Romney\u2019s high-wire act on religion at the Republican convention<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On Thursday night, Mitt Romney will step out at the Republican National Convention to accept the nomination as the presidential candidate. The question,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/08\/romneys-high-wire-act-on-religion-at-the-republican-convention.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Romney\u2019s high-wire act on religion at the Republican convention\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On Thursday night, Mitt Romney will step out at the Republican National Convention to accept the nomination as the presidential candidate. 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{"id":1902,"date":"2012-08-28T16:43:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T16:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/08\/romneys-high-wire-act-on-religion-at-the-republican-convention.html"},"modified":"2012-08-28T16:43:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T16:43:00","slug":"romneys-high-wire-act-on-religion-at-the-republican-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2012\/08\/romneys-high-wire-act-on-religion-at-the-republican-convention.html","title":{"rendered":"Romney\u2019s high-wire act on religion at the Republican convention"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Certain theistic tropes are often part of political rhetoric: for example, Romney will almost certainly evoke some form of God-ordained American exceptionalism, whether general or via a biblical metaphor (such as America as a \u201ccity set on a hill\u201d). This kind of language evokes the vocabulary and metaphors of shared beliefs, while sidestepping sectarian squabbles over contentious points of theology.<\/p>\n

What Romney needs, in other words, is to craft a message around what has been called \u201ccivil religion.\u201d However, Romney faces some unique challenges, both because of the minority status of his Mormon faith<\/a> and because of the expectations of white evangelical Protestants, who promise, if things go well, to constitute more than one-third of his voter base in November.
Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"