Ever since John McCain announced that a pistol-packing, moose-dressing, beehive-sporting hockey mom from Alaska was his vice presidential nominee, journalists, bloggers, and Democrats have all speculated about her Pentecostal religion. Does Palin speak in tongues? Does she believe that the battle of Armageddon is imminent? Does she talk to God? Does she believe the Rapture is coming?
According to Matthew Avery Sutton, an assistant professor of history at Washington State University, the answer to all of these questions is probably yes but so what?
If there are reasons to be concerned about Sarah Palin, Sutton says her faith is not among them.
The author of the award-winning “Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America” (Harvard, 2007), Sutton says Palin is smart enough and pragmatic enough to separate her faith from her policy initiatives just as religiously devout leaders have been doing in the United States for centuries.
“If Palin’s beliefs are cause for alarm, then we should never have elected John F. Kennedy,” Sutton wrote in a recent editorial piece posted online on George Mason University’s History News Network. “After all, the Roman Catholic Church of 1960 wanted to bring down the wall of separation between church and state. Shouldn’t we have kept him out of the White House?”
In fact, Sutton says that over the past century Pentecostals have done a better job than most other religious groups of adapting their faith to modern American culture.
“Furthermore, dating back to the barn-storming days of Aimee Semple McPherson, they have not been afraid to let women assume leadership positions,” he says. “They balance a primitive yearning for a personal relationship with God with a pragmatic willingness to play ball with people of other faiths. They are not usually zealots. If elected, Palin will be no different.”
Sutton, who currently is working on a new book on evangelical politics and apocalyptic thought, also recently discussed Palin and her faith in an interview with National Public Radio in San Diego. That interview can be heard online at https://www.kpbs.org/radio/these_days;id=12767. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Sutton can be reached at (509) 335-8374 (office), (805) 252-5569 (cell) or by e-mail at sutton@wsu.edu.
