During the long Republican primary season, the highest-profile attack on Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith came in October during the Values Voters Summit in Washington, when the pastor who introduced Rick Perry to the assembly, Robert Jeffress of Dallas’s First Baptist Church, told reporters that “born-again followers of Christ should always prefer a competent Christian” for the presidency and dismissed Mormonism as a pseudo-Christian “cult.”
The polls suggested that Jeffress spoke for at least some Republican primary voters. The fallout from his comments, though, turned out to be a boon for Romney. Their bald sectarianism gave the front-runner a chance to cry “bigotry”; they prompted a chorus of denunciations from prominent conservatives; and they forced Perry’s campaign on the defensive when it was fumbling already. The way the controversy played out suggested that while Romney’s Latter Day Saint affiliation might be an electoral liability, any direct attempt to raise the issue was likely to backfire on his political opponents.
Hence the dilemma for the Obama White House. The president is entering a general election campaign in which his best chance of victory is to brand the Republican nominee as dangerously outside the mainstream, and in a sense Romney’s Mormon faith offers an ideal path to doing just that. It isn’t only evangelicals who regard the L.D.S. Church with a significant measure of distrust: In Gallup polling, 19 percent of Independents (and 27 percent of Democrats) state that they would prefer not to elect a Mormon to the White House. These numbers have been consistent for decades. The polling company notes that “Americans’ reluctance to support a Mormon for president has held close to the 20% level since Gallup first measured this in 1967, and long after historical biases against voting for blacks, Catholics, Jews and women have dwindled.” (Less than 10 percent of Americans express doubts about voting for a member of each of those groups.)
But it will be difficult for the White House to exploit these suspicions directly. If it seems like prominent Democrats are playing the religion card, then the Romney camp will have a chance to re-run the Jeffress controversy and paint its opponents as bigots. There’s also the awkward matter of President Obama’s own religious background: The White House probably would rather not do anything that might revive the 2008 debate over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
This explains why the White House was so quick to distance itself from Brian Schweitzer, the governor of Montana, when he raised the fact that Romney’s great-grandfather practiced polygamy. And it explains why the dog whistles that some conservatives have detected coming from the White House – an Obama spokesman contrasting Romney’s “faith” with the president’s “Christianity,” the repeated references to Romney’s “weirdness” from unnamed administration officials – have been pitched too faintly to be heard by most voters.
For Romney’s religion to become a significant issue in the general election, the White House probably needs the media to play the Mormon card for them. Not through overt attacks on Mormon theology and practice, which would be out of bounds for most mainstream outlets. Rather, the Obama campaign’s best-case scenario involves a wave of theoretically evenhanded coverage come August and September – newsmagazine cover stories on Mormon theology, 60 Minutes specials on L.D.S. history, pieces about Romney’s own family tree – that end up reminding undecided voters of the things that they find strange and alien about the Republican nominee’s faith.
The media would have good reason to pursue at least some coverage along these lines. If there’s ever a year when the Mormon story is worth telling, it’s a year when a Mormon is on the presidential ballot. And there’s no way to tell the Mormon story comprehensively without bringing up issues (polygamy, race, the Book of Mormon’s alternative pre-history of the Americas) that highlight the distance between the Latter Day Saints and other forms of American Christianity.
For Mitt Romney himself, this is the strongest case for not just playing defense on the faith question. The Obama White House may not make Mormonism an issue directly, but that doesn’t mean that the incumbent won’t benefit from the coverage that Romney’s religion will inevitably receive. And it’s possible that Romney would stand to gain if he spoke more directly and in more detail about a worldview that’s clearly at the heart of his identity, and that provides one of the most authentic and deeply-felt influences on his often inauthentic-seeming personality. In one form or another, there will be plenty of attempts to define Romney’s religion for him, and he might be better off doing his own defining first.
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