SOUL FOOD:

On Super Tuesday John McCain pinned Mitt Romney to the mat, and Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul turned out to be not so much contenders as, possibly, spoilers. Did Romney come up short because he’s a Latter-day Saint?

Or was it because, as pundit Ben Shapiro says, he is boring? Or was it because voters sensed what staffers of the other Republican campaigns say they have: Romney is not just a Washington outsider but also a phony and a hypocrite, what a former staffer for Fred Thompson described to Time reporter Anna Marie Cox, as a “wholesale reinvention.”

OK, I may be wrong. Maybe Romney came out ahead. I am, after all, writing this before Super Tuesday.

Whatever the outcome, did faith have much — or anything — to do with it?

After the 2004 presidential election, certain ultra-conservative, evangelical, Christian para-church organizations rushed to take credit for President George W. Bush’s win.

“Voters of faith,” wrote Ralph Reed, in December that year, “see George W. Bush as personifying [their] values, a man of decency and character who is leading the nation with a rare mixture of courage and moral clarity.”

Other voters were outraged to think a faith-based coalition of voters could have swung a presidential election.

A band of “new atheists” — Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens — wrote books that denounced religion as a scourge on society. Their books moved up the ranks on bestseller book lists and held on tightly.

Christians like Jim Wallis wrote critical books, too. In “God’s Politics” and more recently in “The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America,” he urges like-minded believers to “take back the faith co-opted by the Right and dismissed by the Left.”

He believes we can hold our leaders accountable only by bringing our faith-based moral convictions to bear on our nation’s domestic and foreign policies. That is, as long as those moral convictions resemble his more than those of George W. Bush, Tony Perkins or Ralph Reed.

Now that the president’s approval rating has tanked, it’s hard not to wonder how many of Reed’s “voters of faith” now think Bush has dragged them through the mud. Earlier this year it appeared those same voters were ironically willing to back Rudolph Giuliani into the White House.

Yet on social issues, the three-times married, three-times divorced Giuliani stands for everything they stand against. What was the appeal? I can’t say I’ve figured it out.

I can only tell you that evangelical constituents are no more homogenous than the Republican Party. Like Republicans in general, evangelical voters are at odds with each other on key issues.

They simply can’t be matched to candidates like pegs to holes.

Whatever the influence of faith on the presidential election in 2004, voters of all faiths seem circumspect this year about the relationship of faith to politics. Locally I talked to voters of various faiths about how they tangled with making choices when casting their votes.

For Dee Wallace, who is Roman Catholic, the religious faith of a candidate is not an issue. She reads, listens to radio and television broadcasts, and uses the Internet to find information to help her make her decisions.

Her sources run from Newsweek to Network, a Catholic social justice lobby in Washington, D.C. When I last talked with her she was still undecided about which candidate she would vote for in the primary.

Sue Dodd, a member of the Huntington Beach Church of Christ, was going to vote for Thompson in the primary until he dropped out. She then decided to support Romney; his Mormon faith did not deter her.

“[He] believes God’s commands regarding marriage between a man and a woman only and [regarding] abortion of a human being,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. She says she hopes she never will have to face an election where no candidate holds those views.

Turkish-Muslim immigrant Atilla Kahveci suspects those like him will cast their votes for Hillary Clinton. “When the big earthquake happened in Turkey in 1998,” he told me, “Bill Clinton came to visit with the first lady…and daughter Chelsea. [He] walked around the rubbles, held a child up in his arms and talked to the kid.”

When national television stations broadcast these images, Kahveci says they “won the hearts of the Turkish people.” Chalk one up to nostalgia — and perhaps to there being no Turkish-Muslim candidate.

Like Romney, Carolyn Allen is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He will get her vote and that of her husband, she says, because of “his record of successes as governor of Massachusetts” and because business success indicates “that he knows how to make things happen.”

Since they see the disintegration of the family as one of our nation’s biggest problems, they also like that “[Romney] has a stable family situation.”

But not all their Latter-day Saint friends support him. At a Romney rally in Fountain Valley last week, though, she met many people who were there to support him even though they didn’t share his faith.

“They all were fed up with liberal McCain who plays the POW card much too often,” she says they told her. And they didn’t think Huckabee stood a chance.

Buddhist Jon Turner is concerned that we tend to pick candidates based on what they stand for rather than on their ability to act with wisdom and insight. While Rabbi Stephen J. Einstein of Congregation B’nai Tzedek, yearns for the best of both worlds.

“I’d like to have [a candidate],” he says, “who has principles and has beliefs and acts on them.” But he wants that person to be “willing to listen to all sides” and to sometimes realize the need to change a view.

“The world changes,” he says. New circumstances arise. Einstein has misgivings about a politician “so locked into a position that [his] attitude is ‘don’t confuse me with the facts.’”

But he admonishes, “You’re not going to get the perfect candidate somebody who agrees with you on every single issue.”

So at times, bringing one’s faith to bear on one’s political choices can be far from a cakewalk and more like a slog through a minefield on a moonless night.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].