From Romney's faith in America speech yesterday:

"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

This was some serious dogwhistle messaging to the Christian right. As I wrote yesterday:

Now he's setting up secularism as a common enemy with the religious right: the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

In the name of unity (i.e. bringing Christians who are skeptical of his faith into the fold) and religious tolerance Romney was actually perpetuating an ongoing and quite divisive culture war between the right and the left. Today, conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks calls Romney out.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other's passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn't start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people's minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not.

I am used to being considered a cultural enemy of the right so it didn't strike me as odd to hear this language in Romney's speech but Brooks is right and it begs the question: would Romney be a president to the faithless?

TPM is on it:

A spokesman for the Mitt Romney campaign is thus far refusing to say whether Romney sees any positive role in America for atheists and other non-believers, after Election Central inquired about the topic yesterday.

No real upside to his answering this during the primary unless the media forces him to, which I hope they do. In the general, however, if he gets that far, Romney's going to have to come up with an answer.

Update [2007-12-7 17:25:43 by Todd Beeton]:I must say, I'm really intrigued that Romney is getting so much pushback from the right for excluding "the faithless" from the happy little America he imagines himself governing. Dave Dayen at The Right's Field alerts us that Peggy Noonan's taken offense as well.

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots.

Umm, ya think? But where have these guys been? They've sat back while their party has waged this culture war and now they're finally calling foul? It seems that Romney has exposed a dirty little secret about the GOP, that it has a secularist wing to it as well, one whose Republicanism is borne out of greed and bowing at the altar of corporatism, and they're sick of the fealty to the theocratic wing, especially by Romney whom they'd considered one of their own. As Dayen notes, what we are seeing here is nothing short of a crack-up of the Republican coalition.

La Noonan couldn’t have made it more clear than that; theocrats and so-called “values voters” are idiots, whose intolerance doesn’t fit with the model of America. Of course, if any Democrat said this, there would be pure outrage. But that Noonan said it reflects the strain between the theocons and the econocons.