I should let Swampland handle the political analysis of Mitt Romney’s religion speech, but I suppose my rant yesterday obligates me to follow up.
I should disclose that Romney was not speaking to me, as a nonreligious American: he made that pretty clear with “Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom.” (Joe Klein elaborates on this point at Swampland.) But I wonder how well, among his intended audience, he handled the bifurcated message of the speech: that whether a candidate believes in some religion is crucially important, yet which religion is not at all.
Thus Romney made a point of saying, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of mankind.” OK. But describing how his beliefs about Jesus differ from those of non-Mormons was not our business. He said that he believed in the teachings of his church, renounces none of them and if that loses him the election, so be it. But to ask him to detail what those beliefs actually are “would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution.” (Ironically, in the CNN coverage I watched, the network accompanied his speech with sidebar factoids about the Mormon church and its history–even in long sections where Romney repeated the phrase “my church” rather than say “Mormon” out loud.)
The implicit message, near as I can decipher it, is: It is very important that a President have religious beliefs. But it doesn’t matter so much what those specific beliefs are. Now, I’m sure this is actually a position plenty of voters would agree with. I’m not sure if those are the same voters whose votes he was trying to get, though. Where Mike Huckabee seems to have connected well in the GOP primary debates is in being comfortable talking specifically about how his religious beliefs have influenced his political policies–on immigration, for instance.
However well-calibrated his rhetoric, Romney as a speaker doesn’t deliver the same kind of passion nearly as well as Huckabee. That’s fine; not all candidates do. But those candidates generally don’t do things like, say, schedule a highly publicized speech about religion. Since Romney did, I have to wonder if he wouldn’t have done better–even among Christian GOP voters suspicious of his religion–if he had gone into greater detail about how the specifics of his beliefs do and don’t affect him as a politician. What points he might have lost among Mormon-leery voters–whose votes he probably wasn’t going to get anyway–he might have made up for in authenticity points.
But again, I’m not exactly the intended audience, so I’d especially love to hear thoughts from any of you who are.