As chronicled in America by Heart, Sarah Palin had a life-changing epiphany at the age of eleven. "I walked outside, " she tells us, "looked out at the Chugach Mountains to one side and Mt. Mc Kinley to the other and it hit me: if God knew what He was doing when He created Alaska, then He certainly had some ideas in mind when He created a speck like me.* It was then that I realized that surely God has a purpose for all of us--and He expects a lot from us! From that day forward, I put my life in God's hands. Feeling reborn, I moved forward..." You can't expect systematic logical coherence from an eleven year-old (or, for that matter, from an epiphany), so it's best just to disregard both the dubious and unsupported premise ("if God knew what He was doing when He created Alaska") and the nonsequiturs that follow ("God has a purpose for all of us--and He expects a lot from us!"), and to take the incident merely as illustrative of Sarah's deeply felt belief in God. And, perhaps, as illustrative of the evocative and inspirational power of striking landscapes--trust me, I live in Montana and I know what that's like.
In any case, just as Sarah's entire life--at least from the age of eleven onwards--bespeaks her faith in God and God's purposes, so too (she says) does America's history rely on a similar faith. You don't have to take Ms. Palin's word for it; you need only review the many citations she offers from the likes of John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Mitt Romney, all of them attesting to the intrinsic connection between religion, freedom, and America. To quote Mr. Romney: "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom...Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. Corporations are people, my friend."^ And to quote George Washington (paraphrased by Ms. Palin): "morality itself cannot be sustained without the support of religious belief."^^
This particular chapter ("The Indispensable Support of Freedom") is about as innocuous as it gets. You'd have to really, really want to pick a fight with Sarah Palin to do any more than yawn your way through its predictable pieties. That she quotes Mitt Romney and Antonin Scalia right along with Abraham Lincoln**might seem risible--but why bother? When Sarah concludes "I believe my country, too, has a purpose: to be a shining city on a hill, a beacon of liberty and hope for all the peoples of the earth" while at the same time adding "I don't believe any of us can claim to know the mind of the Creator who gave us life and liberty," then you realize you're not being invited to a theological or metaphysical discussion; you're just being asked to nod and say "Amen". I managed the nodding part, at least.
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*Such becoming modesty, such humble self-deprecation--"a speck like me": Sarah, you are a very special speck, and don't you forget it. ("A Speck Like Me" would be a nice title, though.)
^Alright, I took that last sentence out of context and tossed it in there.
^^She adds, "This is not a politically correct notion today," though of course it's plenty politically correct on her side of the aisle. Have you noticed that when people say, "It's not politically correct," they are really just saying "Not everyone agrees with me"? They're also, of course, claiming to be brave and independent thinkers--Sarah Palin, alas, is neither of those.
**Though she never mentions Lincoln's lifelong religious doubts, it's to her credit that Ms. Palin quotes from his "Second Inaugural," the most profound, haunting, and unsettling words ever uttered by an American President. To her further credit, she even says that Lincoln "resisted the temptation to invoke God in support of his cause." I'm not convinced that Sarah has learned from Lincoln's example, but I'm glad she gets at least that much of his point.
Addendum: Typepad has recently added a neat gimmick from "Zemanta" that adds, and customizes, links within its blogs; bloggers like myself are given options as to which references in each post are given links. I hope I've chosen wisely, and that readers enjoy Zemanta's links to "God," "Alaska," the "Chugach Mountains," "Abraham Lincoln," and even to "Antonin Scalia".
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