Although there are 5.5 million card-carrying members of the Mormon Church in the United States---one of whom targeted me on a major campus yesterday--I don’t think anyone would have predicted that a Mormon would make a serious bid to be on a presidential ticket until Mitt Romney actually ran in 2008. It’s fairly interesting to note that Mitt Romney is one of the most palatable Republican candidates to Democrats and even more interesting to consider how much the electorate is influenced by his religion. 

Michael Gerber just penned an Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post in which he discusses both Republican and Democrat attitudes towards Romney’s Mormon faith. In the article, Gerber cites a poll whose results suggest that one in five Republicans wouldn’t vote for a Mormon to be president.Yet, Gerber believes that Romney’s faith should not be a factor in the race because Mormons represent a large voting block within the United States. 

Gerber further suggests that liberals might be more offended by Mormons, largely as a result of the role the Mormon Church played in supporting Proposition 8 in California. That said, he does state that Romney might not actually be the strongest of Mormons in terms of political; Romney might actually have more of his own positions to back himself up in a bid for president than someone like MIchele Bachmann who is tied to the Evangelical Christian voting block. 

Should Romney’s religious beliefs play a role in the presidential campaign? Do you believe that voters have a right to judge a candidate by which way they worship God or if they worship God at all? 

If a candidate truthfully believes in the separation of church and state, that is one thing, but if a candidate is overly-influenced by the politics of his church, that’s yet another thing entirely. In the poll that I cited above, the Republicans (and Protestants) who didn’t like Romney didn’t like Romney because they didn’t like the way that he believed in God. The way a person believes in God (or if a person believes in God) shouldn’t be the determining factor in whether a not someone votes for a candidate; the determining factor should be how much the candidate allows the Church to influence his or her role in political office. 

Again, with a fundamentalist Christian, you know that even their answers in televised debates will relay that God has spoken to them; that’s typically not a good sign. Thus far in the campaign, I haven’t heard Romney say anything along those lines.