Then again, if Mormons gather for a seminar on what Southern Baptists believe, the odds are good that one of the teachers will be a former Southern Baptist.

“There’s an important word that people forget when they start talking about Southern Baptists and Mormons and that word is ‘competition,’ ” said the Rev. Richard Land, one of the most outspoken leaders of America’s largest non-Catholic flock. He leads the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

“We are talking about the two most evangelistic churches in North America and most of the world,” he said. “There are lots of Mormons who used to be Baptists and lots of Baptists who used to be Mormons. … It’s natural to see some tensions now and then.”

Meanwhile, some Mormons and Baptists keep colliding in the public square every four years or so — just about the time White House wannabes butt heads in Republican debates.

The latest storm centered on remarks by the Rev. Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. A supporter of Rick Perry of Texas, Jeffress told the recent Values Voters Summit crowd that Mormon Mitt Romney is “not a real Christian” and later insisted on calling the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a “theological cult.”

Obviously, that language offends Mormons, said Land. Truth is, no one in today’s Southern Baptist leadership believes that modern Mormons should be described with the word “cult” as most Americans would understand this hot-button term, defined according to “psychological or sociological” factors.

“Clearly the Mormons are anything but that,” he said. “They’re the president of your Rotary Club and the leaders of your local bank. No one thinks they’re one of the dangerous, separatistic cults that you read about in headlines — people like Jim Jones or the Branch Davidians.”

However, most Baptists and members of many other Christian churches have grown up hearing Mormonism described in “theological or doctrinal” terms. A Southern Baptist website on new religious movements states: “A cult … is a group of people polarized around someone’s interpretation of the Bible and is characterized by major deviations from orthodox Christianity relative to the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, particularly the fact that God became man in Jesus Christ.”

In recent years, Land has numbered himself among those who describe Mormonism as a kind of fourth Abrahamic tradition, a new faith that has reinterpreted the past under the guidance of its own prophet and its own scriptures. In this case, he said, “Joseph Smith is like Mohammad and The Book of Mormon is like the Koran.” Mormons believe they have restored true Christianity, while Trinitarian churches reject this claim that they have lost the faith.

Thus, it’s not surprising that a new LifeWay Research survey of 1,000 liberal and conservative Protestant clergy in America found that 75 percent disagreed with this statement: “I personally consider Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) to be Christians.” The surprise was that 48 percent of mainline Protestant pastors strongly agreed that Mormons are not Christians.

Meanwhile, the Vatican in 2001 posted its stance on this issue: “Whether the baptism conferred by the community The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called Mormons in the vernacular, is valid.”

The response from the late Pope John Paul II was blunt: “Negative.” His verdict validated that of scholar Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI.

Of course, the reason these issues are being debated in the first place is that Romney — a prominent Mormon leader — is a Republican frontrunner in an era in which conservative Catholic and Protestant voters play a prominent role in Iowa, South Carolina and numerous other primary contests. Mormons voters and donors are crucial, as well.

Land, who urged Romney to seek the presidency in 2008, is convinced most conservative believers will have no trouble backing the former Massachusetts governor, when push comes to shove.

“Most people know that they’re voting for a president, not a Bible-study leader,” he said. “Actually, the problem Romney is having in the primaries is not that he’s a Mormon, but that many GOP voters are not sure that he’s Mormon enough.”

But this life, on this world, is just the beginning. Consider this glimpse into eternity, drawn from a funeral eulogy for President Spencer W. Kimball in 1985.

“In the Colorado Rockies, I asked President Kimball a searching question,” recalled Barbara B. Smith, the 10th general president of the church’s Relief Society. “‘When you create a world of your own, what will you have in it?’ He looked around at those mountains for a few minutes before he answered and then he said, ‘I’ll have everything just like this world because I love this world and everything in it.’ “

After all, added Smith: “What is our greatest potential? Is it not to achieve godhood ourselves?”

This is the question that will not die when Mormons face the leaders of traditional Christian groups to discuss that blunt question: “Are Mormons Christians?”

A fussy feud over doctrinal details? Ask Mitt Romney about that.

