More On Huckabee

It's a rare event when the OPJ and I actually blog on the same subject but it happened this morning. Luckily for the blog, her posting read better - so after about 3 minutes I took mine down.

There is one aspect to the story that she didn't touch on. So here it is.

When Governor Huckabee said:

I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ.

He was speaking at a conference (more on that in a bit) during the wave of school shootings in the late 90s:

[T]he catalysts for the nation's recent school shootings -- including the one March 24 near Jonesboro that left four students and a teacher dead and 10 others wounded -- were harder to see but were driven by "the winds of spiritual change in a nation that has forgotten its God."

"Government knows it does not have the answer, but it's arrogant and acts as though it does," Huckabee said. "Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed."

The shootings were just one more wake-up call to the nation, he said.

"I fear we will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours."

Set aside his "Blame America First" message, you can see where he gets the "answer the alarm clock" metaphor.

Now about that conference. The story is here.

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, addressed his contemporaries at the two-day Pastors' Conference, which continues today. The three-day Southern Baptist Convention begins Tuesday here in the heartland of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the city in which the Mormons have their world headquarters.

Now why would the Southern Baptist Convention go to the heart of the Church of Latter Day Saints?

They were looking to convert all those Mormons. Take a look:

''We're looking at the biggest evangelistic outreach in the Salt Lake Valley in history,'' said Phil Roberts, an official with the Baptists' North American Mission Board (and no relation to Clint Roberts). ''There may be as many as 50,000 personal knocks on the door,'' he added.

And why would they want such an outreach?

Turns out that the Southern Baptists don't fully agree with the ideas found within the Church of Latter Day Saints. The North American Missions Board is the domestic missions agency of the Southern Baptist Convention. Their website links to a site called Apologetics.

On that site in a page labelled New Religions and Cults. And there you will find the NAMB's biblical responses to among others the Nation of Islam, Scientology, postmodernism, the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons.

Go read some of the responses, if you like. They assert that the Jesus Christ of the LDS is not the same Jesus Christ of the Bible, that God as described by the LDS is not the same God as described by the Bible and so on.

As with any such metaphysical argument there's no way of establishing which side is right (many thanks to A.J. Ayer on that - indeed Ayer would go further and say that each assertion is simply nonsense). As I am an agnostic, I won't be taking any sides but it seems pretty obvious to me why the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't consider the Church of Latter Day Saints to be a Christian demonination.

And it might explain some of the stresses found within Gods Own Party in relation to Mitt Romney.