Johann Hari

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 percent 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 1400 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. Too many of us have bought into this logic: only 27 percent of British people in a recent poll agreed that "one of the good things about a democracy is that we can criticise each other's faiths." (Muslims were slightly more inclined to agree, with 28 percent).

Amidst 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 then declared was sanctioned by an intangible supernatural being. Virtually everyone believes this - except about their own religion. Find me a Christian who believes Ron L. Hubbard genuinely had visions of Xenu, the intergalactic tyrant who terrified the universe ten million years ago according to Scientologists. Find me a Muslim who believes that the followers of Wicca really do have a spiritual connection to the trees and plants.

So how does this truth apply to Mitt Romney and Ruth Kelley? We should test their religious ideas - and how they drive their political behaviour - 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 - hence the "Latter Day" - 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 Romney defies some of the most cliched criticisms of Mormonism: when he competes in the Republican primaries against Rudi Guilliani, John McCain and Newt Gingrich, the Mormon will be the only one who has only had 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 pontifical successor - is Divine Truth. End of. 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 Jose-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. The cult stresses personal sin and painful penitence, like wearing a wire tied tight around your leg as you go about your daily life. 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. They vehemently oppose homosexuality, contraception, and life-saving scientific progress like stem cell research.

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 primarily when they have developed elaborate atheistic 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 the separation that Kennedy endorsed. It is not only acceptable but necessary to oppose the politicians gripped by these species of superstition before they can contaminate public policy.

I do not 'respect' Romney's beliefs, or Kelly's, or Hamza's. The current social stigma around challenging religion - married to a condescending multiculturalism that treats religious minorities as excitable children who cannot cope with disagreement - is protecting ideas 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 multiculturalize ourselves into swallowing even more religion.