Church Membership and the U.S. Presidency

Religion seems to be taking a more prominent role in this year's U.S. presidential race than usual, even for this notoriously religious nation.

Mitt Romney took a lot of heat during his run for the U.S. presidency because of his Mormon faith. There were a lot of evangelicals interviewed on TV and radio who said they couldn't imagine voting for a Mormon. When asked for specifics, most cited the fundamental religious differences. Then Barack Obama took heat for being a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where the Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been the pastor for many years and preached some messages that ended up online. Rev. Wright was speaking from his experience and in a tradition of black preachers, but the clips of his sermons on YouTube made him look like an anti-American bigot. Questions were asked of Obama about his own views, and ultimately he made the difficult decision of removing his membership from that congregation. Now there's Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and candidate on the Republican ticket for vice-president of the United States.

Ms. Palin was a long-time member of Wasilla Assembly of God in Alaska before moving her family to a nondenominational congregation. She had been baptized in that church and she appears to have been in regular attendance there. I could try going into the particular beliefs of that congregation and what she heard from the pulpit week after week since childhood, but it would be no fairer to do that to her than it was when it happened to Barack Obama. Many of us attend churches where we frequently disagree with a particular message or don't especially care for the viewpoint of the regular preacher. Are we expected to church hop and shop every time we disagree, or should we get up and walk out when we don't like something we hear? Neither option is especially valid, though there may be serious enough cause at times for either response.

What really matters to me, and what I think should matter to everyone, is what people believe individually. We can only know this through what they've said, written and done. You can know something about a person by the company he or she keeps, but not everything and certainly not enough to make a voting decision on that alone. It is necessary to look primarily at the person running for office, in my opinion.

That said, beliefs do drive us as people. We all operate with our own worldviews and act according to basic ideas which we hold to be true. Click here to take a look at what Gov. Palin had to say just a few months ago to a graduating class at her former church. The video is no longer available on the church website, and a message there explains that the site wasn't designed to take so much web traffic. The views she expresses may be your own, or they may not be, but either way you should know.

See Also:
Palin's Church May Have Shaped Controversial Worldview
Bill Moyers Interviews Rev. Jeremiah Wright