Let’s stop letting Mitt Romney’s religious beliefs be an issue in this election. He was born into his faith, as so many of us are into our own. He didn’t convert into it. Whatever the LDS Church’s theology may be, we are behaving wrongfully to judge its members’ worth on the basis of whether we agree with that theology. No matter what denomination you may belong to you, there is at least one other—perhaps many others—that will regard your own faith as a heresy. As for the “cult” accusations,I will admit they began as a sort of cult, but then so did Christianity in the eyes of its first contemporaries, if you really want to be fair about it. Jesus lost many of His followers when He began talking about their having to eat His body and drink His blood in order to have life. I don’t know all the details of “Mormonism,” but I do know that overall, its adherents have earned great respect for their principles of family-centered sober and upright living, their thrift and industry. I wish we all lived in a system that would support such values. Also, the LDS faith, as I understand it, sees America as a uniquely important part of God’s design for this world. There is absolutely no reason to reject Mitt Romney on the basis of his religion. I can recall the 1960 election, when there was a major eruption of bigotry against my Catholic faith, by the way. A vote for Mitt Romney is not a vote for any theology. I am saying all this, even though I am not a Romney supporter. My own major concern in this election is the influence of corporatism. Both Obama and Romney
show every sign of being puppets of Wall Street; therefore, we do not seem to have a meaningful choice in this election. Let us pray that whoever wins will pull a fast one on the “fat cats” and end up acting in the people’s interest. That’s actually a pretty forlorn hope, but with God all things are possible.