Is Mitt Romney Bad for Christians?

It's early yet, but Mitt Romney is clearly going to be getting a lot of ink as he contends for the presidency in 2008. Much of that publicity is going to focus on the fact that Mitt is a Mormon, and I think that the Christian community had better start preparing itself for this.

Because reporters don't know much about anything, they try to define everything in terms of big, sweeping categories: Businessmen and guns are bad; environmentalists and anything that sounds European are good. It helps them to get their heads around complicated issues without all the pesky research that cuts into happy hour. As they look into Mormonism for stories on Romney, they're going to discover--if you don't mind me saying--some weird-ass crap. Since, inside their tiny reporter brains, they've already determined that all religious people are the same, they're going to assume that the aforementioned weird-ass crap applies to Christians too, and they'll write their stories without looking into it any more than that.

(By the way, if you think I'm implying that Mormons aren't Christians, you're exactly right.)

Already there are commentators who are actively trying to equate evangelical Christians with Islamic fanatics. Christians haven't been nearly aggressive enough in slapping that line down, and the longer stuff like that goes unchallenged, the more it seeps into the collective consciousness as truth. If we're not vigilant, those same commentators will blur the line between Conservative Christian/Devout Mormon so that the average guy on the street thinks they're one and the same.

This is not an official jaceonline anti-endorsement of Mitt Romney. The Republican field right now is so weak that he may be the best available option come 2008. But his Mormonism combined with the ignorance of the press (willful or otherwise) will lead to distortions that Christians must be prepared to refute.