In Romney’s view, the one thing Americans are apparently not free to do is to not be a person of faith. Indeed, in Romney’s view, if you are not religious, you cannot be free. In the speech, he opined “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Except, apparently, the freedom from religion. This is astonishing since the freedom from being forced to ascribe to belief is one of the fundamental American freedoms and a genuine achievement in human history.

The speech contained the expected buzz words about John F. Kennedy and his famous speech affirming the separation of church and state in his presidential campaign despite his Catholic faith and its history of theocratic rule. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was referenced as well by Romney. But what speech on religion and America does not reference King? Certainly not one like this speech by Romney that seems, in great part, to have been designed by pollsters rather than theologians.

Quoting John Adams is also obligatory when you want to dance around issues of religion and freedom, and so Adams comes up in the Romney speech, not just once but twice, and then Sam Adams is mentioned for good measure. So Romney agrees with the “founding fathers” we are led to believe.

Underneath the buzz words, however, the legacy of theocracy in the Mormon faith is visible in Romney’s speech. Theocracy is a word derived from the Greek words for God and state and it means the religious rule of politics. Romney engages in a not even very subtle Muslim bashing in regard to “[R]adical violent Islam” and even “jihad.” This is accompanied by an undercurrent of the ‘Christian America’ riff that is, in fact, a theocratic reading of American history. The Mormon faith, however, in its origins as a theocracy in Utah, is at variance with the history of the achievement of separation of church and state in the U.S. Even the “establishment” of various Protestant sects in the various states of the colonial era (and, in some cases, into the early years of the new United States) were never, in fact, theocracies.

Twenty-five references to freedom, free and liberty cannot finally disguise that in Mitt Romney’s view, you better have faith and the right faith if you want to be an American. This is fairly ironic coming from a Mormon. The speech ran on two tracks, I thought, Romney’s own Mormon assumptions about religion and the state and buzz words that poll well in the U.S. They don’t really go together.

My advice to Romney: pick one track.