This concept of devout Mormons achieving godhood and creating worlds “is not an idea that would be foreign to Mormons today, but it is also not a concept we hear a lot about,” said religion professor Robert Millet of Brigham Young University, a veteran of many interfaith dialogues.

Still, it’s clear that this belief — called “exaltation” — is something that remains “conceivable to Mormons, while it is absolutely inconceivable to traditional Christians.” But for modern Mormons, he stressed, there is little or no difference between talking about “exaltation” and talking about salvation and “eternal life.”

When it comes to the very nature of God, Mormons have radically different beliefs than traditional Christians. For starters, Mormons reject Trinitarian Christianity and believe that the Father God of this world is a former man who, like Jesus, has a physical, perfected body. This Heavenly Father is married to a Heavenly Mother, creating a celestial family that is the cornerstone of Mormon teachings about family and eternity.

Most debates about these topic begin with a 1844 sermon by Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, in which he stated: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. That is the great secret. ? I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity, I will refute that idea.”

Note that if Mormons can achieve godhood and create new worlds, this implies there are other gods ruling their own worlds. For the many critics of Mormonism, this mystery can be captured in one word — “polytheism.”

“I think ‘polytheism’ is used … to describe the multiple gods of, say, the Greeks and the Romans,” Boyd K. Packer, now acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, told me in a 1986 interview. “We are talking about something entirely different, and that word conjures up ideas that are not accurate.

“I suppose that technically, it means ‘many gods.’ Technically, the word is all right. … It carries a lot of baggage.”

These issues loomed overhead as Romney delivered his recent “Faith in America” address. Thus, he risked this profession: “What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church’s beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history.”

Romney was in a tough spot, said Millet, who attended the speech. It was a classic “danged if you do and danged if you don’t” situation as the candidate affirmed his heritage while reaching out to the conservative Protestants and Catholics who are so crucial in Republican races today.

It’s crucial to understand, said Millet, that Mormons are determined to retain their unique beliefs, while striving to clarify the differences between the actual “doctrines of the church and what you might call a kind of Mormon folklore.”

The results will pacify few hostile outsiders. But the trend is clear.

“Throughout the church,” he said, “our faith is much more Christocentric — more centered on the redemptive work of Jesus Christ — than the Mormonism that I knew as a boy in the 1950s. That has affected everything that we say and do.”

We’re not talking about Mitt Romney’s recent trip to Virginia Beach to deliver the commencement address at Regent University. For political insiders, the only controversy in that speech was when he said, “I want to offer my sincere thanks to Dr. Pat Robertson for extending me the honor of addressing you today.”

No, the daring campaign address that politicos are still discussing was the one John F. Kennedy delivered in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the speech in which he erected a high wall of separation between his public political life and his private Catholic faith.

“I believe in an America,” said Kennedy, “that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

“For, while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew — or a Quaker — or a Unitarian — or a Baptist.”

Or a Mormon? That’s the question facing legions of evangelicals as they gird their loins for battle in the Bible Belt political primaries. They are waiting to see if Romney will publicly address their concerns about his deep Mormon faith.

That didn’t happen at Regent, where the candidate stuck to marriage, parenting, public service and positive thinking. There was one clear religious reference, when he referred to the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech.

“We’re shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting,” said Romney. “I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve’s oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world.”

Regent was a signpost in Romney’s quest to calm evangelical fears, in part because the campus contains the headquarters of Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network — which addresses Mormonism in its “How Do I Recognize a Cult?” website page. It states, for example, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a “prosperous, growing organization that has produced many people of exemplary character. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the Mormons are far from the truth.”

That passage is mild compared to the incendiary language common among many Christian conservatives. Bill Keller of LivePrayer.com, for example, bluntly states that the teachings of the “Mormon cult are doctrinally and theologically in complete opposition to the Absolute Truth of God’s Word. There is no common ground. If Mormonism is true, then the Christian faith is a complete lie.”

Mormons do believe that the Old and New Testaments — as read by traditional Christians — are packed with errors and that Mormonism is the one true faith. Mormons believe that their president is a living prophet and that faithful mortals, in the next life, can achieve godhood. Thus, Mormons reject or redefine the Trinity, teaching that this world’s Father God has both a literal body and a literal wife.

