Here it comes.

The first thing to note here is the way Romney is contextualizing himself. According to a nameless Romney minion, The Speech will address Romney’s faith in reference to concepts like religious liberty, American greatness, and, of course, freedom. Absent, presumably, will be discussions of whether Mormonism is Christian, whether Romney has been “saved,” and the Garden of Eden’s Missouri soil.

This represents something of a shift in Romney rhetoric. He’s spent a great deal of time and energy to this point reaching out to evangelicals in their own language. He’s called Jesus his “personal savior,” vernacular essential within evangelicalism but rather tinny to Mormon ears. He’s borrowed evangelical buzzwords, such as Rick Warren’s multipronged call for Christ-centered living: “purpose-driven.” And he’s conspicuously celebrated the Bible distributing Gideons, a twentieth century version of antebellum evangelical organizations like the American Tract Society and the British Foreign Bible Society. He has, subtly and not so subtly, attempted to persuade evangelicals that he isn’t really that different from them; that Mormonism is not so ideologically and theologically foreign as to prevent its full participation in the old, idealistic, values-driven tradition of social and political reform that’s often driven evangelicals into American politics.

But then Mike Huckabee happened. It appears evangelicals who might have been nose-holding Romney supporters are jumping ship. Thus, a new Romney tactic emerges. Now, he’s arguing to a different and broader audience. The Speech, it appears, will make Mormonism’s case not as a participant in the evangelical tradition, but in perhaps an even older one: the civic religion of the United States. This is a tradition that accepts pluralism in the abstract, that celebrates American exceptionalism, and stresses the importance of generic religiosity to the strength of American society.

In both cases, Romney seems to be a walking challenge to R. Laurence Moore’s argument that Mormonism, and other grassroots American religious movements, embraced the identity of “outsiders” tilting against the mainline, and indeed, through such defiance, gained what vigor and claim to “Americanism” they had. Ironically, it appears though while Romney is eager for admittance to the dull establishment Joseph Smith spurned, that establishment is not ready to have him. Will he, as Francis Beckwith claimed Kennedy did, have to surrender the distinctiveness of his faith as the price of admission?