Mitt's Mission

Church was at their father's core. In the mid-'80s, just as he was starting his business, Romney helped form a new ward (equivalent to a parish) in Belmont. He would serve as its bishop from 1985 until, in 1986, he assumed the presidency of the Boston stake of the LDS Church (equivalent to a diocese). These were demanding jobs, particularly for the father of growing children with an all-consuming career. As bishop, Romney was responsible for the administration of religious services. His responsibilities to his flock included counseling couples whose marriages were in trouble, instructing youth and distributing charity to church members who had come on hard times.

Romney the churchgoer was much like Romney the capitalist. Serving as Boston stake president in the early '90s, he led an effort to build a new chapel on a patch of undeveloped land in one of the city's industrial suburbs. Others in the stake were skeptical—the lot was a desolate expanse of concrete and weeds. Would there be enough Mormons in the area to go to church there? But Romney saw a good deal for a rapidly growing faith and insisted. "He was right," says Kent Bowen, a member of the Belmont ward. "There are now many, many people who go to chapel over there."

But Romney was careful to keep his professional and private lives separate. Many of his colleagues at Bain knew little about the details of his religious observance. Like his father, he kept liquor in his home for non-Mormon guests and was careful not to impose the strictures of his faith on the outside world. When Bain invested in a film studio with a large catalog of R-rated films, Romney struggled internally. R-rated movies are frowned upon in the Mormon faith, but the deal looked good for Bain. Romney's solution: make the deal happen, but skip his usual practice of putting some of his own money into it as well. "I didn't want to profit from a studio that made R-rated movies," he told The Boston Globe earlier this year.

But Romney's carefully constructed barrier between secular and spiritual came down when he entered politics. By the early '90s, he was a millionaire a hundred times over; long since self-sufficient, he was ready to run for office. His shot, which came in 1994, was not ideal: running as a Republican against Ted Kennedy, who was seeking a fifth full term representing Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. But it was the shot he had. Romney launched himself as a fresh-faced, moderate alternative to the old liberal lion. George and Lenore Romney temporarily decamped to Belmont to advise their novice son.

From the start, Romney made clear that questions about his faith were out of bounds, and from the start, his faith was all anyone wanted to talk about. The Boston papers were filled with tales of his secret Mormon life. As bishop, he'd counseled a Mormon woman not to have an abortion. As stake president, he'd called homosexuality "perverse." (Romney denied making this comment.) The tales fed the notion that there was something sinister inside Romney, that beneath the mild-mannered moderate lurked a secret extremist. When Kennedy suggested that Romney should have to answer for the LDS history on race (until 1978, African-Americans couldn't hold the priesthood), Romney called an angry news conference to condemn Kennedy for forgetting his own brother's admonition that a candidate's religious beliefs had no place in the public sphere. George—who was shredded by the press during his presidential run, but not on account of his religion—stood behind Mitt as he made his statement. Growing impatient, George seized the microphone: "I think it is absolutely wrong to keep hammering on the religious issues." The high road turned out to be a problematic course.

In the three decades since the elder Romney had last run for office, religious issues had moved to the center of American politics. In the White House, Bill Clinton talked openly about his relationship with Jesus Christ. On the campaign trail that fall, young, Republican candidates were promising a conservative crusade that would restore moral values and make America a more godly place. But Romney, as godly a candidate as any, could not join their number. In November, he lost the race to Kennedy, primarily due to a lack of experience and the resilience of Camelot in the Bay State. The race left his advisers with a question: would Romney's faith prevent him from achieving the political life he'd always planned to have?