This is not Romney's Kennedy moment

Mitt Romney is caught between Mormonism and a hard place -- the fundamentalist Christian base of the modern GOP. And it's partly his own fault.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Republican Party, Andrew O'Hehir, Politics, John F. Kennedy, Mormons, Opinion, 2008 election, Mitt Romney

Reuters/Yuri Gripas

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney prays at the Republican National Hispanic Assembly Conventions prayer breakfast in Washington July 22, 2007.

Dec. 6, 2007 | When Joseph Smith Jr., who would become the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was a 14-year-old boy in 1820, he went into the woods near his home in Palmyra, N.Y., to pray for spiritual guidance. All over the rural United States people were being swept up in a religious upheaval that historians would later call the Second Great Awakening. Western New York state, Smith's home region, was so prone to "catching fire" with religious fervor that it became known as the Burned-Over District.

Young Joseph was suffused with religious feeling from an early age; both of his grandfathers and both of his parents apparently experienced prophetic visions. Joseph had attended Methodist camp meetings around Palmyra, and had very likely heard traveling Presbyterian and Baptist preachers spreading their versions of the gospel too. But when he retired to that now-legendary grove of trees to ask God "which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join," he was met with a startling response. By Smith's own account of Mormonism's First Vision, "a pillar of light" descended on him, containing two "Personages," who turned out to be Almighty God and his son Jesus Christ.

"I was answered [evidently by Jesus] that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: 'they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.'"

When former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney faces the cameras on Thursday at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, where he has promised to deliver a major speech "about the role of religion, faith, in America and in a free society," he carries the legacy of Joseph Smith's First Vision with him, whether he likes it or not. Romney is unlikely to tell the Protestants and Catholics in his audience that their creeds are an abomination, or that they are participants in a Great Apostasy that began shortly after Jesus ascended to heaven and continued, in all forms of Christianity, till Smith founded the Mormon church on a new set of scriptures in 1830. But he cannot quite evade those beliefs either, for they are fundamental tenets of his faith.

As the most prominent Mormon presidential candidate since his father, George, 40 years ago, or since Smith himself ran on a platform of "Theodemocracy" in 1844, Romney must negotiate between two opposing forces. The theology and tangled history of Mormonism is at odds with the quasi-theocratic nature of the contemporary Republican Party, which seems to have decreed that only Bible-believing Christians or their close allies may run for high office. Neither of these two forces is of Romney's own making, but it was the candidate, and his decisions about how to run his campaign, who ensured that they would collide.

As Christopher Hitchens recently complained in Slate, political reporters have generally treated the details of Romney's faith as a no-go zone. If the question were simply whether his beliefs (or anyone else's) should qualify or disqualify him from public office, I would agree that there was nothing to discuss. Moreover, only Mitt Romney can know how much of Mormon doctrine he accepts without question and how much he takes with a grain of salt. Even in the most dogmatic of believers and the most dictatorial of denominations, faith is fundamentally a private process of negotiation.

But you don't have to descend to Hitchens' level of anti-Mormon vitriol to recognize that Romney's religion, and how he characterizes and explains it, has now become the central issue of his campaign. It may even be the issue that ends his candidacy -- and some of that is no one's fault but Mitt Romney's. In transforming himself from a moderate, pro-choice Republican into an avid pro-life conservative, and in pandering to the party's white Southern evangelical base -- essentially presenting himself as a Christian fellow traveler with a few eccentric updates -- Romney himself helped make an evangelical vetting of his faith inevitable.

Romney has explicitly resisted comparing his upcoming College Station speech to John F. Kennedy's September 1960 address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, and for good reason. Most famously, Kennedy declared in that speech that he was "not the Catholic candidate for president," but rather "the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic." Earlier in the address, he said things that were arguably more important, and that Romney is singularly unlikely to repeat, unless his steadily sinking poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire have convinced him to reverse fields yet again and run as a liberal Republican after all.

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," Kennedy told the Houston ministers, "where no Catholic prelate would tell the President -- should he be Catholic -- how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference ... I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials."

Kennedy was seeking to take his then-controversial faith off the table by embracing the constitutional and secular nature of the American republic, and by asking voters to judge him on his own words and deeds rather than as a representative of his church. If Romney were trying to accomplish something similar, one could only commend him. But his task is more perplexing and difficult than that.

Next page: Smith moved toward an intriguing mishmash of post-Christian theology drawn in part from Swedenborgian mysticism, Masonic ritual and Hinduism