When LDS Church president Gordon B. Hinckley died last week, Mitt Romney broke the non-stop campaigning he was doing in preparation for super-Tuesday and traveled to Salt Lake City for Saturday’s funeral observances. For those familiar with the Mormon tradition, the candidate’s decision to attend the funeral was not a surprise.
Although I have no inside information as to why the Republican candidate elected to be among the 21,000 mourners at President Hinckley’s funeral, it seems to me that he was not there simply because he is an eminent LDS figure, a person of prominence like Senators Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch. Certainly Romney was not there for political reasons. He already has the Utah vote “in the can,” as they say.
I’m convinced that Romney attended President Hinckley’s funeral because he is a Mormon through and through.
He was ordained to the LDS priesthood when he was still a boy and as a very young man, he spent two years as a missionary in France. Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has no professional clergy, its congregations are led by men who take on pastoral responsibilities in addition to their regular vocations. Romney served as such a pastor (known in LDS parlance as a bishop) in a Mormon ward (parish) in Belmont, Massachusetts. Afterwards, he was called to serve as the president of one of the four LDS Massachusetts stakes (dioceses). During the time he was bishop and stake president, local LDS authorities were often in close contact with the leaders of the church in Salt Lake City. With this in his personal history, the death of the church’s prophet/president was tantamount to the death of a member of his family.
It seems to me that his making a speech about his religion has allowed Romney to be more comfortable with his Mormonism as a feature of who he is. Rather than using unfamiliar evangelical language to describe his faith, he now acknowledges that being a Mormon Christian and an evangelical Christian are not exactly one and the same.
There is more to it than this. Romney seems to be allowing his years of being a bishop to show as well. In visiting with a Martin Luther King Day crowd, Romney admired a child’s gold necklace, calling it “bling, bling.” Such a reference would be fairly common to most any pastor who often visits with toddlers dressed in their Sunday best. But this was clearly new to none other than CNN’s Anderson Cooper who made Romney’s banter with the child seem bizarre. Yet in becoming more comfortable with allowing his Mormonism to show, the candidate seems to be more relaxed, more at ease with who he is.
Romney may flame out tomorrow, but if he does not, Calvin Trillin’s description of him as “Ken,” Barbie’s plastic counterpart, in the Nation this month might not fit so well as well as it did earlier in the campaign.
