Romney to Address His Mormonism
By Michael Luo
Mitt Romney will deliver a speech entitled “Faith in America,” addressing his Mormon religion, on Thursday at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Tex.
His campaign is describing the address as an opportunity for Mr. Romney 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.”
Mr. Romney personally made the decision to give the speech last week, feeling it was the right moment to do so, his advisers said. After he decided he would make it, the campaign consulted with former President Bush’s library, which invited him to deliver it there.
Suspicions about his Mormon beliefs, which many conservative Christians consider to be heretical, have dogged Mr. Romney’s candidacy since it began, with many polls showing large numbers of Americans would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate.
Mr. Romney had resisted delivering a speech dedicated to his faith up to this point, choosing instead to address questions about his beliefs when they came up from audience members and reporters.
But many, including evangelical supporters, have long urged him to address the questions head on and deliver an address modeled after the one John F. Kennedy delivered about his Catholicism to a gathering of Southern Baptist ministers in Houston in 1960 that many credit with defusing questions about his faith.
If Mr. Romney’s responses to questions about his faith on the stump are taken as a guide, it is unlikely that he will dwell much, if at all, on the specifics of what he believes but instead talk about the fact the Constitution bars any religious test for higher office.
The timing of his decision cannot be ignored. It comes only a week after Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist pastor who a new Des Moines Register poll shows has now passed Mr. Romney for the lead among likely caucus-goers in Iowa, began airing a television ad that highlighted his identity as a “Christian leader.” Mr. Huckabee’s rise in the polls has been fueled by evangelical Christians.
For those who were looking for clues about Mr. Romney’s intentions, he actually alluded to one in an informal get-together with reporters on Saturday. He said he had been recently re-reading a book by Jon Meacham about the faith of America’s founding fathers entitled, “American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.” |
