After years of avoiding direct mention of his religion, Mitt Romney
will open up about his Mormon faith as he accepts the Republican nomination for
president.
The former Massachusetts
governor is the first Mormon presidential candidate on a major party ticket.
It's unclear just how much detail he will provide on Thursday night, the
pinnacle of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. He has spoken
broadly in the past about the importance of prayer and belief in God, but has
not discussed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"I think this is a speech
where he's going to talk a lot about what's informed his values, what's
informed his outlook. Of course his faith is an important part of that,"
Romney aide Kevin Madden said in Tampa this week. "It's an important part
of who he is as a husband and a father. And so I think you can expect some of
that."
Starting in the 1980s, Romney
was a bishop in the Boston suburb of Belmont, a job akin to the pastor of a
congregation. He then served as a stake president, the top Mormon authority in
his region, which meant he presided over several congregations in a district
similar to a diocese.
He counseled Latter-day Saints
on their most personal concerns, regarding marriage, parenting, finances and
faith. He worked with immigrant converts from Haiti, Cambodia and other
countries.
Grant Bennett, an assistant to
Romney at the Belmont congregation, has in the past described how Romney built
relationships with other religious groups around his Belmont, Mass., hometown,
after a suspicious fire in 1984 destroyed a new Mormon meeting house there.
Bennett told delegates
Thursday that Romney had "a listening ear and a helping hand." He
said Romney devoted as many as 20 hours a week at his own expense.
Ted and Pat Oparowski, also
fellow Mormons, recalled how Romney helped their dying son write his will. And
Pam Finlayson, who belonged to Romney's congregation, remembered him stroking
the back of her prematurely born daughter during a hospital visit and bringing
over Thanksgiving dinner.
Only Bennett used the full
name of the church when speaking about Romney's years of service.
Other convention speakers had
already laid a foundation for this new faith emphasis. In his acceptance speech
Wednesday night, vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, a Roman Catholic, said
"our different faiths come together in the same moral creed."
Ann Romney, in a speech meant
to show a more personal side of her husband, described the early challenges
they faced as a couple, including religious differences. "I was
Episcopalian. He was a Mormon," she said. The reference was striking given
that the Romneys almost never use the word Mormon on the campaign trail.
Republican evangelicals have
been playing down conflict with Latter-day Saints. Most prominently, former
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, speaking from the podium Wednesday night, said,
"I care far less as to where Mitt Romney takes his family to church, than
I do about where he takes this country."
Huckabee, a Southern Baptist
pastor before he entered politics, had publicly questioned Mormon beliefs when
he was competing against Romney in the 2008 presidential primary. Most
Christians don't consider Latter-day Saints part of traditional Christianity,
although Mormons do.
Romney has struggled to navigate
as a member of a religious minority seeking the nation's highest office.
Since Mormons generally live
in concentrated communities in the Mountain West and California, few Americans
have met a Latter-day Saint. Most Mormons said they were stunned by the open
expression of prejudice against their church during Romney's first bid for the
White House.
In his 2008 campaign, Romney
openly courted evangelicals, who make up about a quarter of the electorate and
are a critical part of the Republican base. He stressed the beliefs he shared
with Christian conservatives about Christ and the Bible, and he promised he
would not be influenced on policy by the leaders of the LDS church. This year,
he has done little public outreach with Protestant conservatives and, until
now, has largely separated his Mormonism from his campaign.
"He's trying to find the
right register, and those around him who advise him are trying to find the
right register. Now, it seems, the push is to make him look human, that means
emphasizing the admittedly wonderful things he has done in the church to help
people," said Laurie Maffly-Kipp, a religion scholar at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who writes frequently about the LDS church.
"The trick is to do that without bringing up the parts of Mormonism that
might sound odd to others."
A Gallup poll in June found
that voter bias against Mormons has barely budged for decades. In the survey,
18 percent of Americans said they would not vote for a well-qualified
presidential candidate who happens to be a Mormon, compared to 17 percent who
said so in 1967, when Romney's father George had been seeking the Republican
nomination.
However, the campaign clearly
felt more confident discussing the LDS Church since Romney sealed the
nomination.
Polls indicate that Republican
voters are willing to set aside their concerns about the LDS church to oust
President Barack Obama. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that a
majority of people who know that Romney is Mormon are comfortable with his
religion or don't consider it a concern. In the days leading up to the
convention, Romney told interviewers he prays daily and discussed the doubts he
experienced about his religion when he, like most young Mormon men, fulfilled
his church duty to serve as a missionary. Romney served in overwhelmingly
Catholic France during the 1960s, and faced hostility as an American and a
Mormon.
"I don't think underlying
attitudes have changed," said John Green, director of the University of
Akron's Bliss Institute for Applied Politics. "I don't think evangelicals
are any less skeptical about Mormons, but an election is a choice and
Republicans have something to work with here because of the unpopularity of
Obama among this group of evangelicals."
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