Mormon Jon Huntsman raising daughter in Hindu faith. (From MADMIKESAMERICA)



Unlike Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman is willing to talk about his faith.
GOP candidates for the presidency, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are both Mormons. While Romney is unwilling to be engaged on the subject of his faith, Jon Huntsman speaks freely about faith and his spiritual life.

Jon Huntsman’s grandfather was an apostle in the Mormon church, his father is a lay leader in the church, and Huntsman himself was a Mormon missionary to Taiwan, which gave him the language skills that helped land his last job, as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to China.


Jon Huntsman says he is not “overly religious”
“I can’t say I’m overly religious,” Huntsman told Fortune magazine when he was still ambassador. “I get satisfaction from many different types of religions and philosophies.”

Salt Lake Tribune Washington correspondent Thomas Burr notes that Huntsman and his wife are raising their adopted Indian daughter in her native Hindu faith and that another Huntsman daughter was married in an Episcopal church. The Huntsman’s have seven children total with another daughter, Gracie Mei adopted from China.

“Jon Huntsman’s Mormon roots run deep,” said Burr, who has covered Huntsman since his days as Utah’s governor in the mid-2000s. “Personally, Huntsman says he considers himself a Mormon, but he’s also stressed that he gets inspiration from many faiths.”

It’s a contrast to the way the other Mormon candidate in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Burr said. “Those who know Huntsman and Romney would say that Romney is very active in his church, while Huntsman hasn’t been as active.”

Moreover, he told Newsweek magazine in December 2010 that the LDS Church doesn’t have a monopoly on his spiritual life. In an interview with Time magazine, he stated that he is more spiritual than religious and that his membership in the LDS Church is “tough to define”. Huntsman has said that he and his wife draw from an array of sources for inspiration, stating:

“I was raised a Mormon, Mary Kaye was raised Episcopalian, our kids have gone to Catholic school, I went to a Lutheran school growing up in Los Angeles. I have an adopted daughter from India who has a very distinct Hindu tradition, one that we would celebrate during Diwali. So you kind of bind all this together.”

Jon Huntsman should appeal to the more moderate, thinking conservatives, but will he?