As many commentators have observed, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney faces a challenge beyond the obstacles common to all presidential aspirants: His religious faith may doom his campaign from the outset.

In July 2006, a Los Angeles Times /Bloomberg poll found that 37% of those questioned would not choose a Mormon presidential candidate. According to a November Rasmussen poll, 43% of American voters would never consider electing a Mormon president. (The figure rises to 53% among evangelical Christians.)

As both an ardent conservative and a committed Mormon, I've found such data disheartening.

When Mitt's father, George, ran against Richard Nixon for the 1968 Republican nomination, the elder Romney's membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints played little role in the discussion.

But national politics have changed. Evangelicals, for instance, had not yet found their public voice in the 1960s nor begun their ascendancy in the Republican Party. The Moral Majority was still ten years away. Already by 1983, though, the prominent historian Martin Marty, alluding to the most visible of the evangelical denominations, was drawing attention to what he called “the Baptistification of America.”

The rise of the Religious Right has made our faith something of a burden, politically speaking, even though, in most regards, Mormons and evangelicals tend to share very similar personal and social values. (Precisely how much of a burden it is remains to be seen.)

Evangelical “Countercult”

One reason for this, however, has been little noticed by political commentators, for the good and sufficient reason that they probably aren't aware of it: Operating on the fringes of the conservative Protestant community — and prospering with it — is a vocal “countercult” movement that focuses much of its effort on Mormonism, which it routinely labels sinister, pagan, anti-Christian, and deliberately deceptive.

Well funded anti-Mormons have poured forth websites, books, radio programs, pamphlets, seminars, tabloids, videos, lecture series, newsletters, message boards, visitor centers, cable television shows, and “ministries” critical of what one writer has called Mormonism's “fountain of slime,” and sometimes going so far as to accuse Mormons of sorcery, Satanism, treason, and murder.

(Some of these countercultists are also, either openly or rather discreetly, anti-Catholic, and many of their charges against Mormons have a lengthy pedigree in Protestant polemics against Rome.)

A particularly notorious anti-Mormon who operates out of the Pacific Northwest claims that the Mormon Church's enthusiastic sponsorship of Boy Scout troops is designed to train paramilitary forces to support a planned Mormon coup. After the revolution, it seems, the president of the Church will issue his theocratic edicts to conquered America from a full-scale replica of the Oval Office located in the Mormon temple that stands just outside the Capital Beltway in suburban Maryland. (No such room exists, of course.)

Richard Mouw, a leading Calvinist theologian and the president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in California, surely had such extravagant allegations in mind when, using potent biblical terms like “sin” and “false witness,” he apologized to a 2004 audience gathered at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

“We evangelicals,” he said, “have often seriously misrepresented the beliefs and practices of the Mormon community.” (Professor Mouw has been roundly criticized for his remarks by those to whose excesses he referred.)

There are, of course, substantial differences between Mormonism and traditional Christian orthodoxy. But there are also broad and important areas of agreement. At some point, however irrelevant such matters may be, strictly speaking, to his qualifications for political office, Governor Romney will probably have to emphasize those in order to allay fears about his personal faith.

Secular Opposition

In addition to the Protestant countercult, however, Governor Romney will also face secular opposition because of his faith. One way of interpreting the high negatives reported in both the Los Angeles Times /Bloomberg poll and the Rasmussen survey is that they reflect not merely (and perhaps not even largely) evangelical theological concerns, but also the worries of those leaning to the secular left about a confident, wealthy, corporate, patriarchal, and zealously missionizing church that they regard as socially and politically retrograde.

Utah is arguably the reddest state in the union — along with Idaho, which also has a large Mormon population. This is not purely coincidental. If that is so, the polling data may simply be demonstrating, to some degree or another, what we could already have guessed: Secular liberals are unlikely to support Mitt Romney.

But there are also unmistakable signs on the left of, as it were, an explicitly doctrinal critique. Writing in Slate in December 2006, Jacob Weisberg argued that Romney should indeed be rejected precisely on religious grounds: Anybody who believes “the founding whoppers of Mormonism” is, he suggested, manifestly unqualified to lead the nation. The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Weisberg wrote, “was an obvious con man. Romney has every right to believe in con men, but I want to know if he does, and if so, I don't want him running the country.”

