Romney makes Mormonism part of his big night

In this Aug. 29, 2012 file photo, Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts Gov. Mitt Rom­ney speaks at the Amer­i­can Legion National Con­ven­tion in Indi­anapo­lis. When Rom­ney addresses the Repub­li­can con­ven­tion Thurs­day night, he’ll do it from a stage that puts him a lit­tle bit closer to the crowd inside the con­ven­tion hall. His cam­paign hopes the evening ends with Amer­i­cans feel­ing a lit­tle bit closer to the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, too. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

RACHEL ZOLL

AP Reli­gion Writer

After years of avoid­ing direct men­tion of his reli­gion, Mitt Rom­ney will open up about his Mor­mon faith as he accepts the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion for president.

The for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor is the first Mor­mon pres­i­den­tial can­di­date on a major party ticket. It’s unclear just how much detail he will pro­vide on Thurs­day night, the pin­na­cle of the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion in Tampa, Fla. He has spo­ken broadly in the past about the impor­tance of prayer and belief in God, but has not dis­cussed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

How­ever, the ros­ter of speak­ers promises at least a glimpse into his nearly 14 years of ser­vice as a lay Mor­mon pas­tor around Boston. The invo­ca­tion will be given by Ken Hutchins, a retired North­bor­ough, Mass., police chief, who was also a Mor­mon leader in the state, and Grant Ben­nett, who served as a church coun­selor to Rom­ney, is sched­uled to offer remarks.

“I think this is a speech where he’s going to talk a lot about what’s informed his val­ues, what’s informed his out­look. Of course his faith is an impor­tant part of that,” Rom­ney aide Kevin Mad­den said in Tampa this week. “It’s an impor­tant part of who he is as a hus­band and a father. And so I think you can expect some of that.”

Start­ing in the 1980s, Rom­ney was a bishop in the Boston sub­urb of Bel­mont, a job akin to the pas­tor of a con­gre­ga­tion. He then served as a stake pres­i­dent, the top Mor­mon author­ity in his region, which meant he presided over sev­eral con­gre­ga­tions in a dis­trict sim­i­lar to a diocese.

He coun­seled Latter-day Saints on their most per­sonal con­cerns, regard­ing mar­riage, par­ent­ing, finances and faith. He worked with immi­grant con­verts from Haiti, Cam­bo­dia and other coun­tries. Ben­nett has in the past described how Rom­ney built rela­tion­ships with other reli­gious groups around his Bel­mont, Mass., home­town, after a sus­pi­cious fire in 1984 destroyed a new Mor­mon meet­ing house there.

Other con­ven­tion speak­ers have already laid a foun­da­tion for this new faith empha­sis. In his accep­tance speech Wednes­day night, vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Paul Ryan, a Roman Catholic, said “our dif­fer­ent faiths come together in the same moral creed.” Ann Rom­ney, in a speech meant to show a more per­sonal side of her hus­band, describ­ing the early chal­lenges they faced as a cou­ple, includ­ing reli­gious dif­fer­ences. “I was Epis­co­palian. He was a Mor­mon,” she said. The ref­er­ence was strik­ing given that the Rom­neys almost never use the word Mor­mon on the cam­paign trail.

Repub­li­can evan­gel­i­cals have been play­ing down con­flict with Latter-day Saints. Most promi­nently, for­mer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huck­abee, speak­ing from the podium Wednes­day night, said, “I care far less as to where Mitt Rom­ney takes his fam­ily to church, than I do about where he takes this coun­try.” Huck­abee, a South­ern Bap­tist pas­tor before he entered pol­i­tics, had pub­licly ques­tioned Mor­mon beliefs when he was com­pet­ing against Rom­ney in the 2008 pres­i­den­tial pri­mary. Most Chris­tians don’t con­sider Latter-day Saints part of tra­di­tional Chris­tian­ity, although Mor­mons do.

Rom­ney has strug­gled to nav­i­gate as a reli­gious minor­ity seek­ing the nation’s high­est office.

Since Mor­mons gen­er­ally live in con­cen­trated com­mu­ni­ties in the Moun­tain West and Cal­i­for­nia, few Amer­i­cans have met a Latter-day Saint. Most Mor­mons said they were stunned by the open expres­sion of prej­u­dice against their church dur­ing Romney’s first bid for the White House.

In his 2008 cam­paign, Rom­ney openly courted evan­gel­i­cals, who make up about a quar­ter of the elec­torate and are a crit­i­cal part of the Repub­li­can base. He stressed the beliefs he shared with Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives about Christ and the Bible, and he promised he would not be influ­enced on pol­icy by the lead­ers of the LDS church. This year, he has done lit­tle pub­lic out­reach with Protes­tant con­ser­v­a­tives and, until now, has largely sep­a­rated his Mor­monism from his campaign.

“He’s try­ing to find the right reg­is­ter, and those around him who advise him are try­ing to find the right reg­is­ter. Now, it seems, the push is to make him look human, that means empha­siz­ing the admit­tedly won­der­ful things he has done in the church to help peo­ple,” said Lau­rie Maffly-Kipp, a reli­gion scholar at the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina, Chapel Hill, who writes fre­quently about the LDS church. “The trick is to do that with­out bring­ing up the parts of Mor­monism that might sound odd to others.”

A Gallup poll in June found that voter bias against Mor­mons has barely budged for decades. In the sur­vey, 18 per­cent of Amer­i­cans said they would not vote for a well-qualified pres­i­den­tial can­di­date who hap­pens to be a Mor­mon, com­pared to 17% who said so in 1967, when Romney’s father George had been seek­ing the Repub­li­can nomination.

How­ever, the cam­paign clearly felt more con­fi­dent dis­cussing the LDS Church since Rom­ney sealed the nomination.

Polls indi­cate that Repub­li­can vot­ers are will­ing to set aside their con­cerns about the LDS church to oust Pres­i­dent Barack Obama. A recent poll by the Pew Research Cen­ter found that a major­ity of peo­ple who know that Rom­ney is Mor­mon are com­fort­able with his reli­gion or don’t con­sider it a con­cern. In the days lead­ing up to the con­ven­tion, Rom­ney told inter­view­ers he prays daily and dis­cussed the doubts he expe­ri­enced about his reli­gion when he, like most young Mor­mon men, ful­filled his church duty to serve as a mis­sion­ary. Rom­ney served in over­whelm­ingly Catholic France dur­ing the 1960s, and faced hos­til­ity as an Amer­i­can and a Mormon.

“I don’t think under­ly­ing atti­tudes have changed,” said John Green, direc­tor of the Uni­ver­sity of Akron’s Bliss Insti­tute for Applied Pol­i­tics. “I don’t think evan­gel­i­cals are any less skep­ti­cal about Mor­mons, but an elec­tion is a choice and Repub­li­cans have some­thing to work with here because of the unpop­u­lar­ity of Obama among this group of evangelicals.”

Posted by AP News on Aug 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.