Arguably the most important thing about Mitt Romney is the one thing it seems indelicate to talk about: his religious faith. He is not a convert — he comes from Mormon stock going back generations.
Nor has he merely been a member, going on a mission and then simply following the faith’s commands.
He was once formally in charge of the church in the larger Boston area, and had real religious authority and responsibility.
He counselled women considering abortion; he excommunicated the wayward; he taught the doctrines of his faith to adults; he controlled who had access to the temple in Belmont, Massachusetts, where he would worship in long white robes every Sunday.
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When he was a hotshot at Bain Capital, he was known for his aversion to socialising with his secular and boozy colleagues — he does not drink alcohol or even coffee. Instead the bulk of his social life was among other Mormon families and friends. One of his friends from his temple told The New York Times recently that Mormonism is “at the centre of who he really is, if you scrape everything else off”.
Romney is also the candidate of a party that defines itself by a view that religion and politics cannot and should not be separated. His closest competitor in the primaries was Rick Santorum, who famously declared that John F Kennedy’s clear and rigid distinction between private faith and public service made him want to “throw up”.
Santorum is not an outlier. One of the core concepts of modern Republicanism is that a believing Christian must be fully Christian in his public stances and draw his or her political views from the religious beliefs that so many Americans share. That, in fact, is where much of the difference between America’s modern Republicans and Britain’s Tories lies. Brits don’t do God in politics; American Republicans emphatically do.
Is it okay that a president should disappear into secret religious settings for secret rites without public scrutiny? So how to tackle the issue of Romney’s Mormonism in this election? It is an extremely touchy subject. Sources say it is the one subject of which his campaign is truly terrified. He refuses to comment on the subject, even to the most established media outlets. He hasn’t mentioned the M-word in the campaign, although he has talked about his mission years in France.
When he has spoken of Mormonism in the past, it’s almost always in the way other Mormons speak of it: not of the doctrines or ceremonies or rites but of the all-encompassing way of life it encourages and sustains. Mormons are among the nicest, kindest, most wholesome people in America, as the hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon brilliantly mocks and celebrates at the same time.
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Mormons tend to have longer marriages, closer families and upright personal morals.
At the same time, there is simply no doubt that the doctrines that lie behind this admirable way of life are deeply strange. All religious doctrines are strange in their own way, of course, but because Mormonism is so young, its origins are less shrouded in the mists of time. When you learn that Mormons believe, for example, that Jesus visited the Americas just after his resurrection, that he will return in Jackson County, Missouri, or that God is a human being with a physical body, you stop short a little.
When you discover that the founder of the religion was a convicted scam artist who claimed revelations from buried sacred plates nobody else could see or translate, you pause a little longer. And when you find out that Mormons believe that the Americas of two millennia ago were home to various strange groups such as the Nephites and the Lamanites, for whom no archeological evidence exists, the alarm bells ring.
And yet my own church believes that the Virgin Mary was physically lifted up into heaven. So who am I to talk about strangeness in religion? The brutal persecution that Mormons suffered in 19th-century America also reminds one of the poison of religious intolerance. And so no decent person wants to raise the religious question in the political debate as an issue. And yet, how can we not?
Much of the far right openly asserts that Obama is a Muslim, for example. Invocation of Jesus and of America as a Christian nation are routine in Republican politics. A president, moreover, is more than a conventional political figure. He is the head of state; he symbolises the country in a way no prime minister does in Britain.
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And if a Mormon became president of the US, it would be an epochal moment for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It is already among the fastest-growing religions in the world; the prestige and legitimacy the American presidency would give it is incalculable. Equally, seeing an American president attend a Mormon temple would be ... well, as big a cultural shift as a black man in the Oval Office.
I have no reservations about a Mormon in the presidency. In fact, I think it can be seen as a sign of America’s tolerance that such a thing is even thinkable. The Obama campaign will not touch the subject. But there are legitimate questions to be asked. How does Romney’s faith interact with his politics? Is its emphasis on thrift and family reflected in Romney’s social views? Is its view that the American constitution was brought about by Jesus in order to create a polity in which the restored church could thrive something Romney also believes?
Mormonism is different from other Christian churches in a few core respects. It has temples that non- Mormons may not enter. Is it okay that a president should disappear into secret religious settings for secret rites without public scrutiny? Would 10% of the president’s publicly funded income go to the church?
Once you start asking these questions — as they would be asked of candidates of any other faith — they can lead to troubling places. I think Romney has to tackle them at some point, in his own way and on his own terms, just as Obama had to account for his attendance at Jeremiah Wright’s church. And the longer Romney waits, the more the discussion of the subject could veer out of his control into bigotry or ignorance.
Kennedy had to grasp the nettle with Catholicism, but Romney is trapped. If he declares, like Kennedy, that church and state are inviolably separate, his own party would balk. If he brings up the subject and legitimises it, the doctrines of Mormonism could dominate the debate and sink his candidacy.
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Hence the strange and uncomfortable silence. At some point, surely, it will break. Romney should be the one to break it. And soon.