occasion for a high-profile strike like the one Jeffress launched.

Not so this year. Attacks on a politician’s identity–questioning Romney’s religion, say, or Obama’s birthplace–tend to come when an opponent is desperate and can’t sell himself. (Perry spokesmen have said Perry doesn’t believe Mormonism is a cult and “doesn’t judge what is in the heart and soul of others.”) As a political matter, having to put up with some Mormon bashing is probably a price worth paying–if you are Romney. The rest of us, however, should not have to endure a political climate suffused with religious bigotry.

The extreme Evangelical view of Mormonism is rooted in contempt for–and uneasiness with–the idea of what theologians call ongoing revelation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grew out of the visions of Joseph Smith, who believed he received a divine commission in the 1820s to restore the “true” church that had fallen into sin and error. The texts of the faith, chiefly the Book of Mormon, are considered Scripture, but Evangelicals believe the Bible is the final, authoritative word of God. The Mormon understanding of God the Father and God the Son as flesh-and-blood beings is also unusual in traditional Christian terms. Yet unless one truly fears that Romney is an agent of a theological cult–which is as rational as thinking John F. Kennedy was an agent of the papacy or George H.W. Bush was an agent of the Episcopal Church–then such matters are interesting but not dispositive.

The rhetoric Jeffress used suggests two things. First, those who profess the apostolic faith of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost must speak out forcefully in opposition to those who would invoke it in pursuit of theocracy of any kind or degree. There is a biblical and religious case for the separation of church and state that is worth discussing. (Jesus was such a separatist, telling Pilate that “my kingdom is not of this world.”) Roger Williams believed that the wall between the two should protect the church from the corruption of the state as much as–if not more than–the state from the influence of the church.

Second, we should recognize that the religious right is shrill because it has lost the central arguments of our time (over school prayer and abortion) and is likely to lose over marriage equality. A wounded foe is always more dangerous than a healthy one.

Romney put matters well in the 2008 campaign. “Perhaps the most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office is this: Does he share these American values: the equality of humankind, the obligation to serve one another and a steadfast commitment to liberty?” If so, that’s a cult worth joining.