Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney needs to assure evangelicals that his Mormon faith would not be his ultimate guide if he wants their support, an influential Southern Baptist official said earlier in the week.
"If Romney wants to get significant Southern Baptist and evangelical support he's going to have to give a Kennedy-style speech," said Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Land was referring to a speech by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy in Houston in 1960 in which he assured southern evangelicals he would not let his Catholic faith dictate his policies but defended the right of a Catholic to run for office.
White evangelical Protestants like Southern Baptists are a an important part of the Republican Party's base but they have yet to unite around a single candidate before the presidential election in November 2008.
In their eyes much of the Republican field is flawed, but Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has a huge problem: many evangelicals, who take matters of faith very seriously, regard his Mormon religion as a cult.
A recent survey by the Poll Research Center found that 52 percent of white evangelical Protestants who attend church on a regular basis do not view Mormonism, founded by Joseph Smith in western New York in 1830, as a Christian faith.
"I think that there is a percentage, there's a minority of Southern Baptists who will not under any circumstances vote for a Mormon," Land told Reuters on the sidelines of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention's annual meeting.
This view was echoed in conversations with several others at the meeting.
