Can a Mormon ever become president? Yes, if he keeps quiet about it, and talks fast about his MBA-honed ability to fix the nation’s healthcare finances.

As Mitt Romney launches his bid for the presidency, his religion is his biggest handicap. The ever-pragmatic Religious Right, reckoning that Romney may be its best bet as candidate out of an uncomfortably colourful Republican line-up, is wondering whether it can make the most of his natural social conservativism, skate over the few liberal gestures he once made and play down the flakier connotations of Mormonism.

Romney, who can’t be faulted on worldly ambition, is no doubt making the same calculations. Throughout his short and unusual political career, he has crafted his image with what you may call intelligent design. It is a full year before Republicans pick their candidate, but still a good bet that Romney’s attractions will eclipse other worries. Except two: that his perfection as a candidate borders on dullness, and that his shifting views make him seem an opportunist in a field of instinctive, passionate rivals.

It is not a help to be a Mormon in US politics, even though it is one of the country’s fastest-growing religions, with more than five million followers.

Polls have steadily put the number saying they would not vote for a Mormon candidate at nearly a fifth; one put it at more than a third last summer.

Romney was the fourth Republican in a row to be Governor of Massachussetts, and less of an oddity in that respect than the state’s liberal reputation may suggest. But his religion, in a state with many Catholics, made him stand out; it is often the first thing people associate with him.

Mistrust of the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints is widespread. Many regard Mormons as outsiders — and Mormons embrace the term “a peculiar people” as a badge of honour. Religious conservatives may approve of the emphasis on family and temperance. But many view it as a cult; some do not consider it Christian at all. The Mormon belief in “eternal progression” towards God does not fit with mainstream Christian views of the afterlife. Nor does its practice of “posthumous baptism”, a device to offer salvation to those born before it was founded.

That has contributed to a reputation for flakiness; so has a taste for polygamy among one sect, although the mainstream Church has disowned this. Mormons’ robust belief in the profit motive has also jarred with the puritanism of much American religion.

Its principles underpin a distaste for big government. Because Mormons believe that people are judged by the choices they make on Earth, they want maximum freedom of choice. This has chimed well with the independence of Utah, the faith’s capital, but has often clashed with Mormons’ own desire to rule behaviour out of bounds.

Romney embodies these contradictions and oddities. He is said to swear by saying “h, e, double-hockey-sticks”, which might be irreproachably clean but would not serve to capture the gravity, say, of Baghdad. But his worldliness offers a powerful counterweight; he sorted out the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, and began to repair Massachussetts’s finances. To social conservatives, he may well look more reliable material than Senator John McCain, whose record on those issues is more mixed.

All the same, it is hard to say that a member of the “peculiar people” is ideal material for president of a country of 300 million.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die