Sarah Palin loves the limelight. Despite that and the
limitations that she shares with other people who rely more on
instinct than on study to answer political questions, Palin also
has an impressive talent for living rent-free in progressive heads.
That talent has little to do with her appearance or her willingness
to coin words like “refudiate,” but lots to do with the way she
embraces life and faith publicly. No one else with comparable name
recognition demolishes progressive dogma just by getting up in the
morning.
Without ever leaving her comfort zone, Palin introduced a
corollary to Ramesh Ponnuru’s assertion that “abortion corrupts
everything it touches.” Ponnuru wrote that more than ten years ago,
in a career-making 1998 essay
called “Dead Reckoning” that rocked both National Review
and First Things. Whether Sarah Palin ever read the piece
matters not at all.
Palin can be every bit as prickly or superficial as her
enemies claim, but together with son Trig and daughter Bristol, the
winsome Wasillan and her underrated husband bookend Ponnuru’s point
by reminding anyone paying attention that pro-life witness
refreshes some people and infuriates others. You might even say
that there are echoes in the deceptively pedestrian Palin lives of
what C.S. Lewis once called “the weight of glory.” (I’ll pay no
attention to criticisms of overreach or “dysfunctional karmic
antennae” from people who said nothing when a San Francisco
newspaper columnist described our current president as a
“lightworker” before his ham-fisted attempts to treat 300 million
people as a community in need of organizing went kablooey
).
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend can’t claim the Palin cachet,
but the former lieutenant governor of Maryland is not above calling
for close air support in her country-club battle with Palin-style
conservatism. Townsend took to the pages of the Washington
Post
earlier this month to defend her uncle John against charges of
malpractice that Sarah Palin had leveled against him in her book,
America by Heart. Ironically, although her essay suggests
that Townsend found the Palin book title saccharine, and its
content fey, twee, or manipulative, she read the book anyway. They
all do.
Long before shooting a moose on camera to send at least
one leftist into “late night fist-pumping delirium,” Caribou Barbie
wrote, in effect, that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Greater
Houston Ministerial Association subverted American principle rather
than expressing it. As even younger readers may have heard, that
speech was Kennedy’s “Don’t hate me for being Catholic, because I
won’t take orders from the pope” sop to evangelical Protestant
leaders whose support he needed at the time.
Washington Post editors gave
Townsend 1,500 words to defend her uncle’s attempt to
compartmentalize his faith, but the “coulda been a contender”
lament that they got for their trouble only exposed Townsend as
another palooka in a family full of them.
Townsend asserts that she gave America by Heart a
careful reading, from which she came away sure that Palin supports
an unconstitutional religious test for public office.
Inconveniently, we have to take Townsend’s word for that, because
Palin actually says no such thing: the closest she gets is to
express disappointment at John F. Kennedy’s failure to reconcile
his “private faith and public role,” and his unwillingness to tell
fellow countrymen “how his faith had enriched him.” Palin did not
use Hilaire Belloc as a counter-example, but he would have been a
better choice than Mitt Romney, whom she did mention. In 1906, when
Belloc ran for a seat in the British Parliament as a representative
of the Liberal party, his stem-winding stump speech included a
ringing affirmation of faith: “Gentlemen, I am a Roman Catholic. As
far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out
of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and
tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my
religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of
being made your representative.”
John F. Kennedy would have done well to follow that
precedent, only he didn’t, and so one of his nieces was left to
burnish a flawed legacy.
Deeply suspicious of the dog whistle for conservatives
that she seems to think Palin keeps in a drawer near her Naughty
Monkey shoes, Townsend reasons that any such testimony by JFK would
have opened the door to American theocracy, and praises her uncle
for having had wisdom enough to realize that his religious beliefs
were nobody else’s business. By then, the opposing camps are
plainly visible: Palin says “Cards on the table, please,” while
Townsend parries with “To demand that citizens display their
religious beliefs attacks the very foundation of our
nation.”
