The Evangelical Dilemma: Vote for a Mormon or Vote for a Black

The perverse side of me finds some humor in the dilemma facing a number of racist evangelical Christianists:  do they hold their nose and vote for Mitt Romney a Mormon or do they vote for Barack Obama, a black man (assuming, of course, they are not total ignoramuses who believe Obama is a Muslim).   Andrew Sullivan looks at a video previously posted on this blog and the Christianist voter dilemma.  He also underscores the significant differences between Mormon theology and standard Christian theology - and the fact that Mormonism is not what most conservative Christians would even deem to be Christian.    Were America a country where religious belief was a private matter and where one political party, the GOP, did not seek to fuse religion into the party platform, these bigoted voters would not be confronted with this dilemma.  Here are some post highlights:

"Not to shun Mormons, but they teach that Jesus was a man exactly like you or me and that men can become gods. We have traditionally been a Christian nation, and God has blessed us because of that. And now we're going to hand the reins over to a Mormon?" - Ed Seyler, an undecided evangelical voter in Iowa. As the article notes, he is not alone:

Plenty of congregants at Grandview Park Baptist Church face the same predicament: Is it better to vote for a Mormon or to not vote at all? "It's a conundrum," says Smith, the senior pastor, who is personally keen on Romney. "It's tough for a lot of people."

Mainstream Christianity rejects the Mormon theology that God the Father is actually still a physical human being, that Jesus visited the Americas two millennnia ago, that men can become gods, that black people are inherently cursed by God in their DNA, that dead people (especially Jews) can be baptized by proxy, and, most critically, that God is not three-in-one, but three separate entities.

Many may object to my posting video footage of the kind of ceremony that Romney will be extremely familiar with, but which even many Mormons do not get to see. My view is that if you are running for president, transparency is essential.

I don't believe there should be double standards on this, as fervently as I believe that a candidate's religion should be irrelevant in the decision to elect him or her to a secular office. But then, I'm a secularist Christian, and Romney and his party strongly disagree, seeing religion and politics as inseparable. And indeed, in one debate, Romney recently stated, his belief that “We’re all children of the same God."  The trouble is, theologically speaking, and with all due respect for the sincerity of Romney's faith, we are not all children of Romney's version of God. The Christian Trinity is not the Mormon Godhead.

Christianists, willing to overlook the bizarre theology of Mormonism in order to promote the policies most fundamentalists of all types favor: re-criminalizing abortion, stripping gay people of the rights heterosexuals have, and a new war to protect Israel, [will vote for Romney].

I agree with Andrew.  If Romney and the GOP want to dispense civil rights based on whether and to what extent one adheres to certain Christianist religious dogmas, then it is only fair that Romney's religious beliefs and tradition be open game for scrutiny and criticism.