Romney: No candidate should be rejected because of his faith

Additional information:  Watch Mitt Romney's "Faith In America" speech (from mittromney.com)

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered few details about his Mormon faith in his long-awaited speech on religion here Thursday, focusing instead on the need to stand up against efforts to eliminate God from public life and other beliefs he shares with conservatives.

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom," Romney said from the stage of the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum's conference center during what many have termed a risky attempt to silence questions about his membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said Romney's speech sent the right message to send evangelical voters who don't see Mormons as fellow Christians.

"It's a ringing defense of the role that religion has played and should play and should not play in American public society," Land said. "I can't imagine that there's anyone who'd be less likely to vote for Mitt Romney after hearing this speech who's likely to vote in a Republican primary."

Even evangelicals. "People of religious faith respect genuine religious conviction," Land said. "He certainly helped himself with some evangelicals."

Romney spoke only briefly of his church, but said he would not be distanced from his beliefs.

"That I will not do. I believe in my Mormon faith and I endeavor to live by it. My faith is the faith of my fathers — I will be true to them and to my beliefs," he said, before acknowledging he holds different beliefs about Jesus Christ than other faiths, the only reference to LDS doctrine.

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines," Romney said. "No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith."

Romney described the American values all faiths share, including seeing liberty as "a gift of God, not an indulgence of government." He said he was taught to "honor God and love thy neighbor," and recalled seeing his father, the late Michigan governor

and onetime presidential candidate, George Romney, march with civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

"My faith is grounded on these truths," he said. "You can witness them in Ann and my marriage and in our family. We are a long way from perfect and we surely stumbled along the way, but our aspirations, our values, are the selfsame as those from the other faiths that stand upon this common foundation."