Republicans to Romney: Embrace Your Mormonism

Many Republicans say it’s time for their party’s presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney to show public pride in his Mormon faith. His campaign has avoided his Mormonism in both 2008 and especially in this go-round as evangelical Christians swarmed to other candidates, Politico reports.

But many Republicans say they’re a lot more worried about beating President Barack Obama in November than the religious denomination of their candidate. And they say an open embrace of Mormonism by Romney will help voters get a better feel for him as a person.

“I will support anyone against this president,” Penny Young Nance, president of Concerned Women of America and a former Rick Santorum supporter, told Politico. If voters get a chance to see Romney’s commitment to his religion, it can help him gain their allegiance, she said.

“His religion isn’t the issue: he’s the issue. At some point you need to be honest about who you are. He has an authenticity problem. People don’t get him. They don’t feel that they know the guy.”

Conservative activist L. Brent Bozell, who preferred more conservative candidates than Romney, sees it much the same way. “If you’re a Mormon, you don’t need to distance yourself from it,” he told Politico. “We can all get along. I think the hostility seen in the primaries toward him was based more on cultural issues — social issues, not religious.”