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ABC News’ Katti Gray reports:

Aiming to keep the economy at center stage in the race for 2012's Republican presidential nominee, several GOP contenders today downplayed a leading evangelical Christian’s dismissal of Mormonism as a cult and GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, a practicing Mormon, as a non-Christian.

“To make this a big issue is just ridiculous right now because every day I’m out on the street talking to people, this is not what people are talking about,” Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., said today on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

As Bachmann declined to answer whether she considers former Massachusetts Gov. Romney a Christian, White House hopefuls Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich also tried to drive the debate away from religion. “None of us should sit in judgment on someone else’s religion,” former House Speaker Gingrich said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Rev. Robert Jeffress comments, Gingrich added, had “no place” in the campaign.

The other Mormon in the race, Jon Huntsman, told a a New London, N.H., town hall crowd today that it is “the most ridiculous sideshow in recent politics.”

 ”Discussion of Mormonism doesn’t create additional jobs … doesn’t expand our economic base,” Huntsman said, according to CBS News. “It doesn’t secure our position in the world. I have no idea why people are wasting so much political-capital bandwidth on this issue. It’s nonsense. … There are a lot of folks who believe different things, and that’s the tradition that we respect in this country.”

Said Cain: “I believe that they believe they are Christians.”

Cain, running in second place behind Romney, according to national polls, also said he was “not running for theologian in chief” during separate appearances on CNN and CBS.

Jeffress, pastor of Dallas’ First Baptist Church, lambasted Mormonism and Romney to reporters Friday after introducing Texas Gov. Rick Perry to an audience of the Value Voters Summit in Washington. Romney, Jeffress said, ”is a good moral man, but those of us who are born-again followers of Christ should prefer a competent Christian.”

Perry, who has been falling farther behind in the polls, said his own views diverged from Jeffress’. “I don’t think the Mormon Church is a cult,” Perry told the Des Moines Register over the weekend, adding that he welcomed political endorsements, even if he disagreed with some of the endorsers’ public statements.

As for Romney himself, he also chose to ignore Jeffress, instead criticizing the speaker who followed him at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., Saturday, Bryan Fischer of the conservative American Family Association, who has criticized Mormonism.

“We should remember that decency and civility are values too,” Romney said. “One of the speakers who will follow me today, has crossed that line. Poisonous language does not advance our cause. It has never softened a single heart nor changed a single mind.”