You’ll learn more about the Mormon Church from the “Landmark Moments in LDS History” Collectors Plate [1] than you will from Mitt Romney’s 21-minute speech to a stacked house yesterday at the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. I counted exactly one reference to Mormonism (“I believe in my Mormon faith and endeavor to live by it”), unless he gets credit for the sly mention of Brigham Young when he’s enumerating a trilogy of people persecuted for their faith. (The other two are Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams—interesting choices, because one was cast out by the Puritans, and the other was the leading exponent of church/state separation. What’s the subliminal message here? That the evangelicals are too puritanical and theocratic? That that’s how we ended up with Utah in the first place?)

[2]

After all the buildup for this speech—it’s just like Kennedy’s speech to the anti-Catholics in 1960, it’s his opportunity to answer critics who say Mormonism is a cult, it’s a chance to make Mormonism seem reasonable to those who think polygamy wasn’t such a good idea even in the 19th century—it was basically (and this is extremely odd coming from a Mormon) a plea for ecumenicism. This is not likely to make either the Mormons or the evangelicals he’s courting very happy at all.

Of the two ways he could have gone—religion is nobody’s business and should be kept out of politics, or I answer to God first—he chose some sloppy muddled middle way that argues that we’re a God-fearing nation, but let’s not get too precise about the nature of that God. And as to Mormonism, he doesn’t even come close to describing or defining it at all.

Here’s the arc of the speech, as far as I was able to follow it:

The founders of America sought the blessings of the Creator. The reason they did that is that you can’t ensure morality without religion. “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” (The atheist Christopher Hitchens would disagree. In fact, he’s posted a challenge on his website to name any principle of morality that is practiced only by religionists. But we digress.)

Romney then quotes JFK, to get that out of the way. He then states that the leaders of his church (he never uses the full name of the Church of Latter-Day Saints) will never exert authority over presidential decisions because the actual presidential oath of office is, to him, “my highest promise to God.” (This is actually a major departure from mainstream evangelical belief, which holds that the highest promise to God should derive not from the Constitution, but from the Bible.)

He follows up his “highest” belief with the assurance (to this audience, at least) that “Jesus is the son of God and the savior of mankind.” But then he says that “The President is not a spokesman for one faith, because he will need the prayers of peoples of all faiths.” This is the first time he gets real applause—the audience was a little nervous up till then—and then he enumerates the many faiths in America and lists what he loves about each one. This part bears repeating, both for the categories of faith he chooses and what he praises them for. In order:

Catholics: “I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic mass.”

Evangelicals: “[I love] the approachability of God in the prayers of the evangelicals.”

Pentecostals: “[I love] the tenderness of spirit among the pentecostals.”

Lutherans: “[I love] the confident independence of the Lutherans.”

Jews: “[I love] the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages.”

Muslims: “[I love] the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims.”

Well, okay, he’s a little lame on the Muslims. “Frequent” prayer? Whatever. He then summons a vision of upright steeples scattered throughout the towns and cities of the nation, all pointing to, presumably, the same God in heaven. You couldn’t have stated it better at a World Council of Churches Ecumenical Conference.

And yet . . . I doubt Mitt Romney is an ecumenicist. I doubt anyone he’s appealing to is an ecumenicist. And ecumenism is something that the secular world doesn’t care about at all, because they start from the assumption that we shouldn’t be talking about God in the first place. I also can’t help noting that one category on that list seems out of place. Look at the six “faiths” again and ask, What’s wrong with this picture?

Lutherans, right? Why are the Lutherans a separate category? Apparently he gave some considerable thought to the matter, along these lines: Well, they won’t like being called evangelicals, and they certainly wouldn’t want to be thought of as pentecostals. But if you give the Lutherans their own category, then what about Anglicans? They’re probably not crazy about the evangelical label either, at least not the High Church devotees. At any rate, the reason he has this problem in the first place is that he feels compelled to break the Protestant category into three different groups: Evangelical, Pentecostal, Lutheran. And why would he do that? Because it confuses which category the MORMONS belong in!

Either consciously or unconsciously, Romney is saying, “The Mormons really don’t fit into this whole Catholic/Protestant/Jewish/Muslim template we have, but look at it this way—we’re not any weirder than the Lutherans or the Pentecostals!”

One thing that is weird, though, is those who would create “a new religion of secularism.” “They’re wrong,” says Romney. Secularism bad. Ecumenism good. This is exactly why the founders said don’t get entangled with religion in the first place. But Romney soldiers on for another ten minutes, basically using the old “religious heritage” argument—meaning that it’s all the various religions that give us our morality, and that many faiths all believe the same things (equality, service, liberty of the individual). “Liberty is a gift of God,” he says, “not an indulgence of government.”

And then at the climax of his speech, he points out how lucky America is, because the cathedrals of Europe stand empty and the Asian continent is racked by the “theocratic tyranny” of radical Islam, but America is still a land where Reason and Religion are joined as allies. Here he’s become John Bunyan, reeling off the eternal verities of Liberty, Equality, Freedom, Reason, Religion and—to enormous applause—“our nation’s symphony of faith.”

In other words, a thoroughly un-Mormon speech. And a thoroughly American one. He could be an instructor at Union Theological Seminary. For that matter, he could chair the Dalai Lama’s next seminar. Yawn.