Salon has an article about televangelist Bill Keller’s efforts to dissuade the 2.4 million readers of his e-mail list from voting for presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, a Mormon.
“A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan,” Keller declared in his daily e-mail devotional last May. His reasoning went like this: Romney’s election would serve as a giant advertisement for a competing religion, Mormonism, which Keller and others believe has falsely portrayed itself as another form of Christianity in an effort to find converts. “He would influence people to seek out the Mormon faith,” Keller predicted of a Romney presidency. “They would get sucked into those lies and they would eventually die and go to hell.”
Though Keller’s rhetoric is extreme and his predictions are controversial, his biblical reasoning is mainstream for many of the nation’s Christian evangelicals, who make up about 40 percent of the Republican Party. Large denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention have long considered Mormonism to be a cult, not a true path to salvation. National polling paints a stark picture of the problem. According to a recent Pew Center poll, 25 percent of Republicans say they are reluctant to vote for a candidate who is Mormon. Among white evangelicals who attend church weekly, 41 percent are reluctant to vote for a Mormon.
(Last year I read Jon Krakauer’s engrossing history of Mormonism and its offshoots, Under the Banner of Heaven.)