In fact, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is well up MAGA’s priority list for hate.
The ex-Marine who shot up and torched a Michigan Mormon Church after crashing his MAGA-adorned pickup truck into it harbored an intense hatred for the Mormon faith, and was – by all visible evidence – a passionate Trump supporter. He referred to Mormons as “the Anti-Christ.”
The shooter was, even in the eyes of Baptist News Global, apparently a MAGA. The Detroit Free Press notes that the shooter signed an anti-choice petition supported by Right to Life of Michigan.
In Biloxi, Mississippi, Stefan Day Rowold was convicted of twice setting fire to an LDS church. According to the SunHerald, Rowold “hated the LDS church and spray-painted slurs such as “Child Molesters,” “Cowards,” and “False Prophets” on the walls. He also said he received an “epiphany from God” long after his own conviction for child molestation, which made him a registered sex offender.”
To many evangelicals, these slurs have a very familiar ring. Evangelicals, most of whom are synonyms for MAGA, have made a cottage industry of bashing the Mormon faith for decades, and most Mormons are keenly well aware of it. The “anti-Christ” characterization is completely in line with this abundant anti-Mormon literature.
In 2011, MAGA pastor Robert Jeffress proclaimed at the assemblage of sex-obsessed perverts known as the Values Voters Summit, “Rick Perry’s a Christian. He’s an evangelical Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ…Mitt Romney’s a good moral person, but he’s not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.” He told his Dallas congregation that he intends to continue speaking out against “false religions.”
Romney’s religious faith made many MAGA voters uneasy. Some MAGA voters went even further, in this excerpt from The Iowa Republican: ““There is a national pastor who is very much on the anti-Mitt Romney bandwagon,” Craig Bergman said. “A lot of the evangelicals believe God would give us four more years of Obama just for the opportunity to expose the cult of Mormon…There’s a thousand pastors ready to do that.” Judd Saul agrees that Mitt Romney faces problems with evangelicals. “They won’t vote for a Mormon,” he said.”
The full-fascist Reformation Party lumped Mormons in with “heretics and infidels,” warning that allying with Mormons would incur the wrath of God: “For example, a significant portion of the Constitution Party is Mormon.) If so, they are contributing to religious apostasy and calling down the wrath of God upon us, and contradicting the Biblical doctrines outlined in the original Westminster Standards and Three Forms of Unity, whether in ignorance or willfully.” This also appeared at Puritans.net.
Anti-LDS hate runs deep and long in American culture, and a sizeable chunk of it is stoked by anti-Mormon rhetoric in right-wing “Christianity.”