Definitely Not Helping

It’s a rule of American comity that we all refrain from expressing doubts about the purely doctrinal aspects of each other’s religions. ~David Frum

It is? That’s news to me. There are a lot of televangelists, New Atheists, and, for that matter, rank-and-file believers and non-believers who express doubts about purely doctrinal aspects of other people’s religions. Granted, this probably doesn’t necessarily come up at social gatherings as a matter of etiquette, but in public discourse it comes up all the time and it is hardly limited to poking holes in official Mormon theology. It seems to me that Frum’s best argument in favor of Mormon candidates can be summed up like this: “Most Mormons don’t really believe or know about the more bizarre things their church teaches, so don’t hold it against them.” I would suggest that portraying Mormons as indifferent to or ignorant about their own doctrines is probably the best way to make Mormon candidates as unattractive to all religious conservatives as possible. One of the things that I found very unsettling about the arguments made by Romney’s Christian supporters was that they were saying that faith and doctrine are irrelevant to moral and social teachings, and essentially that it does not matter what you believe but only what you do. In any other context, I doubt many Christians would endorse this view, and this sort of weak, politically convenient ecumenist argument that some Romneyites offered would not have convinced many of the people making the argument if the candidate in question had been, say, a Muslim or a Hindu.

Indeed, Frum’s description gives the impression that the LDS is more cult-like in an unflattering way than it really is:

Note that he has nothing at all to say about the teachings of the church. Instead he talks about the warmth of community, the power of belonging. He says: “I don’t care if there’s Kool-Aid down in the basement. I’m drinking it. I want to be like that.”

How does this overcome skepticism? How does this do anything except fit into the most polemical stereotypes of Mormonism? And this is supposed to be a positive representation of the church?

In the end, the GOP could not even assemble the coalition of McCain voters if the party nominated a Mormon. This is the political reality. Arguments that insist that the religious doctrine a person holds is irrelevant to his public life are the least likely to persuade Christian conservatives, but I am not sure that there would be any argument that could persuade these conservatives, including myself, that doctrine is utterly irrelevant.

Update: In the new issue now online, Michael has an article (notnow online) discussing whether Mormons can be included more fully in social conservative politics. It is significant that Michael’s article focuses on the slight thaw between evangelicals and Mormons following the passage of Proposition 8, as this is probably the one culture war issue where there is some obvious common ground. However, there is not quite the same zeal among Mormons concerning the sanctity of life as there is about marriage, and the exceptions permitted by LDS authorities are considerably broader than most pro-life Christians would be willing to accept. Perhaps doctrine really does matter.