Romney and religion

The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Mitt Romney is finally going to deliver the Mormon speech this week. Why is he doing it? Here's why:

Romney's aides insist there is no connection between the timing of the speech, scheduled to be delivered this Thursday at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, and the situation in Iowa, where a large percentage of Republican voterss are evangelical Christians who are strongly attracted by Huckabee's explicitly Christian campaign.

However, outside observers are skeptical of their denials. "There's only one reason for it -- Huckabee," an expert of religion in public life told the Boston Globe.

As long as Romney was the only place for social conservatives to go for someone who appealed to them and could beat Hillary, Romney could delay the speech.

Here's David Frum's take on Romney's challenge, comparing it to JFK's Catholicism in 1960:

Nobody expected Kennedy to defend the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, or the idea of intercession by saints, or the use of images in Catholic places of worship. He spoke in Houston as a politician, explaining his understanding of the boundaries between religion and politics.

Romney faces a very different problem - and a very different set of questions. Nobody doubts that Mormons as a community and as individuals honor and respect the rules of the American constitutional system. But precisely because nobody does doubt it, Romney will get nowhere by explaining that Mormons do.

Romney rather faces much more purely religious questions - and any attempt to respond to them must draw him into a purely religious answer that will almost certainly do him more harm than good. Is Mormonism a Christian faith? Is it a plausible system of belief? What does it say about you that you accept as true something that most Americans regard as blatantly false?

These are the questions that lurk about the Romney candidacy. In my opinion, they are not appropriate questions to ask - and so they are not questions it is possible to answer. But if Romney does answer them, he is going to have to answer them all the way. Evasive tactics will buy him nothing.

Frum goes on to offer the unsolicited advice that Romney downplay his Mormonism and affirm his belief in the American civil religion. This is probably what he will do. I can't image Romney going into theological details. That's basically what he did do on Face the Nation a month and a half ago.

I don't think it's a losing proposition like Frum does, fearing that it opens a can of worms rather than closing the lid on it. It alerts people to the fact that Romney's a Mormon, which they are probably not aware of yet. It gets it out there and hopefully for Mitt over with before the voting in the South starts. As with Kennedy in West Virginia in 1960, the news that he's a Mormon might come at a shock right before election time. Romney can't use his big bank account to bribe the local sheriffs to put him on their ballot slates like Kennedy did to put the issue behind him (it was this, and not the speech, that solved his Catholicism problem).