Now we begin to understand why Romney struggled so much with that question in the YouTube debate about Biblical literalism. The question itself may have been a code attack on Mormonism itself. This LDS official statement is pretty clear:
"Latter-day Saints revere the Bible. They study it and believe it to be the word of God. However, they do not believe the Bible, as it is currently available, is without error... As the Bible was compiled, organized, translated and transcribed, many errors entered the text."
I have a feeling a lot of evangelicals may be getting those sentences by email in the next few weeks. Now, of course, the imperfection of the Bible seems self-evident to me. It contradicts itself many times. But it sure doesn't look that way to fundamentalists and many evangelicals. And the question is broad enough to make it into legitimate mainstream discourse. So the evangelicals don't have to "go there" in attacking Romney's Mormonism directly, or raising some of its more eccentric doctrines; they can simply challenge Romney on Biblical literalism and tell their followers why a Mormon can't answer the question as well as Huckabee can. And it becomes very hard to tell them to knock it off: all they're doing is defending their own approach to Scripture.