Mormonism is far less “Christian” in the evangelical mind than Catholicism. Catholicism is just “dead” and not bible based. Mormonism is heretical. They have a whole other book. Their theology is all out of sorts. Hell, mainline churches don’t even recognize their baptisms. Corner an evangelical you know well and ask them their true thoughts on the Church Latter-Day Saints. They might hem and haw a bit but they won’t deny their belief that it’s a cult.

I, personally, have no opinion about Mormonism either way. But, if the Religious Right has any say in the matter, the Republican Party will not nominate a Mormon. It’s that simple. ~A.C. Kleinheider, Hard Right

When I read Taranto’s article last week I was tempted to post on the ‘predicament’ of Mormons in the GOP and the relationship of the LDS to Christianity (in my view, I take it is a given that Mormonism is related to Nicene Christianity even less than Arianism). However, it slipped my mind and I was returning to Chicago shortly afterwards, and now I see that Mr. Kleinheider has beaten me to the punch. His post covered most of the bases, and I recommend it for its political analysis (plus an intriguing suggestion that Mr. Buchanan’s Catholicism may have had a role in 1996 in alienating evangelicals from his campaign). I will add just a couple points.

Mass democratic politics are governed by how well constituencies can identify with candidates. Candidates serve as symbols to be endorsed and acclaimed or vilified, and this increasingly has little to do with what they say they will do once in office or their raft of “positions.” Democracy is inherently a kind of “identity politics”–it is what Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn called identitarian (which is, incidentally, one of the marks of leftism in his typology). Evangelicals have supported Mr. Bush in disproportionate numbers because they regard him, however incredibly, as one of them, and as someone who has had a similar religious experience. This sense of belonging and identity overcomes many ‘rational’ reasons why evangelicals should regard Mr. Bush very badly indeed–when he begins spouting the gnostic fantasies of Wilsonian liberal Christian political messianism, instead of fleeing him en masse, as evangelicals of another generation would have done (and did in Wilson’s time), they have embraced him and his revolutionary fervour.

No Mormon candidate, as a Mormon, will ever be able to command that broad, vague and diffuse loyalty premised on common identity so long as Mormonism remains the fast-growing but minority sect that it is. To be successful in national GOP politics, a Mormon candidate would have to de-emphasise his Mormon-ness in the primaries even more than most Republicans have to de-emphasise whatever Christianity they do profess in general elections. At best, he would be able to use the placeholders of ‘faith’ and ‘values’ and consequently say nothing of substance that will actually resonate with any of the religious voters he would be trying to energise through such appeals.

Orrin Hatch ran into some of this anti-Mormonism in the 1996 primaries during his very short-lived campaign. It was not critical to the defeat of his candidacy, which was plagued by any number of other weaknesses (Sen. Hatch’s personality being prominent among them), but it was significant enough that he had to address it publicly. He did this by way of being bewildered that anyone could doubt that Mormons were Christians, virtually the same as any Protestant, and none of the critics was convinced. This is not too surprising, since it is not a convincing answer.

Only those unfamiliar with Mormon theology and practises could imagine that Mormons are Christians (or that they are Christians in the way that all other confessing Christians are Christians). In the sense that they confess Christ in some way, they might be called Christians, but then so might Valentinians, Montanists and Arians, and it would not mean the same thing at all to call them by this name.

The comparison with the Valentinians and other gnostics is somewhat instructive, if not a perfect match, since Mormon theology has certain similarities with these heresies in beliefs of the pre-existence of human spirits and the kinship of Christ and Satan, among other things. There are a great many errors from tritheism to literal anthropomorphism and through the latter there is even a kind of Patripassianism. Even the Mormon conception of divinisation or deification, which might seem at first to be in some agreement with the Alexandrian tradition in Orthodox teaching, is confused and tainted by the bizarre doctrine that the Father was once a man who became a god: deification is not premised on the Incarnation, but on some kind of weird system of Euhumeristic apotheosis. Someone who holds to doctrines that are such a grab-bag of nonsense and error, as judged by the standards of the teachings of any Christian confession and reasonable faith, would hardly inspire confidence in me as a suitable candidate for any office.