Has Huckabee been playing the religion card?

Charles Krauthammer thinks that Mike Huckabee has been subtly trying to appeal to Evangelicals against Romney.

Huckabee has exploited Romney's Mormonism with an egregious subtlety.

Huckabee is running a very effective ad in Iowa about religion. "Faith doesn't just influence me," he says on camera, "it really defines me." The ad then hails him as a "Christian leader."

Forget the implications of the idea that being a "Christian leader" is some special qualification for the presidency of a country whose Constitution (Article VI) explicitly rejects any religious test for office.

Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It's a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext -- who's the Christian in this race? -- would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear.

Well, Huckabee is running against Romney (the other GOP candidates are non-factors in Iowa) and he knows that many Christian conservatives, particularly those who have an affinity with Huckabee's highly paraded evangelical Christianity, consider Romney's faith a decidedly non-Christian cult.

Huckabee has been asked about this view that Mormonism is a cult. He dodges and dances. "If I'm invited to be the president of a theological school, that'll be a perfectly appropriate question," he says, "but to be the president of the United States, I don't know that that's going to be the most important issue that I'll be facing when I'm sworn in."

Hmmm. So it is an issue, Huckabee avers. But not a very important one.

And he's not going to pronounce upon it. Nice straddle, leaving the question unanswered and still open -- the kind of maneuver one comes to expect from slick former governors of Arkansas lusting for the presidency.

And by Huckabee's own logic, since he is not running for head of a theological college, what is he doing proclaiming himself a "Christian leader" in an ad promoting himself for president?

Answer: Having the issue every which way. Seeming to take the high road of tolerance by refusing to declare Mormonism a cult, indeed declaring himself above the issue -- yet clearly playing to that prejudice by leaving the question ambiguous, while making sure everyone knows that he, for one, is a "Christian leader."

As the Wall Street Journal points out today, it is rather odd if Evangelicals are opposing Mitt Romney on his faith since Mormons live by values that conservative Christians should admire.

How unfortunate it would be if he were rejected on the basis of such irreducible doctrinal differences. The Mormons seem the very embodiment of "family values," and you couldn't invent a religious culture that lived more consistently with Biblical messages. Broadly speaking, most Mormons have, and come from, big families; they're regular churchgoers and give to charity; they don't drink, smoke, gamble or engage in premarital sex. On the scale of American problems, the Mormons don't even register.

It's particularly ironic that some religious voters are trafficking in anti-Mormon bias, because the secular left has spent years trying to portray these same religious voters as a threat to the American system. Evangelicals have spent decades being ridiculed by the coastal elites--for the born-again lifestyle, creationism, opposition to embryonic stem-cell research, the "Left Behind" novels. Recall the ridiculous "theocracy" panic after the 2004 election.

Now some of those same believers are trying to do the same to the Mormons. We doubt Mr. Romney persuaded those voters, but he probably had more success with, say, Republican Catholics who recall their pre-JFK ostracism from Presidential politics.

Perhaps those conservative Christians aren't really turned off by his faith but by his slipperiness on certain key social issues and the appearance of having made several convenient political conversions just in time for his run for the presidency. As the WSJ points out, that is the basis we should be using to judge Romney on, not his faith.

A larger irony is that the biggest doubts we hear about the Romney candidacy have nothing to do with his religious convictions, which seem consistent and sincere. They concern his apparent lack of political convictions. He governed Massachusetts as a moderate Republican, and even today he speaks about reforming Washington less with policy ideas than with the power of his positive technocratic thinking.
Once a cultural moderate, Mr. Romney has converted to conservative social positions on abortion, and so on. Rudy Giuliani recently needled him about his "sanctuary mansion" for illegal immigrants, so this week he fired his gardeners. He boasted about his HillaryCare Lite reform in Massachusetts, then had his free-market advisers rewrite it for the primary campaign. Despite yesterday's laudable speech, we suspect Mr. Romney will rise or fall as a candidate based on how well he can sell his worldly record.

I think it's fine to oppose Romney because you don't trust him on the issues. I just hope that people are not basing their opposition on antipathy for his religion. What do they expect him to do if he became president that would further the Mormon religion? Do they honestly expect him to try to impose some form of his religion on the nation? I'd be more concerned about what ideas he has on health care.