Mitt Romney's speech on his Mormon faith reflects the tightrope he is trying to walk between the evangelical Christian base of the party on the one hand and his non-mainstream faith on the other. He draws parallels with JFK's 1960 speech to promise that the LDS church will not influence his decisions as President, justifying the separation with the Constitution's Establishment clause, but simultaneously seeks to reassure his audience that he does believe Jesus is the Savior and Son of God. What he's really saying is not that religion and policy are separate realms - as Kennedy did - but rather, that the religion he will apply to public life is mainstream evangelical Christianity. He has adopted the evangelical positions on abortion and gay rights (contrary to his positions as Governor). He wants nativity scenes and menorahs to be present in public spaces around the holiday, but when asked if he would have Muslims in his cabinet a few weeks ago, he balked. (His reasoning - that there aren't enough Muslims in America to justify cabinet representation - contradicts the Constitution, meritocracy and his plea to disregard his particular faith - but that's because the latter is really a red herring.)

My problem with Mitt Romney's religion isn't his Mormonism. Sure, Mormons believe in all kinds of nutty stuff, but so do fundamentalists of every faith. There should be no religious test of a candidate's personal beliefs and I will not apply one. What bothers me is three-fold: first, that he has a religious agenda on key domestic policy issues (just not of his particular sect), which gives theology an inappropriate, unjustified credence in policy debates. Second, that he tries to play both sides of the game, disqualifying atheists for office but demanding no religious test be applied to himself (quotes here). No religious test means a person of any religion or no religion should be judged equally for office. Romney's and the GOP's position is that a person of certain accepted sects may run for office (with Mormonism trying to be on the list) but no others. They don't believe in the separation of church and state - they just want their own churches in the state. Whether the list of accepted religions has one entry or a few, it is still a violation of the Establishment clause.

Third, I have a philosophical problem with the assertion that is constantly made, and which Romney reiterated, that without God, there is no freedom or morality. God did not bring liberty to the world; Deist philosophers of the Enlightenment did that. That religion has succeeded in appropriating the best of the Enlightenment as its own is partly a failure of contemporary secular philosophers, but it doesn't make the claim true. Centuries of religious tyranny prove that the God-liberty marriage is a recent one. (The long-held tradition of St. Thomas, for instance, involved secular courts executing people for heresy.) Morality without divinity can be established on numerous grounds: Aristotle disregarded divinity, Kant questioned whether God is moral, Nietzsche declared God as dead, and so forth. Religion is no better at morality than secular alternatives, and often much worse (e.g. read Hitchens or Harris). The subtle application of Christian theology to the War on Terror, for instance, could lead the country on a very immoral, even disastrous, path. It's time for this lie to finally be exposed.

(Update: Andrew Sullivan - a Catholic secularist - has a fantastic piece on the speech here.)