For God's Sake!

I don't have any trouble finding reasons not to vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin, but here's a bad one: Sarah Palin is convinced that the war in Iraq is God's will.

Is that what Palin thinks? The evidence is a prayer she offered, but that seems to get misquoted in a small but crucial way in most of the versions I've seen. Here's the crucial line as the opposition hears it:

Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God

This makes it sound like a direct claim: our leaders are sending the troops on a mission from God. But here's what she actually said, quoted more fully:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God's will.

Oddly enough, I pasted this quote (which matches the version I've heard on the radio and seen on youtube) from a piece by David Knowles, who thinks she's saying that the war is God's will. (You can read the Knowles piece here.) But read what she actually said: pray that the leaders are doing God's will; pray that there is a plan and that it's God's plan. Her prayer simply doesn't say what people keep saying it says. Although it's more specific, it's not so very different from prayers you can hear in many a liberal church any Sunday: that our leaders should be guided by God. That's very different from saying that we know what God wants and that our leaders are definitely doing it.

It's also been pointed out that Palin had some thoughts on the matter of God's interest in the pipeline:

I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get the gas line built, so pray for that.

This strikes me as a little silly (I don't know what would make someone believe they knew what God thinks about pipelines), but it hardly seems worth getting worried about.

More generally: I dare say that there's a good deal in Sarah Palin's religious outlook that I'd find myself uncomfortable with. Some of it might matter politically and some of it might not. But let's not make stuff up. She didn't say that the war is God's will, and anyone who actually pays attention to what she did say can figure out for themselves.

Does she believe that the war is God's will? Who knows? Believers believe all kinds of things. Liberals are appalled by some of the things religious conservatives believe, and conservatives are equally appalled by some of what their liberal religious kin think. Sometimes these sorts of worries rise to the level of legitimate political issue, though background views about what God wants aren't really so different from more general views about what's good, right and true. More or less everyone has views on those sorts of things. Let's argue about the ideas themselves. Can you imagine what the campaign would be like if people did that a little more often?