Round One.(The Talk of the Town)(Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney)

Out in Iowa, with the bell at last ringing and the combatants charging out of their corners, the Republican card has come down to the Maulin' Mormon versus the Battlin' Baptist. Would the Framers be pleased? Doesn't seem likely, somehow. The deists, freethinkers, and assorted Protestants (plus two Catholics) who drafted the Constitution sternly forbade theological sucker punches--"No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" was how they put it--but today's Republicans make their own rules. Marquess of Queensberry? Not for the new Grand Old Party. (Meanwhile, those groovy Democrats are reprising "The Mod Squad," with the white guy, the black guy, and the blonde scrambling to see who gets to make the collar.)

The tale of the tape suggests that Mike Huckabee has to be given the edge, religion-wise. He trained at Ouachita Baptist University and turned pro early, pastoring his own church at twenty-four. A mere nine years later, he was president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention--half a million strong, a fifth of the state's population at the time. He may not be a heavyweight these days (he shed a hundred and ten pounds as governor), but if he no longer has the belly he certainly has the fire.

The fire, yes--but, affable fellow that he is, minus the brimstone. Huckabee's sensational rise has been made possible by his success, so far, at speaking in tongues that evangelicals and non-evangelicals understand differently. "I always tell the story of a lady who asked me, was I a narrow-minded Baptist who thinks only Baptists go to Heaven?" he likes to say. "And I told her, 'No, ma'am, I'm more narrow than that. I don't think all the Baptists are going to make it, either.' " Does he mean "Let's not take this eternal damnation stuff so darn seriously"? Or is it "Everybody roasts in Hell except selected evangelicals"? And then there was his instantly famous sound bite at the November 28th YouTube debate, when he was asked where history's most revered victim of the death penalty would stand on that issue. "Jesus," Huckabee replied with a rueful smile, "was too smart to ever run for public office." This was a clever sally, allowing moderates to infer that he, Huckabee, realizes that capital punishment is morally dubious but (like his gubernatorial predecessor Bill Clinton) supports it for prudential political reasons, while assuring his co-religionists that he, Huckabee, is a humble sinner, albeit one on easy terms with the Lord--who will forgive His flock the minor sin of clamoring for the modern equivalent of crucifixion.

Lately, though, Huckabee has been getting his signals mixed, like a man putting letters to his wife and his mistress in the wrong envelopes. A few weeks ago at Liberty University (founder: the lateJ. Falwell), a student asked him what accounted for his rocketing poll numbers. "There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one," he said. "It's the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people--and that's the only way that our campaign could be doing what it's doing." To an evangelical ear, that might sound like simple wonderment. But to many other people it sounded like the ravings of someone who thinks God is his precinct captain.

In Mitt Romney's case, it's the religion itself that may have a glass jaw. When Mitt's father, George Romney, a liberal Republican governor of Michigan, ran for President, in 1968, his Mormonism was just another biographical detail. That was before the Party's firm embrace of "faith" as a mandatory political talking point. It's no longer clear that the dogmas of whatever sect a candidate happens to be affiliated with can be dismissed as irrelevant to the policies he or she might pursue in office.

And the dogmas of Mitt Romney's sect are breathtaking. They include these: that in 1827 a ...