“Phony theology” and evangelical identity politics

By Steve Kornacki
Salon

For decades, the center of power in the Republican Party has been shifting southward, and the concentration of evangelical Christians within the party has been rising. So there’s some irony in the fact that as a series of crucial primaries in southern states approaches, the GOP race has, at least for now, become a two-man fight between a Mormon from Massachusetts and a Roman Catholic from Pennsylvania.

That Mitt Romney faces particular suspicion from the evangelical voters who have come to dominate southern Republican politics is old news. In his 2008 campaign, the former Massachusetts governor tried to run as the right’s default non-John McCain choice, a strategy that made Dixie crucial to his efforts. But in one southern state after another, Romney lagged badly among evangelicals (many of whom flocked to Mike Huckabee), preventing him from posting the breakout victories he badly needed. And so far in this campaign, polls suggest that the South remains unusually hostile to — or at least skeptical of — Romney.

The assumption is that Romney’s Mormonism plays a significant role in this. The bulk of southern evangelicals are Baptists and Pentecostals, who tend to be extra-resistant to the idea that the Mormon and Christian faiths are at all compatible and who may be extra-reluctant to vote for a candidate they consider so fundamentally different from them. As Robert Jeffress, the Texas Baptist leader who has called Mormonism “a theological cult,” put it a few months ago, “to those of us who are evangelicals, when all other things are equal, we prefer competent Christians to competent non-Christians who may be good, moral people like Mitt Romney.”
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