Mitt’s Stake

Mitt’s Stake: And yet there is something genuinely mysterious—and not just underexposed—in Romney’s faith. As a church leader, Romney seemed devoted to a Mormon ethic of sacrifice for the welfare of the group, an almost communitarian system of belief. As a candidate, his philosophy has been nakedly individualistic and elitist—a turn made explicit last week, when a video emerged of Romney at a Florida fund-raiser writing off 47 percent of the country as shiftless freeloaders: “My job is not to worry about these people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Many of the Boston Mormons believe the Romney they saw in church reflected a separate, genuine strain of his character, one that was opportunistically quashed as he entered national politics. But the clues from Romney’s tenure as a church leader suggest a more complicated relationship to his religion and, therefore, a different explanation—that his approach to leadership seems not so much a departure from his own version of Mormonism as an extension of it. More than anything else, Romney’s church seems to have armed him with a particular view of success.