The Impending Suicide of the Christian Right
Atheists, Moslems, Buddhists, and "spiritual but not religious" secularists, rejoice! The Radical Right is about to gore itself on the horns of a dilemma.
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The choice this election is between a Protestant black man and a non-Christian white man. For the first time, the Christian Right can vote either race or faith, but not both. What will they do? What will they do?
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Will they evade the choice, and just not vote for President? If so, they consent to the re-election of that black man in the White House, but they will at least remain doctrinally pure.
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If they vote for the non-Christian, they are publicly accepting that religion should play no role in politics, which undoes their insistent teachings going back generations. They would very publicly embrace secularism.
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Or they can pretend that Mormonism is Christian, but that necessarily requires them to embrace the Book of Mormon not just as a new gospel but as a third Testament. Indeed, as the Newest Testament, the Book of Mormon would have to be embraced as correcting errors in the older Testaments ("Old", Jewish scriptures; and "New", Christian teachings), just as the New Testament corrected errors in the Old Testament.
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All evangelical churches will have to display the Book of Mormon with the present Bible, and all new Bibles will have to incorporate the Book of Mormon between the Bible's front and back covers, somewhere, equally with the Old and New Testaments.
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If a new Bible incorporates the Book of Mormon, should it do so by placing it at the end, as admission that it is newer, and therefore the literal "last word" on the will of God?
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Or could theologians look thru the current Bible and figure an appropriate place for the Book of Mormon, intact?
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Could they break up the Book of Mormon into its 'logical' parts and place chunks of it into different places scattered among present books of the Bible, in some arguably logical order? For instance, might it not fit after the Gospels that speak to the death and Resurrection of Jesus, so the narrative would now be that once Jesus was lifted up bodily (because the Tomb was empty of the body, not just the soul, of Jesus), Our Lord and Savior traveled the whole of the Earth, to teach the way of the Lord to people everywhere, including across a New World known to Him but not to the peoples of Palestine and the Roman Empire of that day?
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Oh, there are teachings in Mormonism that will be hard to reconcile with present Christian orthodoxy, such as that Jesus was not one with God the Father and the Holy Ghost, and God Himself came from another planet with its own higher god. But if Christians can break down the 'One True God' of Jewish monotheism into a Trinity of three gods (or three faces of God, like the two faces of the Roman god Janus), and posit at one and the same time that Adam and Eve were the only people at the beginning of the world, but the human race did not arise from incest, I'm sure they can put forward diametrically opposed views and argue that they are completely consistent with each other — 'accept this in perfect faith of the Lord's mysterious ways'. And the people who claim to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, including that tricky Adam-Eve/other-people thing, will claim to believe that the traditional narrative and the Book of Mormon are fully consonant.
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But what if evangelicals don't WANT to accept the Book of Mormon as a new gospel that all Christians must accept?
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Then they must accept that Mormonism is NOT Christian, the Republican candidate for President is NOT a Christian, and anyone who votes for him votes to end the dominance in American politics of the Christian faith.
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However you think about it, if the Christian Right votes for the Mormon Mitt Romney rather than the Protestant Barack Obama, they are voting against Christianity, and thus demolishing everything they have worked so hard for all these decades, even centuries.
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So which will it be? The white heretic? Or the black Christian?
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To ease that stark choice, the Radical Right could say that Mitt Romney is the Antichrist, a seemingly nice man whose example leads true Christians astray into the old heresy of accepting that good deeds rather than faith in Jesus and acceptance of the purity and perfection of Christian doctrine bestows redemption, and it is that acceptance that will empower Romney to achieve dominion over the Earth and thus hasten the Second Coming of Christ. The election of Mitt Romney would thus mark the true beginning of End Times, and hasten the Rapture.
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Most Christians aren't looking forward to the world ending, but the Christian Right is not most Christians.
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Even if Mitt Romney should not be viewed as the Antichrist hastening the end of the world, he does threaten to produce End Times for the power of the Christian Right. Should they embrace the end of their secular power, and return to concerning themselves only with people's souls, not their politics?
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The Radical (political) Right is about tribe, not principle. You are either a member of the tribe, so can wander from supposed tribal principles yet still be accepted as a member of the tribe, or you are NOT a member of the tribe, and no principle you embrace will admit you to the tribe. The American Radical Right is a white tribe. It must hold together, and reject nonwhites, but especially blacks. It is thus an absolute, unequivocal duty to vote white. Voting black gets you booted out of the tribe.
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If race trumps faith, and the Christian Right "sells its soul to the Devil" — I don't believe in gods or devils, but people who do believe in the Devil say that Lucifer has many guises, and one of them could assuredly be a Mormon who would have Christians believe that Mormonism IS Christianity, so Christians can embrace heresy, estrange themselves from God, and thus consign their souls to the Devil — it cannot thereafter regain doctrinal purity. They will have sold their virginity to the highest bidder, and there is no such thing as a born-again virgin.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:11 AM