One intriguing, even unexpected, aspect of the race for the Republican nomination has been the emergence—perhaps we should say the reemergence—of the religious issue in presidential politics. Anyone who thinks that John F. Kennedy put it definitively to rest in 1960 in his famous address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association should be aware that the passage of 51 years seems not to have done the trick. As everybody knows, Mitt Romney is a Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and while he is hardly the first Mormon to run for president (Morris Udall, Orrin Hatch, his own father George Romney), he is the first member of his denomination to have what appears to be a plausible chance of being elected. This has awakened some disquieting ghosts.
Governor Romney's religion is an unexpected issue, but we should not have been surprised. Two years before Romney first sought the nomination in 2008, Jacob Weisberg, then-editor of the online magazine Slate, wrote a column lampooning the history and beliefs of Romney's religion, and concluded, "I wouldn't vote for someone who truly believed in the founding whoppers of Mormonism." Nor is Weisberg's casual bigotry an isolated phenomenon. When, in 1994, Romney sought the Senate seat held by Edward Kennedy, and pulled even with Kennedy in the polls, the Lion of the Senate resorted to sly pejorative references to Romney's faith. The tactic worked. In the current political season, the press has wondered out loud about whether Romney's religion might be an electoral liability, and published more than a few stories about evangelical Christian objections to Mormonism. Analysis, or wishful thinking?
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