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Authenticity, “Real” Religion And Romney

I’ve been shocked, really, at the fact that it seems to — there seems to be a place in our culture for, gosh, saying that Mormonism is not a real religion. ~Lynne Cheney Relatively few people are claiming that it’s “not a real religion.”  For its critics, it is only too real, and the thing some […]

I’ve been shocked, really, at the fact that it seems to — there seems to be a place in our culture for, gosh, saying that Mormonism is not a real religion. ~Lynne Cheney

Relatively few people are claiming that it’s “not a real religion.”  For its critics, it is only too real, and the thing some of them might find most shocking is that it does, in fact, exist and people believe it.  The real argument, however, is not incredulity at the Mormon creed, so to speak, as it is anxiety about the relationship between Mormonism and Christianity.  There may be the occasional secular person, a Damon Linker, say, who sees dire threats emanating from Salt Lake City, but the real problem is not so much that Romney’s religion isn’t “real” (it may be one of the very few things about him that isn’t fake!) as it is that his religion seems alien and bizarre to many of the people whose votes he needs to win the nomination. 

If Christian conservatives respond favourably to “one of their own” (as the recent Huckamania suggests they do), they are similarly unenthusiastic about those with whom they cannot relate and identify in terms of shared religious experience.  Even acknowledging Brownback’s less-than-charismatic persona and keeping in mind his ties to evangelicals as qualifications, the fate of Brownback may be telling for how this kind of identity politics works.  It probably did not help him with many of these voters that he had become Catholic.  He could still speak in their idiom and understand their perspective, but there were limits to his ability to claim to be “one of them.” 

Romney hardly helps himself by treating discussion of the subject as a source of embarrassment or lame humour, encouraging critics to regard his religion as something of which he is ashamed.  As a voter’s stupid question about “how many First Ladies can we expect” shows, modern Mormonism is not well understood or very familiar.  Anyone from a relatively poorly understood minority religion is going to carry the political burden of trying to relate his religious experience to that of the voters he’s addressing, especially if he wants to talk up his faith and his life as a “person of faith” in his campaign.

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