So How Will Mitt Romney Play the Religion Card?

By Jacques Berlinerblau

That deafening, churning, leather-on-wood sound you just heard is the sound of the entire Romney campaign “pivoting to the general,” as the pundits like to say.

In the coming months, Mitt and his Faith and Values team will need to figure out how to draw lucrative religious voting blocs to the Republican side of the ledger. Faith-based politicking is always a complicated affair, and for these reasons I offer a few hopefully helpful suggestions on how the Romney team ought to proceed:

Bait the secularists (if you must): Secular-bashing is among the easiest, and most intellectually dishonest, forms of Faith and Values politicking out there. Easy, because there is widespread confusion as to what “secularism” means. The dreaded “ism” can conveniently stand in for anything a politician loathes: godlessness, gang violence, pornography–it’s all good. Or, bad as the case may be.

It is intellectually dishonest because it fails to identify the benefits of secular policies or try to understand why after two centuries American democracy settled–temporarily, it increasingly seems–on this particular form of governance.

Romney already signaled his willingness to strawman secularism in his 2007 “Faith in America” speech. Until secularism gets its acts together (a project to which my forthcoming book is devoted), secular-bashing will remain an effective, if unoriginal and unfortunate, campaign strategy.
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