The problem comes when they (a) tell me that I don’t know what I am talking about when I say that I believe I am a Christian and (b) tell me I am actually lying when I say it. It is one thing to disagree with other people’s religious beliefs or conclusions, but quite another to call them ignorant liars. They assume they have proprietary knowledge of my personal thought processes, things which no rational person can properly assert. (It’s sort of satanic, isn’t it, to say you can read people’s minds?) Yet the standard story told by all too many Evangelical ministers is that, as soon as you hear that a person is a Mormon, you can write him off as stupid and/or evil, without examining his actions and accomplishments, like leading the Olympic games out of a mire of scandal and misrepresentation and into success and solvency.

That is why it irritates some Evangelicals so much to hear Mitt Romney aver that he believes “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind,” as he did in his speech. One would think that any Christian would be happy to hear another person affirm this statement, to have an ally in supporting the application of Christ’s teachings to public policy and defend morality against secularism and atheism. Yet the reaction of many Evangelical ministers (as quoted in the press) is that Romney is not allowed to say that, that it irritates them no end that Romney does not confess to being a heathen, that Evangelicals have a copyright on that phrase, and they will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who uses it without their authorization. They act like they are the MCA of the Bible, and they want a million dollars from every Mormon who violates their copyright by using the name of Christ (c).

I think the Yiddish term for this attitude is Chutzpah. Remember what Jesus said about the ambition of the Pharisees, who were willing to compass the earth to bring a Gentile proselyte to their brand of Judaism, and then made him twice the child of hell that they were.

Like other prejudices, I think what underlies this attitude of superiority is fear, a fear that, in an open exchange, without artificial impediments, the Mormons would make a persuasive case for their viewpoint and lure not only other Evangelicals, but even the ones who are leading the charge. It is the same fear that makes Muslims insist that no Christian meetings be held in any open way in Saudi Arabia, the same fear that makes materialists insist that no questions about the adequacy of Darwinism as a scientific theory be uttered in the public schools, the fear that causes universities to want to bar conservative speakers from campus and military recruiters from law schools. There is a fear that just hearing the detested ideas spoken will drag us down to our respective hells.

But the message of Article VI and the First Amendment is: Snap out of it! We have a marketplace of ideas in this country, and the core part of religious freedom is the freedom to tell other people what you believe, without censorship or threats or slander. Like personal freedom and civil rights, it took over a century for us to realize the promise of those words in our Constitution that we would have “a new birth of freedom”. Being American means you can preach your own beliefs all day and night, but you aren’t entitled to get angry when you disagree with someone else.

That is what Mitt Romney was reminding us of. Being subscribers to the Constitution, being beneficiaries of its guarantees, means we relinquish our right to make other Americans into second class citizens.

In other words, peace on earth to men of good will.

Without a shred of evidence, and despite multiple explicit disclaimers, it’s all about those “wascally”, double-dealing Mormons lying their way into legitimacy. Is paranoia too strong a word here?

While my feelings about the LDS church will remain anonymous, I find this one reason why we shouldn’t be talking so much about religion. Just to underscore his point, the issue is not about one church versus another, but about someone’s qualifications for president. When we (personally) discredit someone BECAUSE of his religion, we are opening the door for ALL religions to be banned, because of the same fear. I hope that people will see that THIS is the reason why I want all of us to adhere to Article VI, and not because I think anyone is a bigot or because I am afraid of being called a bigot.