When Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, ran for president in the 2008 GOP primary, many evangelical Christian voters were reluctant — putting it mildly — to support him, because of his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
One of Romney’s opponents, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, exploited this hesitance by trying to instill fear about the differences between himself and Romney: “Don’t Mormons,” Huckabee trolled in a New York Times Magazine interview, “believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” (Though real theological differences exist, that was not one of them.) At the 2007 Values Voter Summit, Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, told the crowd they ought to back a candidate who speaks “the language of Zion as a mother tongue.