Is Sarah Palin a Christian?
While taking a break from work today, I watched the TV in the lounge. Sarah Palin was on the screen, launching into a speech about Barack Obama’s association with William Ayers. Behind her, hundreds of young women were applauding vigorously.
Barack Obama was 8 years old and attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia when William Ayers, a member of The Weather Underground, engaged, along with a number of other people, in violent actions intended to bring about a revolution. During that turbulent period of American history, there were other violent groups, including The Symbionese Liberation Army. If you read Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, you will learn that violent protest has not been uncommon in the history of our country.
Reading through these Wikipedia articles gives a better understanding of the times. While I do not condone violence as a means to an end, the tactics of The Weather Underground were by no means unusual in our history. Nor were the actions taken by the government to suppress those tactics.
While The Weather Underground was active in the United States, Barack Obama was attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mr. Obama had no association with William Ayers until 1995, when he served on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, along with others.
By the time Mr. Obama met Mr. Ayers, Mr. Ayers had re-integrated himself into main-stream society and was a professor at the University of Chicago.
I was so outraged at what I had seen that I went to speak to one of my fellow workers, who is much more knowledgeable about the Bible than I. I asked her, “Where in the Bible does it say that associating with a sinner stains that person with sin also?” She asked for some context and I explained what I had seen on the TV. She then answered, “Nowhere.”
For Sarah Palin, a self-professed Christian, to excoriate a fellow human being for associating with another human being who sinned is simply un-Christian. Did not Jesus himself associate with sinners and criminals?
Sarah Palin is no Christian, in my opinion. By engaging in the guilt-by-association argument, she has sinned greatly herself. She needs to repent, badly.
Well, I can’t say whether Sarah Palin is a Christian or not–only God knows her heart. But she certainly lied repeatedly about the Bridge to Nowhere. And that lie seemed to pass smoothly and easily through her lips, as though she had gotten plenty of practice. I love the book of James in the New Testament of the Bible because he talks so straightforwardly about true Christianity. In James 1:26 he says, “If any among you seem to be religious and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s [or woman’s] religion is vain.”
Yes, unfortunately, appeals to hatred, ignorance and a simplistic world view do work. Surrender to the Other is a powerful theme in human history. I, too, hope that Obama doesn’t get down in the mud to wrestle with the pigs.
Supposedly Michael Dukakis lost his bid for the presidency through a similar kind of smear campaign. And McCain lost to GWB by way of one. So sadly, they seem to work. I hope Obama bites back some but keeps his cool as well.