That isn’t really what I’m responding to, however. In the past few weeks, I’ve been wishing Mitt had never gotten into this race, because I knew, as Hugh Hewitt did when he wrote his book on Mitt, that a lot of Evangelicals would begin spouting this Anti-Mormon nonsense. I should be used to it by now, but the attacks, especially outside the Conference Center and Temple Square in Salt Lake City and far beneath Christian conduct. But now I think, why should the American people be denied a leader of Mitt Romney’s stature, proven ability and experience simply because a bunch of paid ministers fear losing members to his church? He hasn’t brought religion into this. He’s tried to keep it out. But the media want to talk about Mormon temple garments, Kolob, and a lot of other stuff that has very little to do with his character and the issues of this election, and apparently Evangelicals want his religion to BE the issue, at least in the primaries.

Mormons proselyte among anyone who cares to listen. The church doesn’t target any particular church and it doesn’t try to fool anybody about itself or to spread lies about other churches. Religious tolerance and freedom is part of its Articles of Faith. Certainly a group as persecuted and hated as much as the LDS Church was throughout the Nineteenth Century, understands why we have the First Amendment.

I wish I could let these misrepresentations and barbs roll off and ignore them, thinking no less of the people who spread them. I guess in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, I should pray for them, but at this point I’m not quite up to wishing the Reverend Huckabee all the best. I do have this piece of good advice for him, Mr. Pastore and others who consider Mormons anathema. Evangelicals appear far stranger to most of mainstream society than they realize. Most Americans think of them in terms of Ned Flanders. By making religion an issue in the primaries against Mitt Romney, they open themselves up to closer scrutiny and being called “weird” and “strange” and Huckabee will not be able to call such discussion out of bounds, because he has used it in his favor and against Mitt Romney.

In their daily lives and moral views, Mormons and most Evangelicals are very similar. We believe in many of the same doctrines. But, in an effort to discourage their congregants from even investigating Mormonism, Evangelical ministers and theologians have chosen to play up differences and ignore the many areas where we agree and should be working together for the social good. None of the efforts of the Southern Baptist Convention to propagandize against Mormonism has slowed the growth of the LDS church. When one considers it’s first century, it has endured far worse than anything that Evangelicals can do today. It is reasonable to ask what the motive for such intemperate and hostile rhetoric might be, and a lot of folks might notice that Mormons have no paid ministers. They have no megachurches, and their local congregations are not operated for the income they raise. Nobody has ever become rich as a preacher in the LDS church.

Pastore and others like him, if they have any integrity, should go form their own “Christian” Party and try to run against the Democrats on the one hand, who all too often subordinate religion to government, and the real Republicans on the other hand, who believe that government should create an environment of mutual tolerance and freedom where private actors, like churches, can do their jobs using their own resources, rather than trying to enlist the wealth of others through established churches or political parties that are simply arms of a religious group.

If religious partisans like this take over the Republican presidential nomination, they will fracture the party, especially when those Republicans outside their “in group” realize that they are being coopted to serve the interests of a faction that views other Republicans as second class citizens. It will be 1968, with the Republicans instead of Democrats divided against themselves.

As far as Pastore’s plan to fight Mormon evangelism–I have seen no sign that Evangelicals have ever slacked off of that program. The part that Mormons find curious is the idea that at its core it is an attack on Mormons rather than a campaign to teach the gospel as Evangelicals view it and help people understand it so that they will be loyal to it and not feel a need for Mormonism. There are certainly many reasons for a person to prefer Evangelical Christianity to Mormonism, but one reason NOT to do so is the vituperation and just plain mendacity that is employed in the anti-Mormon campaigns of so many ministers of religion. What it resembles, to my mind, is the kind of subordination of politics to religion, of “anything goes in the name of God” attitude that has its ultimate fulfillment in the Islamic Jihadist movement currently attacking Christianity. I have heard a Mormon professor of Arabic literature who, when he tried to make a presentation of his beliefs to a mixed audience at a state university, was attacked vehemently by both Evangelicals and Muslims, using interchangable arguments. Mr. Pastore should stop and reflect on how his tactics reveal his true master.