There’s an interesting dilemma facing the filmmakers who are presumably hard at work, in some well-hidden editing room, on the biographical movie that will play just before Mitt Romney accepts his party’s nomination: What should the movie say about Romney’s Mormonism?
So far, Romney has said very little about his faith in this campaign, which is clearly how he likes it.
Indeed, his campaign has pushed back vigorously against even innocuous press coverage of Mormon folkways and beliefs, on the theory that trying to explain a much-distrusted, much-misunderstood religion could only distract from the economic message.
But across a long summer of negative attacks, the Obama campaign has succeeded in weakening that message, and turning the conversation to Romney’s character instead. This means the Republican convention can’t just offer an extended indictment of the Obama record; it also needs to reintroduce Romney in a more thoroughgoing way. And if his faith ends up on the cutting-room floor, this reintroduction will be missing something that’s not only essential to the candidate’s life story, but also helps make the case for his worldview.
Start with Romney the man, so often dismissed as hollow, cynical and inauthentic. His various political reinventions notwithstanding, Romney clearly does have deep convictions: The evidence is in his intense commitment to his church, as a local leader and as a philanthropist.
If Romney were a Presbyterian, Methodist or Jew, this would be an obvious part of his campaign narrative. Romney’s years as a bishop would be woven into a biography that emphasized his piety and decency, introducing Americans to the Romney who shut down his business to hunt for a colleague’s missing daughter, the Romney who helped build a memorial park when a friend’s son died of cystic fibrosis,and so on down a list of good deeds.
The broader Mormon experience, meanwhile, could help make the case for his philosophy as well as illuminate his human core. The presumptive Republican nominee is not naturally ideological, but he’s running as a critic of Obama’s expansive liberalism, and as a standard-bearer for a conservative alternative.
Conservatism sometimes makes an idol of the rugged individual, but at its richest and deepest it valorizes local community instead — defending the family and the neighborhood, the civic association and the church. And there is no population in America that lives out this vision of the good society quite like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mormonism is a worldlier, more business-friendly religion than traditional Christianity, but it does not glorify wealth for wealth’s sake, in the style of many contemporary prosperity preachers.
To spend some time in Salt Lake City and its environs, as I did earlier this summer, is to enter a world where faith, family and neighborliness really do seem to fill the role that liberals usually assign to the state.
There you can tour the church-run welfare centers, with supermarkets filled withproducts available to the poor of any faith and assembly lines where Mormon neurosurgeons and lawyers volunteer to can goods or run a bread machine.
And then you can read the statistics: The life expectancy numbers showing that Mormons live much longer than other Americans, the extraordinary rate at which they volunteer and donate, their high marriage rates and low out-of-wedlock birthrates.
Of course, a visit to Mormon country also provides reminders of why Romney has been wary of talking about his religious background. There’s the Mormon Temple, whose interior can be viewed in scale-model form but not actually entered; the defensiveness that surfaces around issues like polygamy and race; the fine line Mormon society walks between a healthy solidarity and an unhealthy conformism — and hanging over everything, the burden of defending Joseph Smith’s revelation, which offers not only bold metaphysical claims (as all religions do) but an entire counterhistory of the Americas, which no archaeologist has yet managed to confirm.
It’s understandable that Romney would prefer to keep these aspects of his religion off the table.
But by trying to insulate his campaign from the things that make his faith seem alien, he’s cut himself off from things that make his life story impressive, and his message compelling.
ROSS DOUTHAT is a columnist for The New York Times.
