The media is focused on today’s speech in College Station, Texas, where Gov. Mitt Romney will give a speech focusing on his Mormon faith. Everybody is calling this his "JFK" speech, but the two speeches couldn’t be more different beyond the similarity that they both deal with the issue of religion.
In 1960, when John F. Kennedy gave his famous Catholicism speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, he and his staff knew that Americans were weary about forfeiting Constitutional and national sovereignty to Vatican rule. The aim of his speech was not to explain that Catholicism is an ecumenical and tolerant body, but to prove to people that they wouldn’t be legislated over by the Pope, the College of Cardinals, or the rule of the Catholic Catechism.
While JFK’s problem of relieving concerns about national sovereignty was politically possible to tackle, Mitt’s problem is not. When his Mormon faith comes up time and time and time again, I don’t believe it is because these people are nervously suspicious about a tribunal of Utah patriarchs overreaching into the realm of public policy. Some people do have this trepidation, but it is not the main driver of the "Mitt’s Mormonism" frenzy.
People are concerned about Mitt’s strong affiliation of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church) because they think it is weird. They know that the church has beliefs which contradict central doctrines of mainstream Christianity, they wonder how the church has such vast business and financial resources, and they may have been annoyed by a pair of the church’s salesman-like missionaries.
Fr. Richard John Newhaus, one of the most respected theologians in the nation and the editor of First Things, an ecumenical Christian scholarly magazine on religion and culture, writes:
Asking whether Mormonism is Christian or Mormons are Christians (a slightly different question) is thought to be insulting. "How can you ask that," protests a Mormon friend, "when we clearly love the Lord Jesus as much as we do?" It is true that St. Paul says that nobody can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3). But that only indicates that aspects of Mormon faith are touched by the Holy Spirit, as is every element of truth no matter where it is found. A Mormon academic declares that asking our question "is a bit like asking if African Americans are human." No, it is not even a bit like that. "Christian" in this context is not honorific but descriptive. Nobody questions whether Mormons are human. To say that Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists are not Christians is no insult. It is a statement of fact, indeed of respect for their difference. The question is whether that is a fact and a difference that applies also to Mormonism.
The LDS Church is relatively new and it differs considerably from Catholic and Reformation-age Protestant doctrines. While these differences might cause problems for many people, the most devastating liability of the faith is that is claims to be the one, true church which replaced fraudulent versions of Christianity that have existed since the first church leaders failed to follow the first apostles. Thus, we can deduce that Mormon scriptures claim that everybody else are not actually Christians but frauds, more or less. How would most Christians feel if they knew that Mormon scriptures consider them to be not real Christians? Father Neuhaus discusses this issue in the full article here.
If JFK had gone on stage to try to prove to Catholic-skeptics that his faith wasn’t some kooky idea, he probably would have failed miserably. It’s impossible to do so.
Mitt Romney will not be able to do this today either. Learning more about the LDS Church through critical and scholarly analysis, I believe, exposes more fundamental differences between mainstream Christianity and the LDS Church. This will most certainly turn away the conservative Christian voters that he is trying to court from his newfound rival, Mike Huckabee.
While Mitt won’t be detailing the more controversial facets of his faith, it will certainly cause the LDS Church to be looked at through a sharper eye (it already has), and in turn make Mitt seem even more "weird" to the Christian voters who are concerned about his faith.