Washington, USA - Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney will this week tackle suspicion among some Americans of his Mormon faith head on, and say how it would impact his presidency, his campaign said Sunday.
Romney's long-awaited address on Thursday will draw immediate comparisons with the speech in Texas given by Democrat John F. Kennedy about his Roman Catholic faith, during his successful presidential campaign in 1960.
The speech, at the library of former president George Bush in College Station, Texas, will come as Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, slips in the polls in Iowa, which holds first leadoff nominating contests on January 3.
"Governor Romney understands that faith is an important issue to many Americans, and he personally feels this moment is the right moment for him to share his views with the nation," said Romney spokesman Kevin Madden.
"Governor Romney personally made the decision to deliver this speech sometime last week," Madden said.
Mormons are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which many mainstream Christians believe is heretical, and some critics have rejected as a cult.
Though Mormons regard themselves as Christians, the faith's central text is the Book of Mormon, which adherents believe was translated from golden tablets discovered by the church's founder Joseph Smith in 1827.
Romney's announcement came hours after Mike Huckabee, his surging rival in Iowa, who is also an ordained Baptist minister, refused to say on a television show whether Romney was a Christian.
"You know, Mitt Romney has to answer that. Nobody can answer for another person, for you, for me," Huckabee said on ABC News show "This Week."
"We all have to personally answer for what our faith is and whether we call ourselves a Christian or we call ourselves Jewish or Muslim. And it's not for me to determine what somebody else's faith is," he said.
A Des Moines Register newspaper poll Sunday showed Huckabee outpacing Romney by 29 to 24 percent in Iowa, which is home to large numbers of evangelical Christian voters.
Rommey leads in New Hampshire, which holds nominating primaries on January 8, but trails national front-runner, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani elsewhere.
Madden said Romney's speech was a chance for him to share his views on religious fredom, and the "grand tradition religious tolerance has played in our nation."
Romney is a multi-millionare former venture capitalist and management consultant, and was credited with rescuing the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City from financial ruin.
He would be the first American to be elected president as Mormon, but there are indications that some Republicans consider his faith to be a problem, especially the crucial evangelical Christian voting bloc.
Various opinion polls have shown large numbers of Americans would not vote for a Mormon candidate.
The 2008 election could however see political conventional wisdom shattered -- the top two Democratic presidential candidates are also trying to break glass ceilings.
Hillary Clinton would be America's first woman president, and Barack Obama would be the black president.
Religion, though nominally kept at bay in politics by the constitutional separation of church and state, plays a much more high profile role in public life in America, than in Western Europe.
Kennedy's speech to a Baptist convention in Texas in 1960, at a time when Roman Catholicism was less accepted in the United States than it is now, was seen to have neutralized the question of his faith in the race.