There’s some­thing a bit off in the way that pun­dits talk about reli­gion, usu­al­ly. Take the case of Mitt Rom­ney. They want us to believe that the nub of his ​“Mor­mon prob­lem” is that his faith will turn off a key vot­ing bloc in the GOP’s base: evan­gel­i­cal Christians.

Think about Romney and his faith for a moment. Does anything come to mind? Anything at all?

Sor­ry, but Romney’s prob­lem with evan­gel­i­cals is hard­ly the fact that he’s a Mor­mon. His prob­lem is that he isn’t Mor­mon enough.

Think about Rom­ney and his faith for a moment. Does any­thing come to mind? Any­thing at all? If you didn’t know his reli­gious affil­i­a­tion by the media’s ref­er­ences to it, would you even know that he’s a Mor­mon, rather than a gar­den-vari­ety Protes­tant or Catholic? Does he talk pub­licly about why he’s a Mor­mon? Do we know how the tra­di­tion has informed his val­ues? Or what Joseph Smith and The Book of Mor­mon mean to him?

Con­trast Rom­ney with George W. Bush. There was nev­er any doubt about where The Decider stood, even if he almost always chose his spot bad­ly. Among the polit­i­cal­ly inter­est­ed, who doesn’t know the sto­ry of Bush’s life-chang­ing walk along a Maine beach with Bil­ly Gra­ham, and his con­ver­sion to Chris­tian­i­ty at the age of 40? And who can for­get his mas­ter­ful response when a reporter asked him to name his favorite philoso­pher. ​“Jesus Christ,” he said, with­out miss­ing a beat, ​“because he changed my life.”

Sure, that answer cost him the vote of all the phi­los­o­phy majors. But it played bril­liant­ly to aver­age Amer­i­cans. The smug premise of the ques­tion – who doesn’t have a favorite philoso­pher? – gave peo­ple anoth­er rea­son to hate the media for its pre­tense and con­de­scen­sion. And it gave Bush anoth­er chance to con­nect with his base by empha­siz­ing what’s most impor­tant to them about reli­gious experience.

For evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians, faith is about change and trans­for­ma­tion. Its essence is con­ver­sion. They love noth­ing more than a sto­ry about the lost sheep find­ing his way back to the fold – the more lost, the bet­ter. The details are both enter­tain­ing and a way of dra­ma­tiz­ing the pow­er of accept­ing Jesus. This is why Bush’s alco­holism and his rumored drug use actu­al­ly helped him with the base. Evan­gel­i­cals aren’t judg­men­tal about the depths of the sin you’ve fall into. They’re glad to hear your sto­ry about it, in detail. But there has to be a pay­off. They have to know that you’ve changed; or that, with God’s mirac­u­lous help, you’ve over­come some kind of great hardship.

What is Mitt Romney’s sto­ry? It must be more com­plex than it seems. But for the casu­al­ly inter­est­ed vot­er, it’s a tale of one suc­cess after anoth­er. Priv­i­leged child­hood. Pri­vate school­ing. Har­vard M.B.A. Beau­ti­ful wife. Fan­tas­ti­cal­ly suc­cess­ful busi­ness career. Gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts. Big, shiny, hap­py fam­i­ly. Mul­ti­ply­ing homes and grand­chil­dren. Mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar income, almost all of it from investments.

Romney’s life sto­ry is so cheery that it almost man­ages, per­verse­ly, to inspire a bit of affec­tion for Bush, whose own path was a long record of fail­ures and strug­gles well into mid­dle age. At least in that biog­ra­phy you can find a rec­og­niz­able human being. One of the well-known sto­ries about Bush, for exam­ple, cap­tures both the fraught nature of the father/​son rela­tion­ship and the ter­ri­ble ordeal of estab­lish­ing one’s own iden­ti­ty. Dri­ving home from a night of drink­ing while vis­it­ing his par­ents in D.C., Bush lost con­trol of his car and hit a trash can, which remained wedged under the car. He was 26 at the time. When his father con­front­ed him about it, Bush upped the ante, mak­ing the inci­dent about much more than a car crash. ​“I hear you’re look­ing for me,” he said. ​“You wan­na go mano-a-mano right here?”

The sto­ry is ludi­crous and poignant all at once – emo­tion­al porn for evan­gel­i­cals, and a per­fect set­up to the pay­off of Bush’s con­ver­sion many years down the road. It’s also a sto­ry that you can’t imag­ine com­ing from Rom­ney, whose own youth is pret­ty well summed up by that now-infa­mous pic­ture tak­en with his Bain col­leagues in the 1980s, in which they’ve stuffed cash into their col­lars, pock­ets and mouths. It isn’t just the dis­play of raw greed that’s so dev­as­tat­ing about that pho­to, polit­i­cal­ly. It’s the fact that Rom­ney seems so suc­cess­ful and pol­ished – and, allow­ing for some aging, not a bit dif­fer­ent than he appears today. It’s all well and good that he made a for­tune and has appar­ent­ly been a faith­ful hus­band for decades. But to real­ly reach evan­gel­i­cals’ hearts, he’d have to talk about some big fail­ures along the way, and the role that his faith played in chang­ing his life.

