I’ve been a “religious” person all my life, and that ranges from the fundamentalist evangelicalism and Pentecostalism of my teen and early adult years all the way over to the more “mainstream” and even “liberal” beliefs of my current Episcopalian/ECLA Lutheran spiritual journey.
I’ve mumbled and grumbled about religion off and on in this website, so I was thinking of such matters when I heard Sen. John McCain’s pick for his presidential nominee, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — who comes from an extremely conservative political and evangelical religious background. Having said all that, I’ll try to convey my honest opinion of her as a candidate. I can’t speak of her as a person because all I know about her is what I’ve read in the media and on the Internet.
I can tell you this: In the conservative evangelical spectrum there are varying viewpoints about women. On the far right, proper or “righteous” women are seen almost as some sort of pure, surreal human equivalents of “Votive candle holders,” i.e., they exist primarily to carry prayers and blessings between God and their husbands/families. Sort of like human equivalents of angels. On the far left (okay, so “far left” is too extreme for ANY range of the fundamentalist/evangelical/Pentecostal spectrum) side of evangelicalism, righteous women are treated with dignity and equality with men, i.e., they are able to be ordained to ministry, teach in churches and/or Bible schools and seminaries, etc.
Somewhere in the middle between human equivalents of angels and humans on an equal par with men is where the vast majority of evangelicals place women. Those who treat women as “second class citizens” or restrict them from ordained ministry really do represent a dying faction.
And I suspect that Gov. Palin, religiously speaking, is closer to the mid-range of that spectrum than the toward the far right. Admittedly, this is based only on my experience with the broad spectrum of Christianity I’ve personally been involved with. And when I tried to find a “denomination” or church label that fit Palin, the best I could find is that she has belonged to some “charismatic,” i.e., Pentecostal churches and sort of identifies her self as “undenominational” or “nondenominational” Protestant. She’s a conservative Bible believer of one stripe or another, for sure.
Enough about religion. I can accept and respect her religious leanings. No problem there. If I can collect even a few of my thoughts on her experience or qualifications for president of the United States, I’ll have something far different to say about that in my next post.
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