It is becoming always more interesting the debate about Mormons and politics. In the next presidential elections there will be two Mormons trying to become the President of the United States, John Huntsman and Mitt Romney.

But as someone said,

one of these two guys could be our next president….the other one is John Huntsman (Colbert report).

Many Americans still do not know what Mormons believe and therefore are a little bit suspicious, but this presidential campaign is helping people to know Mormonism better, or at least it helps to put Mormon beliefs in perspective, even when this is done with a good amount of irony.

For example, again in the  Colbert Report, the “weird” beliefs of Mormonism were compared to the similarly “weird” beliefs of Christianity and Judaism.

Mormons believe that Joseph Smith received golden plates from an Angel on a hill, when everybody knows that Moses got stones tablets stones from a burning bush on a mountain

Many may have never noticed how strange is Moses’ story while at the same time they attack Joseph Smith.

In another case, in an article titled ” The ultimate organization Men”, the author James Carrol does an interesting job of explaining the “organizational” propensity of the Mormon Church (and many of its members) as a consequence of Mormon theology. He writes,

For the Mormon God is not like other gods. God did not create the world out of nothing, as in other monotheistic traditions; according to the revelation given to Joseph Smith, God “organized it out of chaos.’’ Drawing order out of preexisting “elements. . . [that] may be organized and reorganized, but not destroyed,’’ God was working with what was already there.

But what most impressed me in this article is when the author humbly recognizes the need of correcting himself from something he had written previously.

The distinction between God as creator and God as organizer matters because the perennial religious call to imitate God made organizing a defining act of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (Note to readers: In my last column, I omitted “Jesus Christ’’ from the formal name of the Mormon religion – a not insignificant mistake.)

Not everybody who writes about Mormon obviously is so ready to correct their own mistakes, but this campaign will help to make Mormon beliefs better known among the public, someway forcing the media to be more careful when they talk about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of the wrong information that was so commonly disseminated in the past will have to be more carefully reviewed before publication.

Even this article (with a video) on CNN.com is probably a consequence of the political campaign and is fair enough.

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/24/explain-it-to-me-mormonism/?iref=obinsite