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45 Religious Minorities, Religious Freedom, and Religion Chapter 2 1 In the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses, in fact, entrance polls would indicate that approximately 60 percent of participants self-identified as evangelical or Christian conservatives. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/epolls/index .html#IAREP (retrieved 8-3-10). 2 In the words of one Southern Baptist, “I couldn’t vote for him. His cross is not my cross.” Private conversation with the author. That issue continued in the 2012 Even when not exacerbated by controversial constitutional decisions, the interrelationship of law, politics, and religion in the United States is always interesting and often contentious, particularly so in the 2008 Republican presidential nomination process. During the early stage of that process, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney pursued an electoral strategy almost guaranteed to raise questions about the political importance of religion. Judged from the perspective of a long-time observer of the politics of the Iowa caucuses, the Romney strategy apparently was to assume that Senator John McCain would be, in contrast to his 2000 race, the establishment candidate for the Republican nomination, which would leave room for Romney to run to McCain’s right. In the Iowa caucuses, which McCain chose not to contest in any serious manner, Romney thus targeted evangelical Christian conservatives, a constituency that in past caucuses and primaries made up 40 percent or more of the Republican base.1 As the campaign turned out, however, this strategy was fundamentally flawed. By attempting to win the support of religious, predominantly evangelical conservatives, the Romney campaign encountered a paradox: on the one hand, this Republican constituency considered religious values and beliefs to be of the highest importance in public as well as private life, but, on the other hand, much if not most of this very same constituency was suspicious of Romney’s own Mormon religion.2 Indeed, this dilemma 46 The Constitution of Religious Freedom is what left a political opening among Iowa’s evangelical Republicans for the candidacy of former Arkansas Governor—and Baptist minister— Mike Huckabee, who went on to beat Romney in the 2008 caucuses. It was in order to mitigate if not dissolve this paradox a month before the Iowa caucuses that Romney, despite some disagreement among his staff about its advisability, presented a speech on the relation between politics and religion.3 Although basically confused when taken as a whole, the speech in its various parts raises important issues in the interrelationship of law, politics, and religion in America. Specifically, the Romney speech often conflates two distinct concepts: religion and religious freedom. The proposition I wish to advance in this chapter is that the religion clauses of the First Amendment protect not religion but religious freedom. Moreover, once we grasp that fundamental distinction we will be able to understand how the protection of religious freedom is not equivalent to hostility to religion. The general confusion in Romney’s speech is that in appealing to conservative Christians possibly suspicious of the Mormon religion, it emphasizes both the importance of religion in American life and a separation of church and state that, put bluntly, prevents a Mormon president from acting on Mormonism as president. On the one hand, therefore, Romney sounds like many liberals in his insistence on the separation of church and state and, interestingly, on a commonality of values that appears almost as the overlapping consensus of John Rawls. “Let me assure you,” Romney stated, “that no authorities of my church, or of any presidential-election cycle. Reporter Sasha Issenberg wrote in the summer of 2010, “Mitt Romney and his strategists expected his Mormon faith to fade as an issue for fundamentalist Christians during his first presidential campaign. This time around, should he choose to run again, they have doubts.” Referring to 2012 possibilities, Issenberg said, “[E]ven as the national Republican establishment warms to Romney as never before, the former candidate and his closest aides now believe a group of voters will always be off-limits because of his religion.” See “Faith Still Sticky Issue as Romney Mulls Run: Mormonism Remains Hard Sell for Evangelicals,” Boston Globe, July 3, 2010 (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/07/03/faith _still_sticky_issue_as_romney_mulls_run/, retrieved 7-9-10). According to a Pew survey conducted in late May 2011, while 68 percent of the public and 58 percent of white evangelicals said a presidential candidate’s Mormon religion would not matter to them, 25 percent of the public and 34...

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