A Little Taste

The recent controversy at Regent College over Pat Robertson’s choice of Mitt Romney as keynote speaker at the evangelical school’s May 5 commencement should give Romney a little taste of the chilly (if not downright hostile) reception he’ll receive from the evangelicals he’s tried so hard to court in the last few years in anticipation of his presidential bid.

I have said many times that Romney is in for a rude awakening if he thinks that evangelicals are going to embrace him as their candidate in 2008. To be sure, some will. Most, however, will not. It simply doesn’t matter how aggressively Romney engages in gay bashing or how passionately he defends his pro-life position. Even his former liberalism won’t harm him as much as his Mormon faith, which in the eyes of many evangelicals (and not just them) ranks as suspect at best. In 2004 the World Religions and Religious Movements class offered by Regent’s department of Renewal Studies classified Mormonism as a “contemporary cult.”

Moreover, if Romney thinks he can pull off a JFK-style victory, he’s fooling himself. While there may be superficial similarities between the obstacle presented by Romney’s Mormonism today and that posed by Kennedy’s Catholicism in 1960, there really is no parallel.

According to the 1961 Statistical Abstract of the United States (the U.S. Census does not include statistics on religion), Roman Catholics constituted approximately 26% of the population in 1957. By way of contrast, the 2001 Statistical Abstract put Mormons at a mere 1%.

Add to those numbers the fact that by 1960, Catholics had been prominent in state and local politics in many parts of the country for the better part of a century and had built a powerful political machine. Conversely, it was only a little over a century ago that Mormonism officially rejected polygamy.

Opposition from America’s evangelicals may not break Romney’s campaign, but his shift to the far right suggests that he is strongly counting on their support. It will be interesting to see if, once he realizes that the Religious Right doesn’t want him, he moves back toward the moderate to liberal positions he once espoused to try his luck with those closer to the center. I for one am not convinced that this slippery chameleon’s conservative views are etched on golden tablets.