After Sarah Palin was selected by John McCain as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, reporters asked me whether the pick was desperate, brilliant, or risky. I said, "yes." Only time will answer the question about the wisdom of McCain's choice. But soon after the announcement, the firestorm began. I said that it was a double standard to criticize this mother for running for high office because she had five children, including a special needs child and a pregnant teenage daughter. Unless we are also going to ask men (fathers) the same question, we should not ask it of a working woman who decides to run for political office. Families in public life certainly need to take good care of their kids, but that is a mutual and family responsibility, not just for the mom.
And then some media started going after Palin's faith and church. One night I watched Keith Olbermann of MSNBC say something like "Sarah Palin goes to a church where they speak in tongues, believe in the Rapture, and think you can pray away the gay." Please Keith, you may not understand religion, but don't offend evangelicals and Pentecostals who either like Palin's politics or don't, but see nothing wrong with their religion. Palin was a curveball to the Obama campaign, which at first had no real idea as to how to respond. But while they made many mistakes, they didn't resort to the attacks on her family and faith that some in the media did.
But now Republicans are crying crocodile tears and accusing anybody who questions Palin's record, experience, or readiness to lead as part of the liberal cultural elite that is just out to get ordinary people like Palin and the rest of us. Yesterday I spoke to a newspaper columnist, a committed Christian, who knows he will be attacked as anti-Christian if he focuses on the political facts of Palin. Is she the reformer she claims to be? What is her knowledge of the world, of foreign policy issues, of the complicated relationship between the use of diplomacy and force in conflict situations? Do her statements and positions on energy and economic policy comport with the facts and with what is needed to make major changes in direction on both? And most of all, does her experience, knowledge, and perspective give her the judgment, competence, and prudence to become the next president of the United States should something happen to the president?
Those are entirely fair questions for Palin, Joe Biden, John McCain, or Barack Obama. They are about the facts, the issues (not the personalities as I discussed in my last post), and the leadership qualities (which is different) needed to govern the country.
Jim Wallis is the author of The Great Awakening
Why does Jim Wallis think people who find Christianity ridiculous "simply don't get it?"
Speaking in tongues? You mean like Healy Healy Lama Anahanou? My roomate in seminary was Assemblies of God. They believed in tongues. One night we were out drinking and he confessed to me that to speak in tongues, you simply start babbling.
The Rapture? It isn't a biblical doctrine. It is a hodgepodge of scripture passages ranging from Enoch in the Old Testament who "walked with God, and he was not, for God took him," to the lack of the phrase "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches'" after Revelation 3, presumably because all the Christians are raptured. It's about as biblical as the Heaven's Gate comet ride.
Answered prayer? Whenever he does, it's trumpeted as proof of his existence. Most of time when he doesn't, it's "thy will be done, Lord."
Jim, we get it. We just don't believe it, just like we don't believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or the Great Pumpkin. Some of us have grown up. In my case, it took awhile, but I finally did. We just don't believe, and we certainly don't want people with that world view making decisions that affect our lives and the world.
Obermann's "pray away the gay" comment was spot on and speaks volumes about an organization that is not only out of touch with the reality of this subject but finds a large sub-group of our society to be an abomination. Have you ever heard one of these people talk about gays? Their shrill assertion that being gay is a "lifestyle choice?" The causal bigotry used in every reference to gay people?
Why can't they just "live and let live?"
TRANSPARENCY??? You mean EXCEPT when government is trying to bring transparency to the people with troopergate, THEN she is going to stall and block and not cooperate and sue.
WHAT A JOKE!! This woman is transparent!
I agree in principle Palin ought to be questioned on her record and her policy positions and not on her religious beliefs. There is, however, one pragmatic exception for all fundamentalist millenarian Christians who aspire to the office of the president: how will your belief affect the policy related to the "nuke" button and war making in general? This is not unlike questioning a Quaker how her pacifist belief would affect her role as the commander-in-chief!
Excellent analogy!
John Kennedy had to fight through an enormous amount of resistance because he was Catholic. In his words: "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."
In Sarah Palin and in the militant advocacy of the Religious Right, we see an inversion of this call for separation of church and state; we see the walls crumbling. Kennedy presciently warned: "Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril."
THIS would be that time of great national peril.
What we're doing is taking a very specific prohibition against forming a state church and treating it as some abstract, catch-all pronouncement on religion, as if our founders were intent on keeping "religion" out of politics and/or public life in general. (And some extremists on our side believe just the latter.) I'm not sure why our founders would have wanted to treat any institution, including religion, in such a manner, given that their intent was to form a representative democracy. I'd go on, but the site's word limit says no.