This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Mitt Romney appears to have decided that to run successfully for president of the United States, he must run away from the issue of his Mormonism. He's wrong about that. Just as John F. Kennedy faced down the ugly attacks of anti-Catholic bigots in 1960, Romney should confront head-on the question of whether a Mormon is ill-suited to be president because of his faith.
JFK did it in a celebrated speech to Southern Baptist leaders in Houston. Mitt Romney should make a similar statement.
He should do that because most American voters are fair-minded. They will weigh a candidate's religion just as they will weigh other so-called character issues, together with policy positions and party affiliations. But it would be naive to argue that religion does not play a role in politics.
There are two factors that make Mitt Romney's Mormonism problematic, however. One is the fundamentalist evangelical base of the contemporary Republican Party, whose nomination Romney seeks. Some evangelicals do not consider members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be Christians.
Second, polling about Americans' religious beliefs and ideas shows that only about half of Americans have a favorable view of Mormonism, but about the same percentage know little or nothing about the faith. People are skeptical of what they don't know. For example, they tend to associate Mormonism with the practice of polygamy, which the mainline LDS Church disavowed more than a century ago. But the Warren Jeffs prosecution undoubtedly has caused more confusion.
They may also have heard of Mormon baptism for the dead, secret temple rituals and, of course, the scriptures that are peculiar to the LDS faith.
Those same polls show that Americans who actually know Mormons have a higher opinion of the faith than those who don't. Those people may know that for Mormons, families are eternal, and that they stand for traditional marriage, self-reliance and faith in God. They oppose abortion, but not contraception. That sounds like the Republican platform.
Romney should make that point. The difficulty for him is to do that without turning himself into an apologist or defender of every facet of his faith. JFK accomplished that by emphasizing his belief in an America where separation of church and state is absolute, where no religious official would tell a president what to do, and where no candidate would be denied public office simply because his religion differs from that of the people who might elect him.
We think that's the ideal most Americans still embrace, and would support in the voting booth.