Mormonism and Politicized Religion

Robert P. George yesterday wrote about the phone calls allegedly made by the group Catholics for Obama to ask voters questions like “How can you vote for a Mormon who does not believe in Jesus Christ?” The Obama campaign denies the charges, according to an editor’s note in the U.S. News article to which Dr. George had linked.

If the calls were in fact made, they would disgust me because they misrepresented Mormon teaching, and because the callers would likely have been motivated less by concern for the spread of the Gospel than by concern for President Obama’s re-election. Nevertheless I am not sure they would constitute an appalling example of anti-Mormon bigotry.

As Gabriel Rossman pointed out on Twitter, First Things founder Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, for one, did not think that a refusal to vote for a Mormon constituted bigotry. As he wrote late in 2007:

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