Last night was “Meet a Mormon” night at the RNC, part of Romney’s strategy to educate evangelicals who have decided, quite arbitrarily, that their faith is less fanciful than his. To that end a couple far too decent to be onstage told stories of Mitt Romney’s kindness during the death of their son, and a woman told of Mitt crying as he held her sick, prematurely born daughter. I found it moving, but then, I like Mormons and admire them for their over-representation in So You Think You Can Dance. What’s Romney up against? It’s surely difficult for Godless Slate readers to understand; you didn’t even know about the body’s rape pregnancy defense mechanism until this month.
Prosaic anti-Mormonism merely attempts to expose Joseph Smith as a fraudulent prophet. But if the natural world is as alive to you as it is to some Christians, sinister forces manifest where others might see mere falsehood. In this paper on Contemporary Evangelical Anti-Mormonism, sociologist Massimo Introvigne quotes preachers who believe Satan invented Mormonism to lure Christians from the true God. “New age anti-Mormons” believe Satan and his Mormon friends designed the spires of the Mormon church to represent an upside down nail, “pointing defiantly toward heaven—as if to impale the Lord Jesus anew when he comes in the clouds of glory.” The Mormon temple in Salt Lake is a “perfectly designed habitation for devils.” Mormons worship UFOs. Mormons plan on becoming Gods. Mormon apostles have the number “666” stamped on their foreheads. Mormonism is a “sex cult.” This is where it gets weird. Mormon women are “compelled to submit to a special sexual type of operation” that would “blow the minds” of any doctors given permission to examine them. Mormon temple garments “are held together by a subtle occult web of sexual energy which is activated by pressure from the two highest grips in the LDS Temple endowment.” And so on.
Yesterday I implied that the stakes were not so high in this election, but that was before I knew Mitt Romney was Satan, sent to entrap us in his occult web of sexual energy. Which sounds promising. If there’s anything of interest to be drawn from the tedium of endless election coverage, it’s the occasional introduction to imagined worlds we might not otherwise encounter.
