Goldblog says no:
Mormons themselves contend that “Christ is at the center of our worship, study, service and faith,” as a statement released by the church after Jeffress’s comment put it. But theological honesty demands that we recognize that Romney would be the first president to be so far outside the Christian denominational mainstream. There is much in Mormonism that stands in opposition to Christian doctrine, including the belief that the Book of Mormon completes the Christian Bible. Christianity had an established creed about 1,500 years before Joseph Smith appeared in upstate New York with a new truth, codified in the Book of Mormon, which he said was revealed to him by an angel named Moroni.
Then there's the small matter of the Trinity. An interesting question would be what other modern off-shoots of Christianity are there that are this different theologically and yet still recognizably Christian. Jehovah's Witnesses? Not much else comes to mind. I wrote my pay-walled column on this last week. Among the points:
The idea that Jesus dropped by Missouri after his Resurrection, or that until the 1970s, Africans and African-Americans were regarded as an inferior race by doctrine, or that Jesus' Second Coming will likely happen – again! – in Missouri as well: these seem to fade in salience only in front of living, breathing Mormons, whose transparent niceness, cheeriness, good values, strong families and work ethic make you forget all the loopiness. And aren't all religions a little odd, anyway? No one asks a Catholic politician if he believes that the Virgin Mary was literally whooshed up into the skies rather than die – and yet that is held to be an infallible doctrine. Is it stranger to believe in the Holy Trinity or that the three parts of God are actually separate gods? At times it seems as if the Church of Latter Day Saints suffers mainly because it is a new religion – Scientology plus a century or so.
I have zero concerns about a Mormon president. In fact, as a demonstration of this country's religious freedom, I take it as an added value to a Romney presidency, just as Obama's race is to his. But Romney's problem is that his party has ruled out any clear distinction between religion and politics, and insists on a public religiosity that all but begs that these theological issues be front and center. He cannot pull a Kennedy, as Huntsman did eloquently on Colbert last night, and hope to win. There's a reason Perry is still ramping up his campaign.
Previous Dish on this topic from Romney's last campaign here and here.
The Dish 