These are not the issues that obsess typical voters, but they are important to many Christian leaders who wield great influence in the public square. The Vatican, for example, refuses to recognize the validity of Mormon baptisms.

“There are valid questions that Romney will have to answer,” said veteran religion writer Richard Ostling, co-author of “Mormon America: The Power and the Promise.”

“People need to know, ‘Is this man going to take orders from Salt Lake City? Are there elements of Mormon theology that will affect public policy?’ … But before he gets to those questions, Romney may have to say, ‘We have different doctrines. We have different scriptures. … We even have different concepts of God.’ He has to know that he can’t just say, ‘We all have the same faith.’ That is not going to work.”

The word in question is not “Christian.” It’s “cult.”

“I daresay that the Mormon church is less cult-like than many of the religions that delight in calling us one,” argued Card. “Indeed, calling Mormonism a cult is usually an attempt to get people to behave like robots, blindly obeying the command that they reject Mormonism without any independent thought. Kettles, as they say, calling the pot black.”

Debates about Mormonism and public life always heat up when Utah is in the spotlight and the XIX Winter Olympics certainly qualify as that. Journalists have focused on the church’s vow not to proselytize visitors and, of course, whether Mormon morality could stick a cork in the hot party scene that surrounds the games. News is news.

While avoiding deadly overkill, LDS leaders cranked up public-relations efforts to portray their faith as part of mainline Christianity. This strategy is sure to catch the attention of other faiths that send missionaries to the games, such as the 1,000 Southern Baptist volunteers in Utah for Global Outreach 2002.

Tensions are inevitable. Thus, Card launched a preemptive strike in a Beliefnet.com column entitled “Hey, Who Are You Calling a Cult?” It’s ludicrous, he said, to smear Mormons with the same word that defined the Jim Jones flock in Guyana and the “sneaker-wearing folks who killed themselves to join aliens … behind a comet.”

It’s true, he said, that Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was a charismatic leader with fiercely loyal followers. But this is true of almost all new religious movements. Card defied anyone to argue that modern Mormons are “automatons” who yank converts out of their homes and brainwash them.

“If Mormonism were a cult, I would know it, and I would not be in it,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Southern Baptist Convention’s web site on “Cults, Sects and New Religious Movements” includes page after page of materials dissecting LDS beliefs and practices. It uses this definition: “A cult … is a group of people polarized around someone’s interpretation of the Bible and is characterized by major deviations from orthodox Christianity relative to the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, particularly the fact that God became man in Jesus Christ.”

Hardly anyone still calls the Latter-day Saints a “cult” in terms of a “psychological or sociological definition” of that term, stressed the Rev. Tal Davis, of the SBC’s North American Mission Board. But traditional Christians must insist that they can use a “theological definition” of the word “cult.”

“This may not be the best word and we admit that,” said Davis. “We’re using it in a technical way, trying to make it clear that we’re describing a faith that is — according to its own teachings — far outside the borders of traditional Christianity. …

“We’re not trying to be mean-spirited. We want to be very precise. We take doctrine very seriously and we know that the Mormons do, too.”

The doctrinal conflicts are many and sincere, stressed scholar Jan Shipps, a United Methodist who is author of “Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons.” Traditional Christians and the Latter-day Saints are not just arguing about issues of interpretation. These disputes are about pivotal additions to the earlier stream of faith.

The clashes start at the very beginning, with the nature of God. Christians worship one God, yet known as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Saints have a radically different approach, said Shipps, believing God and Jesus to be separate beings — each with a literal body and parts. They say Jesus was sired by God, with a divine Mother in Heaven.

“The Trinity, the Trinity, the Trinity, there is no way around the Trinity,” said Shipps. “But you know, it would also help if Christians — if they are going to use the word ‘cult’ — would admit that Christianity changed the very nature of the Jewish God. Christianity then grew up to become a new religious tradition.

“Mormonism is a new religious tradition that has grown out of Christianity. It is an entity unto itself. It is what it is.”