Who makes more sense? Enter Rev. Charles J. Chaput, the
Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver, Colorado. Archbishop Chaput is
not a man who can be credibly accused of operating from a theology
of “Christian Dominionism,” as some of Palin’s more excitable
detractors say she does. But in phrasing that Sarah Palin would
approve, Chaput called JFK’s 1960 speech “sincere, compelling,
articulate — and wrong.”
Speaking this past spring at Houston Baptist University,
Archbishop Chaput noted that “Real
Christian faith is always personal, but it’s never private.” That
was one of the things about which John F. Kennedy was mistaken.
Moreover, said Chaput, Kennedy’s remarks in Houston
“profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but
of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political
conversation.” And “Today, half a century later, we’re paying for
the damage.”
In other words, Sarah Palin’s criticism of the Kennedy
approach to faith accords substantially with criticisms offered by
another Christian of unquestioned acumen. Not only that, but Chaput
came loaded for bear, quoting another scholar to buttress the point
that John F. Kennedy “secularized the American presidency in order
to win it.”
This is not a debate that Townsend can win. She thinks
Sarah Palin is making a subtle bid for a new Inquisition, but if
Townsend had familiarized herself with Archbishop Chaput’s similar
argument, she would have known better. Instead, she writes about
the “deep current of faith” in the Kennedy family, praises Uncle
John for courage of the kind that Henry V tried to kindle in his
men before the Battle of Agincourt, and dances around Senator Ted
Kennedy’s support for abortion (correctly described by Sarah Palin
as “directly at odds with his Catholic faith”) by disingenuously
suggesting that Catholic moral teaching is of no more import than
whether the Third Sunday of Advent is marked by rose-colored
candles, because “the hierarchy’s positions can change,” and “in
our church, we have an obligation to help bring about those
changes.”
Ha! We may as well cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,
because Townsend leaves no room for concepts like fidelity to “the
deposit of faith” or (as Christians in the Reformed tradition
sometimes put it) “standing firm in the faith once delivered to the
saints.”
When Palin contends that “morality cannot be sustained
without the support of religious beliefs,” Townsend misreads this
acknowledgement of our collective debt to Judeo-Christian
intellectual and religious capital as “a wholesale attack on
countless Americans.” Has she never heard John Adams’ famous quip
that “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people;
it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other”?
It should also be remembered that threats of theocracy do
not typically come from Christians. John Calvin is long dead, the
church courts of the Spanish Inquisition were more often merciful
than the state courts of the same time, and — apart from being a
fractious bunch — we Christians are the “Give to Caesar what is
Caesar’s” people. Connecticut’s Danbury Baptist Church was in on
the ground floor of Jeffersonian thinking about the separation of
church and state, and William Penn was famous for showing why a
concept that worked at the federal level should not be taken as
holy writ by the states. Not to get all triumphalist about it, but
— like the concept of free inquiry in universities— religious
freedom is an outgrowth of Christian theology, not the other way
around.
Townsend’s essay shows no evidence of her having
considered any of that. Instead, one gets
the impression that she agrees with the people who think Sarah
Palin pines to turn America into a heaping helping of God, Gold,
and Guns, as though the only diversity for which Palin and her ilk
have any respect is a diversity of greenback denominations and
shell sizes.
What those critics never explain is what gives them reason
to think Sarah Palin would settle on God, Gold, and Guns as the
unifying thread for every American from Booker T. Washington to
Marco Rubio, Alvin York, and Mia Hamm. Ignoring weasel wording from
high-profile Kennedys and other purveyors of the “religion is
private” line in their own camp, critics charge Palin with
“extremism” and hope (to God?) that the charge sticks. Oddly
enough, some of them tried the same tactic with “Cowboy” George W.
Bush and “Nap-taker-in-Chief” Ronald Reagan. Perhaps the “politics
of personal destruction” is the leftist version of “Now bring us
some figgy pudding.”
They’ll have to do better if they hope to be
persuasive.
