Sarah Palin 'Deeply Religious' - A Positive ?

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Sarah Palin 'Deeply Religious' - A Positive ?

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Now Public Contributor E. Lizardo
August 30, 2008 5:53 PM EDT

Certainly one of the things today taking the world by storm is John McCain's announcement of his choice for Vice Presidential running-mate, Sarah Palin, currently serving as the first woman governor of the great state of Alaska. Many, including this writer may be ashamed to admit they've never even heard of her before.

Already, many articles are up on the net divulging a slew of heretofor unknown facts about the Governor's personal life and public career. We have learned that prior to her current job, she had served for a number of years as the mayor of an Alaskan town of something more than 8000 people. She once was a beauty pageant contestant. She is married to her high school sweetheart who happens to work as a middle manager somewhere in local industry. She likes snowmobiles, and has had her political run-ins with Big Oil.

Also, we are told, she happens to be, 'deeply religious.'

Not being certain about what her religious affiliations might be, I had to look it up.

Just double checking. No suprises there!

Obviously, an emminently 'normal' individual. One who is likely indeed to connect on many, many levels with America's heartland, and perhaps most notably, especially with the feminine side of that essential US national voting block.

After learning all these things, McCain's choice now may call to mind such expressions of traditional wisdom as, 'Crazy like a fox' ...

Deeply Religious - What's In a Sub-Text ?
Knowing next to nothing about Palin's religious affiliations when I read the above cited National Review article, it is interesting to note that as my eyes scanned across the phrase, 'deeply religious,' my mind immediately pulled in a lot of sub-text not explicitly written. The automatic understanding which arose in this author's mind presented a picture of a deeply religious 'Christian' woman, or perhaps one who is 'fundamentalist Christian.'

Here the unwritten sub-text was of course that she is Christian, of whatever type, maybe Lutheran, Presbyterian, probably not Catholic, whatever, although that phrase, 'deeply religious,' might apply equally to, I suppose, any other concievable religion whatsoever. Yet, from the way it was written, with no other qualifying adjectives, such as Shinto, Confucian, Wiccan, Buddhist, Moslem, or Hindu for instance, I just 'knew' what the writer meant.

This automatic mental process of sub-texting is very interesting to this writer, and hopefully is interesting to others as well.

Religious Affiliation - A Positive ?
Of course we see the point here, that 'deeply religious,' is merely a coded way of saying in an indirect manner that Palin is a 'deeply committed Christian.' And this is fine for me personally, since I am more or less a half-breed Christian myself, complete with eight full years of parochial Catholic primary education and Mass first thing in the morning each and every day, and one who may still clearly recall in vivid and shocking detail memories of our school's principal, that towering figure of a woman, Sister Mary Black and Decker, in all her immense and terrifying glory ...

For others, perhaps of differing religious persuasions, I am not so certain. For example, if I were to imagine being Muslim and hearing this news, would I feel any great sense of relief or even personal safety for that matter?

Anyway, I will not allow considerations of this type to ruin an otherwise very promising article by dragging it off the cliff into oblivion, as it were, by asking questions as naive as, 'What ever happened to the sepration of church and state?'

A Digression
As chance would have it, I am currently in the process of re-reading the entire series, more or less, of Patrick O'Brian's critically acclaimed historical seafaring books, The Aubry-Maturin novels. Currently I am rather toward the beginning of number 16, entitled, 'The Wine-Dark Sea.'

Just this morning I came upon a passage which seems somehow very apropo to the topic of this article, at least in the sense of going to show that many, many religions have been part of our culture for a very, very long time, and these many different faiths don't always see things eye to eye ...

And I quote -