“He’s going to have to give the speech,” says one well-known evangelical leader of Mitt Romney. “It’s going to be an issue until he deals with it.” “The speech” refers to an address, modeled on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 talk to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which Romney would discuss his Mormonism, as Kennedy dealt with what he called the “so-called religious issue” of his Catholicism. It’s a speech Romney has so far declined to give. But today, with the first votes of 2008 less than seven weeks away and a variety of polls showing that a significant number of Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, would hesitate to vote for a Mormon, a number of influential evangelicals believe Romney should make some sort of statement.
Romney and his staff have read Kennedy’s speech quite closely; they know what JFK did and did not say. He did not defend Catholicism or any particular Catholic doctrine, endeavoring instead to describe “not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me, but what kind of America I believe in.” He did defend his right to run for president, whatever his faith. And he did suggest that it was un-American for anyone to try to impose a religious test on his candidacy.
It was, by all accounts, a masterful speech, and it helped Kennedy win the White House. But does Romney, leading in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, and moving up in South Carolina, need to do something similar? During a campaign swing through northeastern Iowa recently, I discussed the question with Romney, along with the issue of what such a speech would actually include. With a demeanor that ranged from confident and optimistic to defensive and testy, he gave me a look at what might lie ahead.
His first point: He has no plans to do anything, at least not yet. “Maybe a speech would be helpful at some point in some setting, but at this stage I don’t see a particular requirement or need or value to that,” he told me. Pausing for a moment, he added, “But that could change.” I asked whether, as some rumors have it, the speech is already written and is just waiting for the right time. “No, no,” Romney said. “If it’s going to be written, it will be written by me.” (Romney aides say a recent report that his advisers are dictating his decision was inaccurate; Romney has consistently said the decision will be made by him.)
If he chooses to give the speech, perhaps the most difficult issue Romney will confront is how to address, or whether to address, the main concern of many evangelicals: the question of whether a Mormon may rightly be called a Christian. Mormon leaders have long said the answer is yes, pointing out that their name is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But the general public is divided. According to a recent Pew survey, a narrow majority of Americans — 52 percent — believes that Mormons are Christians, but 52 percent of weekly churchgoing evangelicals disagree.
That number includes some leaders who support Romney. “As a Christian I am completely opposed to the doctrines of Mormonism,” the Rev. Bob Jones III said recently in a statement endorsing Romney. “I’d be very concerned if he tried to make it appear in any of his statements that Mormonism is a Christian denomination of some sort. It isn’t. There’s a theological gulf that can’t be bridged.”
It was nearly an attack disguised as an endorsement. In our discussion, I mentioned to Romney a similar statement by Rep. Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican congressman from South Carolina, who recently recounted a meeting he had with Romney. Inglis told him, “You cannot equate Mormonism with Christianity; you cannot say, ‘I am a Christian just like you,’“ according to an account of the conversation by Bloomberg News. “If he does that,” said Inglis, “every Baptist preacher in the South is going to have to go to the pulpit on Sunday and explain the differences.” I wanted to know what Romney thought about that; Romney wasn’t eager to talk.
“Did Inglis say that to you?” I asked.
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