Was Jesus born in Bethlehem?
 
The outcome of next year’s US presidential election could turn on this question – or at least the identity of the Republican candidate.
The main thing current front-runner Mitt Romney has going for him is that he can string two words together. His major minus is Mormonism.
“He does not believe that Jesus Christ was born on Earth to save our souls... I challenge how a Christian could campaign for Mr. Romney”, complains pastor Robert Jeffress of Dallas, Texas, on the Ye Shall Be My Witnesses website.
Texas Governor Rick Perry, on the other hand, has impeccable credentials as a Bible-believing Christian – and has shown that he, too, can string two words together. Problem is, he’d been aiming for three. In a TV debate on November 10, Perry, outlining his campaign pledge to “cut bloated Washington government down”, listed the “three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: commerce, education, and the, uh... What’s the third one, there?... Let’s see... The third one... I can’t... Oops.”
He might have blown the Christian credentials, too, had he tried enumerating the Trinity. “God the Father, God the Son and... uh... the third one... Oops.”
Perry has plummeted in the polls as a result of the televised faux pas. Which, for the time being, leaves Newt Gingrich as Romney’s main Bible-believing rival.
Last time he pitched for the presidency, Newt came a cropper after his former wife, Jackie Battley, previously his high-school geometry teacher and 15 years his senior, revealed that she’d woken from cancer surgery to find him hovering at the bedside with divorce papers for her to sign so he could marry a member of his security unit, Marianne Ginther, 15 years his junior, whom he’d been screwing throughout her illness.
But after a few years of re-marriage, it was, ‘So long, Marianne’. Failing to learn from Jackie’s mistake, Marianne fell ill, with multiple sclerosis, and was in Ohio to break the news to her mother in person when Newt phoned to confess he had been sleeping for the past six years with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, 23 years his junior, and would like a divorce please.
In a comeback statement this year, Newt accepted he’d done wrong by Jackie and Marianne and explained the circumstances whereby these misfortunes had arisen: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
Hard work plus love of one’s country can be a terrible thing, right enough.
(The Newt-Callista marriage remains ongoing. Callista is reportedly in good health.)
“We are aware that Mr. Gingrich has baggage”, aforementioned pastor Robert Jeffress has conceded on Ye Shall Be My Witnesses. “But he has put himself in the hands of the Lord.”
Has he, though? Rev. Jeffress refers not once to the fact that Mr. Gingrich, upon marrying Ms. Bisek, became a Catholic – not a denomination that Christians of Rev. Jeffress’s persuasion have tended always to embrace. (Jimmy Breslin once remarked that, “The last Catholic seen alive in Dallas, Texas, was John F. Kennedy”.)
To unravel these tangled complexities, we must return to the story of Bethlehem.
Websites like Ye Shall Be My Witnesses have been regularly referring, apropos the candidacy of Mr. Romney, to the Book of Mormon, Alma 7:10: “And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.”
Not Bethlehem but Jerusalem, six long miles away.
The Book of Mormon mentions Jerusalem as the birthplace of Christ in 19 separate passages. Which, if you believe in the literal truth of the Bible, makes it a work of risible fiction. And puts Mormons outside Christianity – whether or not they fancy themselves as followers of Christ.
Thus does an appalling vista open before us: of the presidency of the US – “This country founded on the bedrock of Christian belief”: Rev. Jeffress – being contested in November 2012 between the Mormon Mitt Romney and the Muslim Barack Obama.
The Mormons-aren’t-Christians tendency overlaps hugely with the Obama-is-a Muslim brigade.
The moral criterion for anyone aspiring to the presidency becomes, then, not, ‘Are you a liar, a thief, a serial adulterer?’, but, ‘Do you believe in the story of Bethlehem?’
There now. And you thought Christmas had become completely commercialised.
 
Things could get ever scarier.
Promoting his new book Back To Work on the chat show circuit, Bill Clinton reckons there’s no reason an ex-president couldn’t go for another stint following a break after serving two terms. The evidence suggests his chances wouldn’t be sunk by Alex Cockburn’s story on Counterpunch.com of a fellow who, seeking a certificate of origin for a shipment of steel back in the ‘80s, landed up in Arkansas: “In short order a dinner was arranged with young Governor Bill at the Little Rock Hilton. Tim recalls that they were scarcely seated before Bill was greeting a pretty young waitress in friendly fashion, putting his hand up her dress while announcing genially to the assembled company, ‘This woman has the sweetest cunt in Little Rock.’”
But he believes Jesus was born in Bethlehem.