today's NYT devotes quite a bit of space to Mitt Romney courting evangelicals. the basic Romney rhetoric is: look, i am a religious zealot, and you are religious zealots, so why don't we just get along, given the fact that most of the main characters in our favorite stories are the same?
of course, that does not go down too well with the real zealots on the other side, and the NYT even cares to explain that among the major differences with traditional Christianity, members of
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church
is officially called, do not believe in the concept of the unified
Trinity; the Book of Mormon is considered sacred text, alongside the
Bible and two other texts; and Mormons believe that God has a physical
body and that human beings can eventually become like God.
in a secular state, such a discussion would probably be regarded with the same public interest as a passionate debate about whether the easter bunny's ears are more brownish, or more of a whitish kind of color. however, since secularism is a word that does not mean much in the U.S., the bunny voters and their ability to handle ear-color disputes will probably be important for the outcome of the presidential election, and will definitely be essential for the primaries.
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