Mormon Romney to make leap of faith
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Mormon White House hopeful Mitt Romney will Thursday speak from the heart about his faith, hoping to temper suspicion among crucial Republican evangelical voters, in a speech rich with historic echoes.
Romney's address will highlight the quintessential role of religion in US politics and comes with the former Massachusetts governor's campaign under siege from surging Mike Huckabee -- an ordained Baptist minister.
Huckabee, softening his rejection of abortion and evolutionary theory with sunny wit, passed Romney in a weekend opinion poll in Iowa, which holds its leadoff nominating caucuses on January 3.
Huckabee's sudden rise, exploiting disaffection with the 2008 Republican field among Christian conservatives, has put Romney in a fix.
Romney poured millions of dollars into Iowa, knowing he must shine in its caucuses, then in the New Hampshire primary five days later, to challenge national front-runner Rudolph Giuliani.
He offered himself to conservatives as an alternative to the thrice-married former New York mayor, whose social record horrifies evangelicals.
But Iowa is a stronghold of conservative Christians who helped elect the last three Republican presidents, and mistrust of the Mormon Church runs deep.
"Romney has focused his campaign in the early states on people who believe there ought to be a greater connection between government and religion," said Professor Dennis Goldford, of Drake University, Iowa.
"The bind is, the people to whom he is taking this message are suspicious of his own religious background."
Romney's speech at the library of former president George Bush, will draw comparisons to John F. Kennedy's landmark address on his Roman Catholicism, also in Texas, during his triumphant 1960 presidential run.
Kennedy diluted contemporary fears of his faith by pledging not to threaten the separation of church and state, or take direction from the Pope.
Forty-seven years on, Romney must place his Mormonism, viewed as heretical by many Christians, into a wider American definition of faith.
Promising a Kennedy-like wall between politics and pulpit would likely fail, after a religious awakening dating from the 1970s and left evangelical Christianity intertwined with the Republican Party.
"Evangelicals chafe at this notion," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"They think it is the view of the (left-leaning) American Civil Liberties Union and other political liberals against whom they combat."
That Romney, an accomplished multi-millionaire businessman credited with saving the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from financial ruin needs to address his faith at all, may say more about the United States than him.
Mormonism was barely an issue, when his father George Romney ran unsuccessfully for president in 1968.
But a new Harris Online poll Tuesday found that 82 percent of adult Americans now believe in God and 79 percent believe in miracles.
Ironically, many evangelicals are drawn to politics in the belief that secularists want to drive religious faith out of public life.
So crucial is faith in politics, that some Democrats are gingerly beginning to open up about their spiritual lives.
Romney, who would be America's first Mormon president, gave a possible preview of his speech in an interview with Christianity Today in September.
"While the doctrines of my church are quite different from evangelical Christian doctrines, the values of our faiths are very much the same."
Suspicion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the official name for the Mormon church, runs high.
A Pew Research Center poll in August found 36 percent of white Republican evangelical Christians were less likely to vote for a Mormon.
Founded in 1830 by American pioneer Joseph Smith, the Mormon Church considers itself a Christian denomination, but bases doctrine on the Book of Mormon, a text purporting to contain a fuller version of the words of Jesus.
Smith said he received the content of the book on gold tablets in 1827.
