O’Hehir: In transforming himself from a moderate, pro-choice Republican into an avid pro-life conservative, Romney himself helped make an evangelical vetting of his faith inevitable
December 6, 2007 7:57 am Christian Right and Mormonism, Christian Right and GOPAndrew O’Hehir, This is not Romney’s Kennedy moment, Salon.com, December 6, 2007
When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney faces the cameras on Thursday at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he has promised to deliver a major speech “about the role of religion, faith, in America and in a free society,” he carries the legacy of Joseph Smith’s First Vision with him, whether he likes it or not. Romney is unlikely to tell the Protestants and Catholics in his audience that their creeds are an abomination, or that they are participants in a Great Apostasy that began shortly after Jesus ascended to heaven and continued, in all forms of Christianity, till Smith founded the Mormon church on a new set of scriptures in 1830. But he cannot quite evade those beliefs either, for they are fundamental tenets of his faith.
As the most prominent Mormon presidential candidate since his father, George, 40 years ago, or since Smith himself ran on a platform of “Theodemocracy” in 1844, Romney must negotiate between two opposing forces. The theology and tangled history of Mormonism is at odds with the quasi-theocratic nature of the contemporary Republican Party, which seems to have decreed that only Bible-believing Christians or their close allies may run for high office. Neither of these two forces is of Romney’s own making, but it was the candidate, and his decisions about how to run his campaign, who ensured that they would collide.
As Christopher Hitchens recently complained in Slate, political reporters have generally treated the details of Romney’s faith as a no-go zone. If the question were simply whether his beliefs (or anyone else’s) should qualify or disqualify him from public office, I would agree that there was nothing to discuss. Moreover, only Mitt Romney can know how much of Mormon doctrine he accepts without question and how much he takes with a grain of salt. Even in the most dogmatic of believers and the most dictatorial of denominations, faith is fundamentally a private process of negotiation.