Huckabee’s question is worse than bigotry, it is a ploy, and it plays on the theological and historical ignorance of everyone who hears it. If this were 1888, and a Mormon were running for President, this theological statement would be a charge that should be raised, because of the deep divisions between the Mormons in Utah and the traditional Christians there. It would imply that the two groups could not co-exist. We could infer reasonably that that might be the case. My objection now is that the Mormons have been “tamed.” or “christianized,”so that their morality, their deportment is now consistent with the public peace. I find it ironical that they stand for a morality that is more Christian than that of many main-line Christian churches. Huckabee seems to be implying that such a doctrine necessarily means that a Mormon President would adopt policies that will depart from this course.
Well, you might be right...provided that the only or primary purpose of "religion" was to "tame" folks. (Hint: It's not)
The Bible doesn't mention "religion" very often & when it does, it links back to the Church helping the poor & orphans (book of James). Just as we learn character in a social reality (families, churches, schools, communities, and prayer, etc.), the Bible points out that it's the social reality of a relationship with the true Jesus Christ that yields both eternal life (John 17:3) and character/morality (Galatians, for example talks about the fruit of the spirit).
My bottom-line: It really doesn't matter if we have outwardly "moral" folks like the New Testament Pharisees. Jesus called them a "brood of vipers" whose cups were clean on the outside but were inwardly filthy...he called them children of the devil in John 8. Jesus was more concerned about the inside of the cup. And when you check the inside of the cup in places like Utah, you find that state is consistently in the top 10 for suicide rates in the nation...and Mentalhealth.net just named the state #1 of all states for depression.