Protestant countercultists will surely take pleasure in sentiments such as Weisberg's. For their own reasons, they share his perception of Mormons as bizarre, and of Mormon faith as ridiculous, irrational, and even threatening. Even many in the mainstream denominations will, no doubt, share his verdict on the claims of Mormonism. (Responding to Weisberg, Richard John Neuhaus, while graciously acknowledging that having born a Mormon “is not evidence of a character flaw,” suggested that “remain[ing] a Mormon may be evidence of theological naiveté or indifference.”)

Referendum on Theology

But do most Americans really want to make the election a referendum on theology? This sword is dangerous; it cuts both ways. Mainstream religious believers inclined to applaud Weisberg's dismissive take on Mormonism would probably do well to remember Winston Churchill's definition of an “appeaser” as someone “who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last.”

From a devout secularist's perspective, notions like the Resurrection and the miraculous parting of the Red Sea are no less absurd than Joseph Smith's golden plates. Weisberg, for example, views reliance upon religious faith in general, not merely Mormonism, “as an alternative to rational understanding of complex issues.” (He offers George Bush's Methodism as another example of frightening religious fanaticism.)

Weisberg regards all religious doctrines as “dogmatic, irrational, and absurd. By holding them, someone indicates a basic failure to think for himself or see the world as it is.” More commonly held creeds have simply been granted an unmerited patina of respectability by the sheer passage of time. “Perhaps Christianity and Judaism are merely more venerable and poetic versions of the same. But a few eons makes a big difference.”

Weisberg unashamedly suggests that, regardless of their individual qualities of character, experience, and intellect, their religious affiliation makes Mormons too weird, too gullible, too irrational to be considered for the presidency, too odd to be mainstream Americans. Can anybody doubt that, were he pressed, he would say the same thing about seriously believing Catholics, Protestants, and Jews?

In any case, Mormons have already been very much part of America for most of its history. Besides Salt Lake City and other towns in the Great Basin West, they founded such settlements as San Bernardino and Las Vegas. Members of the “Mormon Battalion” built the first courthouse in San Diego, raised the American flag over Los Angeles in 1847, and discovered the gold at Sutter's Mill that brought the 49ers to California. Mervyn Bennion, the commander of the U.S.S. West Virginia who died defending his ship at Pearl Harbor, is one of several Mormons to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Believing Mormons serve in the Senate and the House of Representatives — notable among them the new Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV). (Curiously, Senator Reid's Mormon faith — he converted while in college — has drawn little public attention, and no discernible criticism. Could the media possibly be biased toward a Democrat? Perish the thought!) They have served, and continue to serve, in presidential cabinets. They have represented the United States as ambassadors, and served as generals, admirals (including overall command of the United States Coast Guard), and federal judges. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir has performed at five presidential inaugurations, for presidents of both parties.

Faithful Mormons have led corporations such as JetBlue, Dell Computer, Black & Decker, Times Mirror, General Mills, and, of course, Marriott. (Mitt Romney's own father ran American Motors before serving three terms as governor of Michigan and then heading up the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the first Nixon administration.) Business guru Stephen Covey is a Mormon.

Mormons have won Oscars, Pulitzers, and Grammys. Mormons have quarterbacked and coached NFL football teams (former San Francisco 49er Steve Young, a lawyer and a descendent of Brigham Young, may yet enter politics himself), flourished on the PGA tour, worn the crown of Miss America, and been elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

A Mormon invented television. Others have orbited the earth as astronauts, directed the space shuttle program, and presided over the American Medical Association, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, NASA, Harvard Business School, and the University of California system. Church members have given enormous sums of time and money to charity.

One has to wonder what members of a religious minority must do before they merit acceptance, by some, as fully equal American citizens.

In a Roper poll taken in June 1960, 35 percent of the respondents reacted negatively to the idea of a Catholic president. Realizing that he needed to confront this challenge directly, John F. Kennedy delivered a famous address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on 12 September. He was elected two months later. Toward the conclusion of that characteristically eloquent speech, Kennedy said:

If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.

Anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism, though not wholly extinct in the United States, have been largely embarrassed into public silence. What, now, of anti-Mormonism? Will Mitt Romney be judged on the basis of his personal character, ability, and opinions? Or will he be summarily dismissed as religiously unworthy and un-American?