Why Romney's "Religion Speech" Won't Work

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 6:57 AM on December 3, 2007.

This post, written by Steve Benen, originally appeared on The Carpetbagger Report

After months of speculation and unsolicited advice, Mitt Romney suggested a few weeks ago that he was inclined to give a major campaign speech outlining his religious beliefs and how his Mormon faith might affect his administration, but his campaign aides were against it, saying it would "draw too much attention" to Romney's religious tradition.

Asked if he'd ever deliver a special speech on the subject, Romney added, "Perhaps, at some point." Now that Romney is falling behind, it looks like that point has arrived.

John F. Kennedy spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on Sept. 12, 1960, and made a powerful case that his administration would be neutral on matters of faith, hoping to assuage fears that his Roman Catholicism would be a problem in the White House. This week, Romney will also travel to Texas for a similar reason.

Mr. Romney plans to give the address, to be called Faith in America, at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Tex., 80 miles from Houston, the site of Kennedy's speech. His campaign is calling it an opportunity for him to "share his views on religious liberty, the grand tradition religious tolerance has played in the progress of our nation and how the governor's own faith would inform his presidency if he were elected." [...]

Suspicions about Mr. Romney's Mormon beliefs, which many conservative Christians consider to be heretical, have dogged his candidacy since it began, with many polls showing that large numbers of Americans would not vote for a Mormon candidate. The announcement comes a week after Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor whose rise in the polls in Iowa has been fueled by evangelical Christians, began running a television advertisement that describes him as a "Christian leader," which some viewed as a jab at Mr. Romney.

A senior Romney campaign official said the address is "not going to be a lesson in Mormon doctrine" but rather "an open discussion of how important and critical faith has been and is in Romney's life" and "how faith is what shapes our values."

This idea is almost certainly going to fail.

Sure, it will satisfy the DC establishment, and probably most of the campaign media, which has insisted for months that this kind of speech is necessary.

But as for changing the political landscape and alleviating the concerns of voters who are hesitant to support a Mormon candidate, it's hard to imagine how Romney's speech is going to do any good at all.

There are two broad considerations here: the theological and the political.

Theologically speaking, there's nothing Romney can do to convince evangelicals that Mormons are mainstream Christians. Giving a high-profile speech like this, as Noam Scheiber noted, may very well exacerbate the problem.

My sense is that a lot of people in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina only have the vaguest notion, if any, that Romney may not be a standard-issue protestant Christian. Devoting a high-profile speech to the subject only draws attention to his differences at a time when he wants to be downplaying them. That's true even if he speaks about faith in the broadest, most general terms, with little mention of Mormonism per se. The press will fill in the gaps.

And, if he goes the alternate route and tries to educate the public about his religion, that may be even worse. As Amy Sullivan wrote in The Washington Monthly a few years back, Mormonism is one of the few contemporary religions that tends to make people more, not less, uneasy the more they hear about it.

Indeed, for those evangelical Republican voters who are moving to Mike Huckabee because of his religious-right-style worldview, Romney praising "religious liberty" will be utterly meaningless. They know Romney's religious, they know his faith has shaped his life, and they're probably well aware of the fact that Romney won't use his office to push Mormonism on the rest of the rest of us. But they don't care -- they just don't like Mormons. (And given Romney's own bigotry towards Muslims, it's not like he has any real moral authority on the subject anyway.)

Which leads us to Romney's political problem. He's apparently delivering this speech from a position of near-panic, with his once-huge lead in Iowa having disappeared altogether.

In response to these conditions, Romney wants to "share his views on...the grand tradition religious tolerance has played in the progress of our nation."

I'm not sure if Romney's been paying attention to Republican politics lately, but right-wing Iowa caucus voters, who are already pre-disposed not to like Mormons, don't much care for "religious tolerance." Indeed, many of them revel in their intolerance.

It's what makes the whole JFK analogy so silly to me. Romney is facing an entirely different kind of challenge. He can't deliver a similar Kennedy-like speech precisely because the same message is now Republican anathema. Nearly a half-century after JFK's speech in Houston, many of today's conservatives, particularly those in the GOP's religious right base, abhor the very idea of church-state separation, which was the basis for Kennedy's address. It's not unusual to hear figures like James Dobson and Pat Robertson reject the constitutional principle's very existence.

If Romney were to publicly argue that "the separation of church and state is absolute," as JFK did, he would be booed aggressively by conservative audiences that want more intermingling between religion and government, not less.

For that matter, the nature of the controversy is very different now than in 1960. Conservative Republicans uneasy about Romney's faith aren't worried that Salt Lake City will dictate policy through the White House; they're just not comfortable with a faith tradition with which they're unfamiliar (and in some cases, find heretical). In this sense, as a friend of mine recently argued, Romney is "boxed in."

Time will tell, but I'm skeptical this week's speech will make any difference at all - and it might make things worse.

Tagged as: religion, conservatives, election08, mormonism, romney, iowa, huckabeee

Steve Benen is a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report. In addition, he is the lead editor of Salon.com's Blog Report, and has been a contributor to Talking Points Memo, Washington Monthly, Crooks & Liars, The American Prospect, and the Guardian.