Mitt Romney made an important speech at Liberty University, preaching the virtues of tolerance. But some members of the Republican Party he will lead next fall are not listening.

Romney was entering unfriendly territory when he spoke at Liberty, an institution founded by the late Jerry Falwell. It was John McCain, after all, who once denounced Falwell and his fellow evangelical pastor, Pat Robertson, as “agents of intolerance,” and Liberty offers a course that describes Romney’s Mormon faith as a “cult.” That’s a widespread view among the conservative Christians who strongly opposed Romney in the Republican primaries.

Romney confronted this hostility with a graceful, even moving, passage: “People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.”

He’s right about the risk of emphasizing “creed and theology” over “shared moral convictions.” Just look at the tribal savagery pitting Sunni, Shia and Alawite Muslims against each other in countries like Iraq and Syria.

American politics is not that bad. Yet. But there are too many voices in our political life today that reflect the self-righteous rigidity of religious warfare. And Romney could have been giving those voices tacit encouragement when he said: “From the beginning, this nation trusted in God, not man.”