The Republican candidate tries to bolster his standing with the religious right
By E.G. | AUSTIN
THOSE who complain that Mitt Romney's privilege has left him insensitive to the workaday problems of the common man fail to consider that the man has apparently struggled for his whole life with the curse of awful timing. There he was Saturday, just days after Barack Obama was garlanded with praise for his surprise endorsement of gay marriage, giving a commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That must have been about the last place a candidate would want to turn up if he was hoping to gently waffle about his views on social issues, as Mr Romney has been wont to do.
The speech was an effort by Mr Romney, a Mormon, to bolster relations with non-Mormon Christians (or, to be precise, that subset of Christians who represent the "religious right"—as Timothy Noah aptly pointed out in March, the category of "Christian" encompasses nearly 80% of Americans). Polls show that a considerable number of people profess to be leery of voting for a Mormon; the wariness is especially pronounced among self-identified evangelical Christians, a demographic that has heavily favoured Republicans in recent elections.
This is actually the second major address Mr Romney has given on the subject of his religion. In 2007, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, he offered a speech that explicitly referenced John F. Kennedy's 1960 address on his Catholicism. In that speech, Mr Romney, like JFK before him, sought to reassure voters who were worried about electing a president whose religion includes a strong, centralised, earthly authority: "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions."
The fact that Mr Romney became the nominee this year might be taken as evidence that concern about his religion has faded. This time around, Mr Romney focused on voters who were suspicious of Mormonism's beliefs rather than its governing structure. "People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology," he said. "Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview."
Evangelical leaders applauded the speech. More generally, as Brad Knickerbocker notes at the Christian Science Monitor, Mr Romney's overall outreach effort has been "apparently successful". Sceptical though they may be of a Mormon, there are bigger bogeymen. I think back to Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, chuckling at an appearance at the National Press Club in DC last autumn, explaining that nothing unites evangelicals like Barack Obama. If values voters were going to undo Mr Romney, they were going to do it in the primary.
So Saturday's speech was of questionable necessity, and it could come back to haunt Mr Romney. First, as Ross Douthat noted in the New York Times, this year's social battles—over contraception, over gay marriage—have resulted in a lot of good press for the president, and are probably less salient to moderate voters than the half-hearted recovery. This speech means another round of cultural commentary, rather than a shift to the economy or entitlement reform or any of the issues where Mr Romney might feel more comfortable.
Secondly, this speech, with its vaguely teleological cast—"from the beginning, this nation trusted in God, not man"—sounds like something Rick Santorum would have said. (In fact, Mr Romney gave a polite but passing reference to Mr Santorum in the speech.) Possible etch-a-sketchery aside, the argument in question is a problematic one. That is, Mr Romney, like Mr Santorum before him, is suddenly conflating the "Judeo-Christian tradition" with American culture writ large, which is dubious from a historical perspective as well as, perhaps, a constitutional one. Here's Mr Romney:
Harvard historian David Landes devoted his lifelong study to understanding why some civilizations rise, and why others falter. His conclusion: Culture makes all the difference. Not natural resources, not geography, but what people believe and value. Central to America's rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition, with its vision of the goodness and possibilities of every life.
It's not particularly contentious to say that culture matters. And Mr Romney does go on to cite aspects of American culture that most of us would agree with: "personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and, at the foundation, the pre-eminence of the family." Those are laudable values, that is, and American ones, but they're not the intellectual property of Jews and Christians. Nor should a religious voter wish it otherwise, really. As Mr Romney says, the "Christian conscience" can be a force for good, but as he said in 2007, "we separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason." After years of struggling with the politics of being a Mormon, Mr Romney has apparently allayed concerns among conservative Christians. But he may have found a new way to aggravate moderates.
