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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

He Just Can’t Win

Just like the challenge for Kennedy in 1960 and for born-again Christian Jimmy Carter in 1976, Romney’s candidacy will provide fresh opportunity for the US to reassert that its democratic traditions are above religion and serve as a protector of religion. ~The Christian Science Monitor This may be the source of one of Romney’s problems […]

Just like the challenge for Kennedy in 1960 and for born-again Christian Jimmy Carter in 1976, Romney’s candidacy will provide fresh opportunity for the US to reassert that its democratic traditions are above religion and serve as a protector of religion. ~The Christian Science Monitor

This may be the source of one of Romney’s problems with Christian voters.  It requires them to accept that, as the CSM rather clumsily put it, “democratic traditions are above religion.”  Put like that, you might be hard-pressed to find a lot of conservative Christians who would want to endorse such a message, since “religion” for them means Christianity and we can be fairly sure that for many of them democracy is not “above” or ahead of Christianity.  This ties into the other reasons why Romney’s Mormon identity will be a problem for him.  On the one hand, his candidacy runs up against the natural democratic impulse to elect people like ourselves who represent us and in whom we can recognise ourselves, and on the other hand his appeal must seek to transcend and so, to some degree, set aside religious identity, which runs the risk of appearing to trivialise the place of religion in public life.  Like so many other pols, he turns to the weasel word “values” to convey his basic agreement with Christian voters on social issues of importance to them, but unlike most of these other pols on the GOP side he does not have the built-in credibility with many conservative voters that goes with being from a Christian background.  He is hemmed in on every side and, as the polls indicate, he just can’t win.

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