Republicans Now Hurling the C-word At Each Other

Robert Jeffress has made a big splash with his declaration at the Values Voter summit that Mitt Romney belongs to a "cult." He declared that Mormonism is not Christianity, even though the Mormon Church is called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But the Mormon Church is not the first to be called a "cult" by a pastor in the Southern Baptist Convention. Jim Smyrl, from Jacksonville, Florida, was calling the Catholic Church a cult since at least 2008.

Smyrl's contention in the video linked above is that Catholic Church is a cult based on doctrinal differences between it and the SBC. In particular, he singles out the transubstantiation of wine into the actual blood of Jesus Christ.

Smyrl's definition seems to be that if a religious group has any doctrine that seems creepy and weird to you, it's a cult. By that definition, Mormonism counts as a cult. It has a history of polygamy, which continues to this day in some sects. It holds that American Indians are a lost tribe of Israel. It has the doctrine of Exaltation, which posits that we can become gods and goddesses. Jews had to fight with the Mormon Church to stop the practice of baptizing Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps (this was apparently done to assist in exaltation). Non-Mormons may not attend weddings in Mormon temples. Mormons keep a cache of emergency supplies wherever they go in case the world ends. And they wear Holy Underwear +4.

And then there's the history of Joe Smith, who seems to have been a prototypical cult leader. He claimed to have translated the Book of Mormom from gold plates given to him by the angel Moroni, which he had to give back after showing them to some guys who signed affidavits that they really, really did exist. Smith was murdered in jail after declaring martial law in the town where he was mayor, shutting down the town newspaper and facing accusations that he was stealing other men's wives. His killers were acquitted.

But what is a cult, really? Generally, a cult is a religious group that has a centralized authority that dictates particular standards of behavior and morality, controls whom followers can marry, dictates with whom members can associate, ostracizes former members, demands large donations from followers, and in general limits exposure to outside influences to prevent "immorality," all in an attempt to maintain complete control over all aspects of the cult member's life.

But the Southern Baptist Convention has its own cultish characteristics. The Baptist Church was famous for forbidding dancing and drinking: that's why there are so many dry counties in the South. Some Baptist sects justified slavery by its mention in the Bible (the SBC apologized for this in 1995). They venerate the cross, the evil device of torture and murder used by the Romans to crucify millions of innocent victims, including Christ, which is more than a little creepy. They have the Trinity, which is really just some freaky nonsense to get around the fact that they actually polytheistic. Their cultishness is sufficiently advanced that Baptists sometimes feel the need to insist that they are not a cult.

But all religions started out as cults: small groups of adherents to a new religion with heretical beliefs. Early Christian cults had to worship in secret for fear of persecution and death.

Cults stop being cults when their numbers are sufficient to be considered mainstream, and their policies allow them to be integrated into the rest of society, by eliminating their exclusionary polices that alienate them from others.

But the real reason that the Baptists say the Mormon Church is a cult may be that the SBC is afraid of losing members to the Mormon Church. This is from an article in Slate from 2007 when the Romney question first arose:

In the early 1980s, Southern Baptist Convention leaders discovered—much to their horror—that 40 percent of Mormonism's 217,000 converts in 1980 came from Baptist backgrounds. More than 150 Mormon missionaries had descended on the northern Georgia area alone, a Southern Baptist magazine noted warily in 1982, and they found Southern Baptists among their most promising targets. When the Mormon Church built temples in the early '80s in Atlanta and Dallas, two of Southern Baptism's most important hubs, it was as if the Mormon Church had thrown down the gauntlet in an arms race between two of the most missionary-minded faiths. Mormonism was declaring its permanent presence in the American South, where Southern Baptism enjoyed status as the de facto religion.

So, what this may really boil down to is not religious doctrine or the saving of souls, but losing church members, the income from their donations, and the subsequent loss of religious and political power to a competing organization.

In other words, this tiff between Baptists and Mormons may all be about the money.