Mitt's agenda may win over evangelicals

In a recent radio interview, prominent evangelical activist James Dobson said that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's Mormon faith "could pose a serious obstacle" if he decided to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Dobson said he thought that conservative Christians wouldn't feel comfortable casting a ballot for a Mormon.

Chances are, he's wrong.

Sure, plenty of evangelical Protestants refuse to consider Mormonism a branch of Christianity. A Pentecostal missionary recently referred to the heavily Mormon state of Utah as the "last frontier" for Christian proselytizing in the United States.

While Protestants and Catholics accept two books of Scripture, Mormons have four. Mormons believe that church founder Joseph Smith was a prophet of God; other Christians don't consider him anything except the founder of, at best, an unusual sect. Perhaps most troubling to many evangelicals, Mormons believe that the Almighty has a physical body. In other words, theologically speaking, Mormonism is much further away from Christian evangelicalism than, say, Catholicism or any mainline Protestant denomination.

But when it comes to American politics, it seems clear that cultural affinity and a shared political agenda can trump theology. Evangelical activists, for instance, have joined forces with conservative Jews and Tibetan Buddhists on human-rights issues such as sex trafficking and North Korean gulags.

Since the earliest days of their religion in the early 19th century, when they were openly persecuted, Mormons have cultivated both their distinctiveness and a greater acceptance by society at large. Indeed, the church's decision to ban polygamy in the late 19th century was tied to its desire to have the Utah Territory accepted as a state. Once keen on establishing their own Zion in the West, Mormons became increasingly eager over time to integrate.

By the late 20th century, Mormons had developed a reputation for being as American as apple pie, even if their beliefs were way out of the mainstream. Many also became loyal Republicans. As recently as this summer, Utah voters — two-thirds of whom are Mormon — gave President Bush the highest job-approval rating of any state.

Joseph Cannon, chairman of the Utah Republican Party, calls Mormons the blacks of the GOP because about 70 percent vote Republican. He says their affinity for Bush and his party derives from shared values. Of course, the same could be said about evangelicals, who at 40 percent make up the single biggest demographic bloc in the Republican coalition.