by John Mark Reynolds [author, academic]

Sarah Palin is busting glass ceilings, but with views drawn more from the Gospels than from the New York Times. Her opponents are aghast. It is not supposed to be this way!

She keeps committing Christianity in public . . . sending secular extremists off the deep edge.

They twist what she says because she frightens them. Her request for prayer for our war and, yes, even an Alaskan pipeline, is part of a long American tradition.

The Wall Street Journal (1/4/08) notes Franklin D. Roosevelt offered religious justifications for the New Deal. Was he a theocrat? Regarding his social programs, President Roosevelt said that “[the] object of all our striving . . . should be to help citizens realize the abundant life Christ said he came to bring.”

This makes Palin sound downright moderate! We were not a theocracy in the nineteen thirties and forties and Franklin D. Roosevelt was no theocrat. The next pundit who hyperventilates about the perils of Palin prayers should produce nothing but laughter.

American political leaders often have talked about God’s will, but should they? The answer depends on what is meant. My own church is more hesitant to call anything God’s will than Roosevelt was because we mean more by it than he did.

In my tradition, saying something is God’s will means that it is something about which few, if any, traditional Christians disagreed at any time in history. The case is so conclusive that it is all but closed. Like Saint Augustine, we are hesitant to speak of God’s will for any particular national event since God’s will is complex and our understanding so limited. If we very well might be wrong, we never call it “God’s will.”

In my experience, churches like those Governor Palin attends use “God’s will” in a looser way. This can lead to confusion especially when secularists with a political agenda use misunderstandings to fuel fear and hatred of different religious ideas.

When Governor Palin says a gas pipeline is God’s will, she means less than my church would. We would be saying, “The church universal is convinced that this is almost surely right.” In my experience Christians like Palin are saying, “After great thought, this is what I think is right at the moment.” Just as the word “subway” means something different in New York than it does in London, so “God’s will” means something different in certain Evangelical and Pentecostal churches than it does in my own.

Palin was expressing her convictions about the pipeline, that it was the right thing to do, and asking for prayerful support. In the context of the religious dialect of her church, it is a gross misunderstanding to think she meant more than that. It was not a statement that she is sure or that anyone who opposes the “pipeline” is a minion of Satan!

The language difference is easy to illustrate. My church might say, “God’s will is for Christians to feed the poor. We will give money to this charity to do so.” We are sure about what God wants done, but not sure about the means. This is pointed out by keeping the two things separate.

Palin’s church might say, “God’s will is for us to feed the poor through this charity.” They know the end (fed poor) is more certainly God’s will than the means (this charity), but for practical purposes they conflate the two. They certainly know the difference.

Every community has a way of saying, “I have thought about this, and this is what I feel is right.” In secular communities, often people will argue that theirs is the only reasonable position. They might be closed minded about their ideas, cloaking their narrowness in the word “reason,” but they don’t have to be! They are staking out their rhetorical turf because they think they are right.

In the same way, certain religious people think and pray about what to do and decide what is right. They believe they know God’s will thereby and are honest enough to say so. As long as they admit when they are wrong, and are open to being wrong, then there is no harm in their beliefs.

Whether clothed in secular or religious language, people act on what they think is right and if they are sane, they are open to being wrong. Being able to change one’s mind (the dreaded flip flop!) is a healthy sign at times, while never admitting an error in discerning what is right is frightening.

Palin has recently been accused of “being for” a thing “before she was against it” so it appears that even her opponents concede she is capable of changing her mind!

Of course, it would help clarify the situation if the AP had not chosen an inflammatory headline. The AP headline implies that Governor Palin said that the Iraq War “is a task from God.” If she had said it, it would not be as strong as the public prayer of Franklin Roosevelt on D-Day in World War II:

“And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment — let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose. With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.”

The worst that can be said of her is that the Alaska governor hunts like Teddy Roosevelt and prays like Franklin Roosevelt. If her opponents keep up their foolish attacks on her religion, she is likely to win like both.

However, the situation is more complicated than that because Governor Palin did not quite say what the AP suggests.

Regarding the Iraq War, she said: “Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God, that’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.” This sentence is confusing, but the most reasonable interpretation is that Palin is asking for prayer that the leaders of the nation do God’s will. She is praying that whatever plan they have that it be God’s plan and not their own.

She is not assuming, at least in this statement, that the particular plan is God’s plan. Her statement about the war in its full context is much less strong than the AP headline would suggest. Christians should pray that America is, to borrow a phrase from Lincoln, on God’s side. She wants God’s plan to be ours. It is not even obvious that she is sure the war as it was fought was God’s plan given other things she has said. If we are to fight, then she wants us to fight with justice and righteousness.

Even if you don’t believe in God, it is hard to see the harm in this desire. Perhaps at her inauguration she can lead us in prayer for the end of this war, using the words of Abraham Lincoln:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

copyright 2008 John Mark Reynolds

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 9:08 am and is filed under Reynolds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.