Like everything else in this country, however, that portrait of principles over partisanship has been battered by the winds that swirl around this presidency. In a poll earlier this year, Latter-day Saint approval of President Trump stood highest of all religious groups. Senator Flake demonstrated that his rhetorical denunciations of President Trump would not translate into effective opposition to administration policy. Mr. Romney has repeatedly proved willing to make peace with the president and the powers that be. His most recent rhetorical contortions on immigration — which he has variously described as more “compassionate” and more hawkish than the president’s — exemplify the difficulty of pinning down Mr. Romney’s politics generally let alone of drawing straight lines between his religious identity and his relationship to this administration’s agenda.

When people ask me about Mr. Romney and Mr. Flake, they are often well aware of these severe limitations on Latter-day Saint opposition to the White House. Still, at the very least, they want to make sense of the rhetoric.

The politically charged resources that we share can push in multiple directions. The same memory of religious persecution that recoils at Mr. Trump’s Islamophobia also generates profound states-rights distrust of a federal government that once sent armed troops into Utah. The same theology of eternal family bonds that balks at Mr. Trump’s misogynistic lechery can only with great difficulty accept his opponents’ pro-choice platforms. Despite appearances in the “reddest of red states,” Latter-day Saint values have never fit perfectly with the political divisions of the two-party system, but the age of Trump has made that misalignment much more pronounced.

Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing publicly displayed some of the choices Latter-day Saints face in the age of Mr. Trump. Mr. Flake’s very public agonizing over the nomination became a vivid symbol of the struggles many of my coreligionists feel when they allow the current political moment to incite deeper forms of civic soul searching.

At the same time, Orrin Hatch’s conspicuous absence of agony symbolizes the decisions of many of my coreligionists not to allow any such thing.

Assuming Mr. Romney wins a seat in the United States Senate, he will have to decide when and how to make common cause with the leader of his party. Will he draw on his experience as a missionary in France to resist isolationism and xenophobia? Will he utilize his memories as a lay church leader in Boston, where he devoted untold hours of ministry to vulnerable individuals and communities, to temper the president’s brutalizing rhetoric of winners and losers? Will he let a distinctly Latter-day Saint reverence for the United States Constitution embolden him to check abuses of executive power?

If he wants to counteract the man to whom he once attributed the potential “unraveling of our national fabric,” he will have plenty of religious resources to bring to bear. Whether he will use them is up to him.

David F. Holland is a professor of religion at the Harvard Divinity School.

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