10/10/08: Palin speaks in code, and may govern by it

I never deliberately set out to turn my column into "my thoughts on taboo dinner party topics," but the recent vice presidential debate brings me reluctantly back to thoughts I expressed months ago on the place of religion in politics — namely, that interrogating politicians on their religious views helps no one, least of all the church.

But then there was Gov. Sarah Palin last week behind the debate podium, speaking Evangelical.

At the Christian college I attended, we referred to the jargon of our faith as "Christianese," often derisively. We considered it a problem that if we spoke of "the indwelling of the Holy Spirit" or used a shorthand reference to Scripture, non-Christians couldn’t understand us.

President Bush has been cited as speaking, occasionally, in a sort of evangelical code or Christianese. He’s said Christ is his favorite philosopher and considered himself "called" to the governorship of Texas. In 2002, he quoted from the gospel of John in reference to America’s prosecution of war.

The reference may have slipped past non-Christians and some media, but Evangelicals caught it.
Palin, like Bush, doesn’t seem to be worried that her words won’t be understood by the uninitiated.

I worry, though.

Palin’s "folksy charm" makes her seem unaffected and unscripted. (Darn right.) But when she said in the debate that President Reagan called the country "a city on a hill," she was almost certainly being disingenuous. Palin knows it wasn’t Reagan who first used that phrase; it was Jesus.

Evangelicals know, too.

Religiously rooted references in speeches are buzzwords for Evangelicals. Any politician able to apply Christianese appropriately can be trusted to run the country as God would want it run — or close enough. Palin is a native speaker.

When she refers to never allowing "a second Holocaust," for instance, something she’s done both in interviews and in the vice presidential debate, she is not referring to special intelligence she’s gotten from the CIA warning of a threat to Israel: She’s almost certainly basing her attitude and unwillingness to "second-guess Israel" on a literal interpretation of a Bible passage in which God says that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.

Basing foreign policy on interpretation of an Old Testament prophet’s statement may seem far-fetched, but from a vice presidential candidate who asserted that finishing the Alaskan pipeline was God’s will, the possibility needs to be taken seriously.

Christianese usually passes by unnoticed by the nonreligious and the media. When conservative religious ideas come into public notice, it can be jarring: think of Jerry Falwell’s statements after Hurricane Katrina when he blamed that natural disaster on God’s wrath, or Pat Robertson’s call to have the president of Venezuela assassinated. At the time it seemed that less conservative or religious thinkers and commentators dismissed these kinds of opinions as being held by only a few basically crazy people.

They’re not. Every Evangelical did not agree with Falwell’s "God’s wrath" theory or Robertson’s assassination suggestion, but exit polls from the past two presidential elections put white Evangelicals at between 14 percent and 23 percent of the population, and 78 percent of them voted for Bush in 2004.

Sarah Palin is talking to them, and in their own language.