Johann Hari: Why should we respect these politicians?

Is it bigoted to oppose a politician because of their religious beliefs? This question will keep slapping us across the face in 2007. We have a Mormon running for the White House - with a credible chance of clutching the Republican nomination. We have an Opus Dei cultist in the British Cabinet trying to block moves towards full equality for gay people. And we have all spent so long wading through multicultural mush about how we should respect religion that we have lost the capacity to respond.

Even here, in an irreligious country where only 7 per cent of people regularly attend a religious service, we feel preternaturally anxious about criticising another person's faith. If a person declares that he believes a whale swallowed a man and burped him out alive and well a month later, or that cartoonists should be imprisoned simply for drawing a man who lived 1,400 years ago, most of us would mock him. But if he says this is part of his religion, we fall silent.

Once an idea is labelled as religious, it becomes surrounded with a rhetorical electric wire fence that few people try to pass. Look at the recent trial of Abu Hamza for inciting violence, where his defence stated - accurately - that many of the the offending passages in his sermons consisted of quotes from the Koran. If it's in a religious book, the defence argued implicitly, it can't be condemned.

Amid all this, it's necessary to restate a basic truth: a religion is simply an idea a human being had some time in the past that he declared was sanctioned by an intangible supernatural being. We should test these ideas - and how they drive the political behaviour of Mitt Romney, Ruth Kelly, or any other public figure - in the marketplace of ideas just as rigorously as we test their ideas about, say, taxation.

Romney - the Governor of Massachusetts and wannabe-President - is a follower of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, better known as Mormons. This faith was smelted in 1830 by a professional treasure-hunter living in upstate New York called Joseph Smith, who declared that ever since the time of Jesus, the Church had fallen into filth and decadence, and he was the man to save it. He produced The Book of Mormon, a 500-page guide explaining that Jesus had visited America after he died, because America is the real focal point of sacred history. (The Garden of Eden is in Jackson, Missouri.) The book counselled that we are now living in end-times and the Messiah will imminently return and rule the world from American soil. Smith believed US politics was the central focus of this celestial battle - the true Zion - which is why he ran for President until he was martyred by an angry mob in 1844.

Romney says this faith "informs very dramatically" his politics. Yes, it is true that Romney defies some of the most clichéd criticisms of Mormonism: when he competes in the Republican primaries against Rudi Guiliani, John McCain and Newt Gingrich, the Mormon will be the only one who has had only one wife. And yes, it is possible Romney has somehow managed to melt the parts of this religion that are most weird into meaningless metaphor. But if so, he's a pioneer, because there is no liberal tradition in Mormonism. The faith has been based from the beginning on pure prophecy: whatever is "revealed" to the Church's head - originally Smith, now a successor - is Divine Truth. No reason. No scope for debate.

In parallel, Ruth Kelly - Britain's Minister for Women and Equality - is a member of Opus Dei, a Catholic sect founded in 1928 by an obscure Spanish lawyer-priest called José Maria Escriva. He wrote a book called The Way which outlines how all followers must behave. They are ordered to keep their membership as secret as possible: "Remain silent, and you will never regret it." They must always show "unreserved obedience to whoever is in charge" of the sect. Opus Dei has always been located on the hard-right of the Catholic Church, providing leading figures for a string of openly fascist governments including those of Franco and Pinochet.

The Dei today, like Mormonism, has no liberal tradition. Its religious philosophy is described by Robert Hutchison, an award-winning journalist who studied the movement, as "totally authoritarian". Religious people are often good and decent, but they are good and decent precisely because they have developed elaborate ways to disregard the teachings of their hallucinatory pre-modern religious texts. Romney and Kelly's religions have only literalism.

Is it really bigoted to question the bigotry inherent to these beliefs? They have already nearly shaped a major government Bill. When Kelly was recently responsible for the legislation that would ban discrimination against gay people, she fought hard for an exemption for Catholic adoption agencies that would have rendered the ban meaningless. (Imagine if racists could choose to opt out of the race discrimination legislation because helping black people was against their fetid consciences.) Only a cabinet rebellion defeated her.

Yet when secularists make these criticisms of faith poisoning the public sphere, we are compared to racists and sexists. How, the critics ask, is discriminating against a Mormon or an Opus Dei follower different to discriminating against a black person or a woman? There is a key difference: the religious choose their faith. Barack Obama cannot choose to stop being black. Hillary Clinton cannot choose to stop being a woman. But Mitt Romney could leave the Mormons and Ruth Kelly could leave Opus Dei tomorrow. If they choose to remain, we must be free to condemn their choice.

Many defenders of religion in high office will at this point wheel out the bloodied corpse of John Kennedy. Wasn't his 1960 Presidential campaign - when he defended being a Catholic against widespread suspicion - a triumph for tolerance? But Kennedy reassured American voters by saying that the wall between church and state is "absolute", and he would never breach it. He made the case against religion in the public sphere, not for it - precisely my argument. There are some forms of religion so vehement, so militant, they cannot accept this separation. It is not only acceptable but necessary to oppose the politicians gripped by these species of faith before they contaminate public policy.

I do not "respect" Romney's ideas, or Kelly's, or Hamza's. The social stigma around challenging religion - married to a condescending multiculturalism that treats religious minorities as excitable children who cannot cope with disagreement - is protecting notions that are intellectually weak and morally repellent. Peter Tatchell puts it best: "All human beings are worthy of respect, but not all ideas deserve respect." Right now we need less bogus respect for bad ideas, and more open argument - before we multiculturalise ourselves into swallowing even more religion.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

More from Johann Hari