fear is such a sudden U-turn is going to give people a case of voter whiplash. I think people have to decide, and Christian leaders have to decide once and for all, whether a candidate’s faith is really important.”7
Jeffress continued his crusade during the 2012 campaign. A supporter of Perry for president, the pastor used an appearance at the Values Voter Summit in October 2011 to drive a wedge between Romney and evangelicals. “I just do not believe that we as conservative Christians can expect him to stand strong for the issues that are important to us,” Jeffress told reporters.8 “I really am not nearly as concerned about a candidate’s fiscal policy or immigration policy as I am about where they stand on biblical issues.”
(Four years later, Jeffress would become Candidate Trump’s most visible Christian disciple, appearing with the thrice-married, casino-owning candidate onstage in Texas during the heat of the GOP primary race. “I can tell you from experience, if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, we who are evangelical Christians are going to have a true friend in the White House,” he said, according to the Dallas Morning News.)
The issue was far from resolved when Romney clinched the GOP nomination in April. A survey released by CBS News and the New York Times found that just 27 percent of white evangelical Republicans said they would “enthusiastically” support him against Obama in the fall.
Even as the professional Christian right grudgingly rallied around him—with endorsements from the major evangelical groups and leaders, including, eventually, Jeffress himself—the grass roots remained hesitant. When Romney agreed to give the May commencement address at Liberty University, the Jerry Falwell–founded Christian college in Virginia, the school wound up removing the news from its Facebook page because of the backlash among students and alumni.
“I get it. I’m from a weird religion, too, according to Republicans,” says Eric Cantor, who hails from a deeply religious tract of Virginia and heard frequent complaints about Romney’s Mormon faith. “My district was sandwiched between the Falwells to the West and Pat Robertson to the East. I’m Jewish, and the district is not even two percent Jewish. We would do polling and one of the most important issues for people was whether the candidate believed in Jesus as their savior. That wasn’t good for me.”
In retrospect, the distrust of Romney is better understood through a prism of cultural warfare than one of theological creed. At the outset of the primary campaign, the Obama administration mandated that religious institutions must cover contraceptives in employees’ insurance plans. In May, on the same day as Romney’s commencement address at Liberty, the president announced his support for same-sex marriage. A month later, in the span of two weeks, Obama issued an executive order protecting young immigrants from deportation while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
All the while, America’s folk landscape looked like the culmination of conservative jeremiads about decline: Fifty Shades of Grey, a novel of true love realized through bondage and sadomasochism, spent more than seven months atop the New York Times bestseller list.
“It was a revolution,” John Boehner says. “The country was changing right underneath our feet.”
The conservative base was on fire. His religion aside, Republicans had reason to worry that Romney—whose adviser had publicly compared the candidate’s November strategy to an “Etch A Sketch,” shaking off the right-wing positions of the primary and starting over afresh—didn’t have the core convictions, much less the stomach, for a fight with Obama.
The president and his allies, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to start throwing haymakers.
ROMNEY WAS AN EASY TARGET. THE WAY HE TALKED AND THE WAY HE walked, the haircut and the mannerisms—it was like a black-and-white sitcom character reborn in the age of Technicolor. Once, after a donor meeting in which Romney heard the phrase “No shit, Sherlock” for the first time, he gleefully repeated the quip to his staff—but cleaned it up to say, “No bleep, Sherlock.”
Even Republicans couldn’t help themselves. As he campaigned for House candidates across the country in 2012, Boehner worked humorous digs at Romney into his stump speech, mocking the Republican nominee behind closed doors as someone who had never mowed his own lawn or owned a pair of blue jeans.
This detachment carried significant political risk. In a vacuum, the fact that Romney didn’t curse, or didn’t drink, or had lots of money, might not have been damaging. But taken with his policy positions, and given how the president aimed