Beliefs in the LDS faith are a mystery to many

Nothing differs from traditional Christianity more than the Mormon understanding of the afterlife. Protestants and Catholics alike believe that after death people go either to heaven or hell. Mormons, however, believe that multiple kingdoms exist where people who have lived on the earth go after death.

Progressively these kingdoms are the Telestial, the Terrestial and the Celestial, and those who merit admission to the Celestial Kingdom have an opportunity for eternal progression toward godhood. Latter-day Saints describe this process as becoming "like God," but the conservative evangelicals who regard Mormonism as a cult connect the LDS belief about the afterlife to what an early church president said: "As man is, God once was; as God is man may become."

Extremely conservative evangelicals, along with some "Ex-Mormons for Jesus," turned this distinction into a book, film strip and movie version of Mormon theology called "The Godmakers." Comparable to a version of the theology of early Christendom that, because of the Eucharist, turned believers into cannibals who ate Christ's body and drank his blood, this work seems to have been partially responsible for the emphasis the LDS Church has placed on its being the CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST.

The charge that Mormonism started as a cult is accurate in that it began as a form of the Judeo-Christian tradition in much the same way that Christianity, which also started out as a cult, began as a form of Judaism. But when cults "grow up," they become cultures in which it is difficult to separate the social from the theological.

Mitt Romney became the person that he is by growing up in a social world that put great emphasis on family, service and leading a moral life. At the same time he absorbed the LDS belief system in the same way that Protestants, Catholics and Jews absorb their traditions' beliefs. With regard to his own faith, Romney's task today is to describe this process without downplaying the distinctiveness of Mormon belief so much that he appears to be dissembling.

---

Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of religious studies and history at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, is a well-known non-Mormon scholar on the LDS Church. Her books include Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition" (University of Illinois Press, 1987) and Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons" (University of Illinois, 2000).