Under increasing pressure as the Republican presidential race tightens in Iowa, Mitt Romney will address his Mormon faith and the role of religion in American politics in a major speech Thursday. For months, he had hedged about whether he would; last month in New Hampshire, he said advisers had told him that such a talk was "not a good idea."

What's changed since then is clear, political observers said: Mike Huckabee has emerged as a serious threat to Romney's longtime lead in Iowa. Evangelical Christians there, some wary of Romney's Mormon faith, appear to be coalescing around Huckabee, and a few recent polls have Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, surging from the single digits into first place.

Even though he's making his speech in Texas, the state where John F. Kennedy made his landmark religion speech during the 1960 election, his speech will not echo Kennedy's, Romney said in New Hampshire yesterday.

"This is not a repeat or an update of the Kennedy speech," said Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, in response to a question at Manchester's Rotary Club, according to the Associated Press.

Kennedy's speech, aimed at allaying fears that as a Catholic he would take orders from the Pope, extolled the value of separation of church and state. Romney, on the other hand, said he would generally discuss the history of faith and the "great moral heritage" of the country.

"I want to make sure that we maintain our religious heritage in this country, not of a particular brand of faith, if you will, not of a particular sect or denomination, but rather the great moral heritage that we have that's so critical to the future of this country," Romney told reporters yesterday. He said he drafted the speech last week. "So, I'll be talking about faith in America - not my own faith in America - and of course I'll answer the obligatory questions, as he did."

Given the target audience many saw for Romney's speech - evangelical Christians in Iowa - it would be impossible for him to reiterate Kennedy's speech, several observers said.

"Romney's problem is he's talking to people who don't necessarily think that church and state should be separate," said Dante Scala, an associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.

"He has to find a way to say, 'Yes, I'm a person of faith, whose decisions will be shaped by that faith, but don't take that faith seriously,' " said Mark Silk, a professor of religion in public life at Trinity College.

Romney's challenge is also bigger than Kennedy's in that the former president's faith had more followers and was more widely understood, said Jan Shipps, a retired professor at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis and the author of Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition.

When she was growing up in the South, Shipps said, everyone she knew was a Protestant.

"Everybody was afraid of the Catholics, but at least we knew what it was," Shipps said. "Romney's problem is that people don't know what Mormonism is, but they're suspicious of it. So Romney has a bigger problem than Kennedy had.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormon Church as it is commonly called, is founded on the teachings of Joseph Smith, who as a young man in upstate New York said he found gold plates inscribed with text in Egyptian-like characters. Smith translated those into the Book of Mormon.

Among the distinctive tenets of Mormonism is that Jesus will return to the North American continent. Although Mormonism is often linked in the public mind with polygamy, which was practiced by church members for its first 60 years, the church banned multiple marriages in 1890. The church is sometimes seen as mysterious, which some attribute to the fact that nonbelievers are banned from entering the Mormon temple.

In religious circles, there is vigorous debate over whether the Mormon faith should be called Christian. Other Christian faiths consider the Bible complete, while Mormons believe also in the Book of Mormon, said David Lamarre-Vincent, the executive director of the New Hampshire Council of Churches, an umbrella group that works with Christian sects.

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