“Where Mitt Romney Takes His Family to Church”: Mike Huckabee’s GOP Convention Speech, the “Mormon Hurdle,” and the Rhetoric of Proportion

On Wednesday, August 29, 2012, Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, 2008 presidential candidate, and ordained Southern Baptist minister, stood before the Republican National Convention gathered in Tampa, Florida, and declared, “I care far less as to where Mitt Romney takes his family to church than I do about where he takes this country.”¹ It was a remarkable statement, given the controversy Romney’s Mormon faith had engendered from the moment he declared his candidacy on June 2, 2011. The day after his announcement, a Washington Times front page headline announced, “Romney’s in; Mormon faith still seen as hurdle.”² Polls conducted that summer indicated that many voters, especially evangelical voters, were uncomfortable with the prospect of a Mormon president.³ Romney’s faith was the target of negative comments in conservative circles, among them Texas pastor Robert Jeffress’ claim, made while introducing Rick Perry at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit that October, that the Mormon religion was a cult and that “every true born-again follower of Christ ought to embrace a Christian over a non-Christian.”⁴ Romney’s stinging loss in the South Carolina primary the following January was attributed in part to his inability to reach “evangelicals and voters searching for a candidate who shared their faith.”⁵

Although Romney had been urged to address the issue explicitly, as he had done in his 2007 “Faith in America” address, he instead responded to the “Mormon dilemma” by claiming a generic Christian identity for himself, while also frequently invoking broader “sacred” themes related to patriotism and America as “one nation under God.” A brochure mailed to South Carolina voters featured “a prayerful Romney in coat and tie, his head bowed and eyes closed,” and included his pledge that as president, he would be true to “my faith.”⁶ In a speech at Liberty University in May 2012 he declared that “there is no greater force for good in the nation than Christian conscience in action,” and he attributed the country’s rise to global leadership to “our Judeo-Christian tradition.” As one pundit put it shortly before the Iowa campaign, Romney was “counting on his new American gospel (‘I love America.’ ‘I love this country.’) to connect with... voters concerned about his faith.”⁷

Working in Romney’s favor was the intensity of conservative voters’ antipathy toward Barack Obama.⁸ One evangelical leader, Bryan Fisher, head of the American Family Association and an “outspoken critic of Mormonism,” captured that sentiment when he said, “If the choice was between Barack Obama and the other guy . . . I’d vote for the other guy.”⁹ Even Jeffress voiced the same intention, in what would become a meme among conservative voters: “I probably would hold my nose and vote for Romney,” adding, “I’d rather vote for a non-Christian who embraces Christian values than a professed Christian who governs by unbiblical principles.”¹⁰ By the time he secured the nomination, this rationale for supporting Romney was so widespread that Jon Stewart would mock it in these words: “Simple math . . . I hate Barack Obama more than I love Jesus.”¹¹

Nevertheless, as the convention approached, Romney’s campaign still faced serious questions about whether his religion would prevent some voters from supporting him. A Gallup poll taken in early June, barely two months before the convention, found that only 90 percent of Republicans were willing to vote for a Mormon; among independent voters, the number was 79 percent, and just 72 percent for Democrats.¹² The Romney campaign, thus, needed to put the “Mormon question” to rest once and for all, and no one was better suited to the task than Mike Huckabee. He and Romney had been bitter rivals in the 2008 campaign, when Huckabee had run as a hardline representative of the Christian Right.¹³ One notable exchange from that campaign that came to represent the nature of their rivalry, occurred when Huckabee suggested in a New York Times interview that “Mormons believe...