On Thursday night, Mitt Romney will step out at the Republican National Convention to accept the nomination as the presidential candidate. The question, ahead of this important moment, is not whether but how he will talk about religion.
Certain theistic tropes are often part of political rhetoric: for example, Romney will almost certainly evoke some form of God-ordained American exceptionalism, whether general or via a biblical metaphor (such as America as a “city set on a hill”). This kind of language evokes the vocabulary and metaphors of shared beliefs, while sidestepping sectarian squabbles over contentious points of theology.
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