If he could, it wouldn’t mat­ter that he’s a Mor­mon, just as it hasn’t mat­tered to evan­gel­i­cals that Newt Gin­grich is twice divorced and a Catholic. Gingrich’s late-in-life con­ver­sion and his own­ing up to past sins absolve all that. The key for evan­gel­i­cals is the trans­form­ing pow­er of faith, not the denom­i­na­tion or tra­di­tion that one belongs to.

The lack of a con­ver­sion sto­ry hand­i­caps Rom­ney in anoth­er crit­i­cal way. Evan­gel­i­cals’ iden­ti­ty is tight­ly bound up with their estrange­ment from the main­stream insti­tu­tions of Amer­i­can soci­ety. The estrange­ment is most­ly self-imposed, and it’s more rhetoric than real­i­ty. It’s a method for evan­gel­i­cal lead­ers to ral­ly their peo­ple, divide the world into believ­ers and unbe­liev­ers, and cast true believ­ers as per­se­cut­ed victims.

Hav­ing a con­ver­sion sto­ry is the clear­est way of tak­ing sides in this imag­i­nary strug­gle. It allows evan­gel­i­cals to hold the most pow­er­ful posi­tions with­in gov­ern­ment and the cor­po­rate world while remain­ing spir­i­tu­al­ly sep­a­rate from the insti­tu­tions that they run. Think about the way George W. cast him­self as an anti-estab­lish­ment man of the peo­ple while com­ing from maybe the most influ­en­tial polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment in all of Amer­i­can his­to­ry – the Bush fam­i­ly. It wasn’t just the ranch in Texas and the fran­tic brush clear­ing. It was the con­ver­sion sto­ry. His base under­stood what it meant: that he had cast his lot with the per­se­cut­ed, right­eous remnant.

Romney’s record of flip-flop­ping is often held against him, but his real weak­ness is that he hasn’t made the most impor­tant flip-flop of all. He doesn’t con­nect with evan­gel­i­cals because noth­ing in his life can­cels out his estab­lish­ment bona fides. There’s no cow­boy swag­ger. No dropped g’s. No brush clear­ing. No con­ver­sion sto­ry. Noth­ing about what his faith actu­al­ly means to him. Rom­ney wears his Mor­monism so light­ly that, from the per­spec­tive of evan­gel­i­cals, he might as well be an Episcopalian.

He seems to believe that his record of suc­cess as a busi­ness­man and gov­er­nor should qual­i­fy him to be pres­i­dent. But that record is most­ly a lia­bil­i­ty, because the base with­in the GOP is angry, and the object of its anger is pre­cise­ly the cor­po­rate and gov­ern­men­tal estab­lish­ment that Rom­ney is so obvi­ous­ly com­fort­able with­in. Rom­ney doesn’t give off a whiff of vic­tim­hood. He doesn’t act as if he’s under siege by elites, or angry at them. He believes, right­ly, that he belongs among them, and is proud of it. Among evan­gel­i­cals, that kind of cozi­ness with pow­er is polit­i­cal­ly toxic.

What they want, des­per­ate­ly, is a leader who is itch­ing to go medieval on the establishment’s ass. Some­one who’s will­ing to risk sound­ing crazy for the sake of the cause. These are peo­ple, after all, who know by heart the bib­li­cal sto­ries in which peo­ple are wiped out by all man­ner of vio­lence: hail­storms, swarm­ing clouds of flies and locusts, earth­quakes, drought, drown­ing, famine, ston­ing, burn­ing, hang­ing and spear­ing, just for starters. Whole tribes and cities are destroyed in one stroke in the Old Tes­ta­ment. And many evan­gel­i­cals believe that human his­to­ry will end in their life­times – that Jesus will return for believ­ers and cast the rest of human­i­ty into hell. Peo­ple with such a keen sense of God’s immi­nent judg­ment aren’t look­ing for a leader who’s hap­py to play by the rules of busi­ness as usu­al. They’re look­ing for a leader who views estab­lished author­i­ty as the ene­my – the kind of man, say, who once chal­lenged his own father to a fistfight.

So it’s hard not to feel the evan­gel­i­cals’ pain when they look at Rom­ney. After three sol­id decades of loy­al­ty to the GOP, this is the joke of a can­di­date the par­ty offers up? A man who isn’t even com­fort­able using his real first name, Willard? A man who looks as if he should be in sun­glass­es and san­dals, sip­ping straw­ber­ry daiquiris on a yacht? A man who embod­ies every sin­gle thing that they despise about Wash­ing­ton? They have good rea­sons to be skep­ti­cal about Rom­ney. His Mor­monism is the least of their worries.

To the busi­ness wing of the GOP, of course, Romney’s estab­lish­ment cre­den­tials are a plus, and he comes off as an emi­nent­ly rea­son­able man. Because of that, and because the field of can­di­dates is so weak, he is on his way to win­ning the nomination.

But that prospect should keep the GOP’s grand poobahs awake at night, because Rom­ney won’t excite the evan­gel­i­cal base in the gen­er­al elec­tion. He doesn’t have a sto­ry that speaks to them. He doesn’t speak their lan­guage. He doesn’t get them at the gut lev­el, the way George W. Bush did, and they cer­tain­ly don’t get him. And the incon­ve­nient truth is that with­out a strong turnout by the evan­gel­i­cals this fall, Mitt Rom­ney doesn’t have a prayer.