I was struck by the bald attack on non-believers:
“Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.”
He went beyond assailing “secularism” (though he did that too), to specifically give non-believers a lower status. Politicians have long decried “secularism,” a vague all-purpose enemy. And of course they invariably implicitly treat non-believers as second-class citizens by relentlessly celebrating the value of religion. But Romney went a step farther, saying he would not be a “friend” or “ally” of the non-believer.
About three percent of the population are atheists or agnostics, according to a study by the Pew Religious Forum. Another 7.5% are “secularists” who have no religious affiliation and few or no religious beliefs or practices.
That means there are four or five times as many non-believers as there are Mormons.

I can’t quite remember a candidate declaring his distaste for a particular demographic group quite this way. Non-believers and secularists may not be a big voting bloc in the Republican primaries, but 10.5% is roughly 22 million people.
Romney had a difficult task. He wanted to be very pro-religion to appeal to religious conservative voters. At the same time, he needed a philosophical formulation that would assuage Christians about his Mormonism. What he came up with was a formula that rallied all people of faith against a common enemy: secularism and secularists.