Charles Gibson shows little cultural understanding of American Christianity in Sarah Palin’s interview.

Charles Gibson shows little cultural understanding of American Christianity in the interview with Sarah Palin. He just doesn’t understand the issues well enough to be effective.

In the video below, it’s just the bit that has to do with the “God ” statements. It’s obvious that Palin, in the original statements spoke in a way that was unclear. All she needs to do then is clarify. Any Evangelical understands exactly what she was trying to say, and what she was trying to say was neither strange nor immoderate. I was listening to “the Bill Handel show” while driving in to work last week. He’s usually a pretty sensible guy, but having had minimal exposure to Evangelical sentiments was as prone as the rest of the dis-informed media types to see things that weren’t there. No matter what an Evangelical of whatever background says Handel can only hear Pat Robertson; hardly representative of historic Evangelical thought on these things. On the “John and Ken Show” while driving home, they were laying out the same kind of unthoughtful rubric. Again, neither have any exposure to 3/4Th’s of the country’s theological understanding of these things.

I seriously doubt that Gibson or the others have ever bothered to read a good commentary on the Bible, just to get in on the debate, or have taken a class in basic elementary theology, or have any background in Christian ethics the way the majority of those in the U.S. do. So they hear something like this and re-interpret it into the only form they are capable of assimilating.

But that they are corporately, if unintentionally, pushing a warped interpretation of what Palin was saying is beyond doubt. Do they care? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.

She was just saying that we should pray that the missions that we send our kids out to fight are in line with what God would have us do. We evangelicals say this kind of thing all the time so we intuitively understand her. If she had wanted to say the war was a mission from God she would have said that. She was saying that we should all hope and pray that the war is a mission from God. Really, that is incredibly different. The first would claim that the mere action itself was right apart from status. The second says that the things that we are trying to do seem to the best of our understanding to be in line with God’s intent that we love our neighbor as ourselves, protect the innocent, and fight for justice. Now we always hope that that is what we are doing. If it is what we are doing then the mission is from God. If we are wrong, it’s not.

In any case, to pray that we are sending our military out on a mission that is from God, is very different from what Charles Gibson accused her of saying by cutting the sentence in half. She should have called him on it but had too much class. Class is not always appropriate when being interviewed by men of low moral character. Instead he asked why she said, “we are sending our military out on a mission that is from God, when really she said we should pray that such is the case. It was a low blow from Charley, but at the end of the day, the people that already like Sarah understand that, and just like her more because of it.

Christopher Neiswonger