"A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan"

In response to the growing backlash against Romney, a wide variety of religious and political leaders, including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and Romney supporters like Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida, have publicly advised Romney not to discuss theology on the campaign trail. They have told him to further refrain from describing Mormonism as a legitimate form of Christianity. "Talking about values is a winner," Feeney said in an interview with Bloomberg News, "talking about theological stuff is a no-no."

Romney appears to have responded to the concerns. On the campaign trail, he has largely refrained in public from repeating the comments he made in October 2006, when he reportedly told a private group of evangelical leaders, "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior." In a recent appearance on Fox News, Ann Romney, the candidate's wife, declared that Mormonism was "a faith based on Christ, and it's a faith based on very Judeo-Christian principles." In the same interview, Mitt Romney declined to pursue her point. Instead, he tried to assure viewers that he would, like the Catholic president John F. Kennedy, consider his oath of office as among "the highest promises" he had "made to God."

Other leaders have appealed to evangelicals to judge Romney by his plans to further the Christian agenda, not the theological tenets of his personal belief. "I think it's thin ice for us as a movement to start making theological judgments about somebody else's faith on Election Day," said Gary Bauer, "because we are asking the country to not do that when it comes to evangelical candidates who run." Bauer ran for the Republican presidential nomination as a social conservative in 2000 and now heads the group American Values. Similarly, Tony Perkins, who runs the Family Research Council, has advised Romney to continue to avoid the religious pitfalls. "I don't know that he has to got to talk about his religion," Perkins said. "I think he needs to continue doing what he is doing, and that is to stake out clear policy positions that connect with values voters across the country."

Others like Robert Taylor, the dean of Bob Jones University, a religious school in South Carolina that teaches that Mormonism is a cult, have come out to endorse Romney. "I have not seen any time in the past where a president has taken advantage of the presidency to promote his particular faith," Taylor explained of his decision. "We can look at the man. We can look at his values." Nonetheless, Taylor says he understands the concerns of his friends who worry that a Romney presidency could lead to more Mormon conversions. And he adds that if Romney did begin to speak about his religion as a legitimate form of Christianity from the stump, "that would make it very different."

Back in the Tampa used-car lot, there was no debate. Keller, the televangelist, remained convinced that a Mormon president will lead to more lost souls. And his fury is no longer just directed at Romney. He calls those Christian leaders who support Romney "Judases" and clowns. "They all come back and say, we're looking for the best president. He's the commander in chief, not the pastor in chief, blah blah blah," Keller said. "What they have done is, they have totally dismissed the fact that this guy's influence is going to lead people to hell."

For Keller, the ministry is all in the numbers. By his own estimate, he has saved hundreds of thousands of souls through his Web site, e-mails and call-in television program, which is set to return to a national broadcast in January. It's a quest that began for him in federal prison, where he was sentenced in 1988 to 30 months for insider trading. There, he rediscovered religion and began taking correspondence courses through Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Ever since, he has been "literally battling for the souls of men, 24/7, 365." It's a journey that took him, for a time, into the world of big-money televangelism, onto Fox News and the Howard Stern show, and to countless mornings at 3 a.m., when he usually writes his daily e-mail devotional.

So Keller's crusade against Romney makes sense in a way, though it only matters if others follow his lead. The question that remains is how much the rank-and-file Bible-believing evangelicals choose to use religion as a litmus test when they go to the polls. The question is whether evangelical voters choose to make the 2008 election about the future on earth or the future in eternity.

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