America by Heart

by Sarah Palin

  Well, I think the refusal of many influential people to accept this elementary fact of Soviet doctrine illustrates an historical reluctance to see totalitarian powers for what they are. We saw this phenomenon in the 1930s. We see it too often today.

  This doesn’t mean we should isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them . . . At the same time, however, they must be made to understand we will never compromise our principles and standards. We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God. . . .

  Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

  Reagan got a lot of flak for that speech. But I wonder if the real problem for some wasn’t that he called the Soviet system evil, but that he called ours good. After all, as Reagan said, the atheism of the Soviet system was right there in the writings and teachings of Lenin. What drove his critics crazy wasn’t that Reagan pointed out the godlessness of the Soviet system, but that he pointed out the presence of God in ours. What they missed was that, by calling the Soviet system by its true name, he brought the Russian people themselves one step closer to freedom.

  That, in the end, is the significance of the words “under God” in our Pledge of Allegiance. Not that they somehow divide an overwhelmingly observant nation or that they were added in a cynical act of cold war gamesmanship. The phrase “one nation under God” is significant because it puts our freedom beyond the reach of men who “preach the supremacy of the state.” It puts our freedom in the hands of the Creator from whom it came, and that is a safe place indeed.

  The question that comes back to me again and again when I hear people attack religion and religious expression is, Why? Why do they have to attack peaceful expressions of faith? What is so offensive about a baby in a manger? What is threatening about the Ten Commandments, a moral code that, by the way, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the religions that account for 97 percent of all American believers, recognize as the basis for living a good life? Why can’t people just live and let live?

  Part of the answer is the cultural divide between our governing elites and the mass of the American people. Most of those who write for the mainstream media and teach at universities and law schools don’t share the religious faith of their fellow Americans. They seem to regard people who believe in God and regularly attend their church or synagogue as alien beings, people who are “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command,” as the Washington Post once famously put it. Perhaps for this and other obvious reasons, I often refer to the conventional press as the “lame stream media.” The truth is that we are alien—to them.

  Recently, columnist Jonah Goldberg hilariously channeled the mind-set of the mainstream media when it comes to covering conservatives, including religious conservatives. In its eyes, he writes, we come from another planet:

  It’s that shadowy, often-sinister world where carbon-based life forms of a generally humanoid appearance say and do things relating to, and supportive of, conservative causes and the Republican Party. These strange creatures have been observed using complex tools, caring and nurturing their young and even participating in complex social rituals. Most worship an unseen sky god that traces its roots back to the ancient Middle East. Even more astounding, these creatures are having a noticeable impact on American politics.

  Aside from this cultural distance, there is a simpler (and more troubling) explanation for the new liberal intolerance. Today’s secular elites don’t agree with appeals to religion because they generally don’t support the reasons for these appeals. Americans typically invoke faith in the public debate to support the sanctity of life, the preservation of marriage, and the nature of our freedom. Many liberals don’t support these things, so they regard bringing faith into the argument as somehow unfair or intolerant—or just beside the point. Of course, they’re happy to talk the God talk (if not walk the God walk) when it’s for a cause they believe in. Witness House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisting that she will pursue public policies consistent with the “Word” of the Gospel, even as she votes against banning partial-birth abortion.

  Another example of talking the (God) talk but not walking the walk among politicians occurred in the 2004 presidential debates between George W. Bush and John Kerry. In the final debate, both candidates spoke at length about the role of religion in their lives. President Bush was consistent in his belief, as he said, that “prayer and religion sustain me.” But Senator Kerry changed his tune depending on the policy in question. On the issue of abortion, Kerry insisted, “I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith.”

  Fair enough. But then the topic shifted to government programs for the poor and the environment, and Kerry changed his tune. His faith, he said, was “why I fight against poverty. That’s why I fight to clean up the environment and protect this earth. That’s why I fight for equality and justice. All of those things come out of that fundamental teaching and belief of faith.”

  I know, I know. Politicians speaking out of both sides of their mouths. What a shocker! But this kind of hypocrisy when it comes to religion is widespread on the left, inside and outside Washington. After consistently calling any involvement of religion in politics offensive and unconstitutional, the New York Times suddenly applauded in 2006 when Cardinal Roger Mahony called on Catholics to engage in civil disobedience to protest a restrictionist immigration bill. In an editorial remarkably headlined “The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437,” the New York Times editors discovered a newfound love of religion in political debate:

  The enormous influx of illegal immigrants and the lack of a coherent federal policy to handle it have prompted a jumble of responses by state and local governments, stirred the passions of the nativist fringe, and reinforced anxieties since 9/11. Cardinal Mahony’s defiance adds a moral dimension to what has largely been a debate about politics and economics. “As his disciples, we are called to attend to the last, littlest, lowest and least in society and in the church,” he said. . . .

  Cardinal Mahony’s declaration of solidarity with illegal immigrants, for whom Lent is every day, is a startling call to civil disobedience, as courageous as it is timely.

  Remarkable! Imagine the Times invoking the Gospel in defense of helping poor kids go to inner city Catholic schools (otherwise known as “school choice”) or a pro-life nurse’s right not to be required to assist at an abortion over the dictates of her conscience.

  The question for so-called progressives, then, is: Which is it? Is it enlightened to talk about religion in the pursuit of liberal causes but constitutionally suspect when traditional American values are being defended? The fact is that religious faith has been invoked in every American movement of conscience, from the abolition of slavery to the prohibition of alcohol to the civil rights movement. Why is bringing faith into the argument good for thee but not for me?

  Neither John Kerry nor the New York Times has any problem with the fact that the movements for the abolition of slavery and for civil rights were based on explicit appeals to Judeo-Christian morality. Such movements were led by clergy, and their rhetoric was infused with religious imagery. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was jailed for taking part in a nonviolent protest against racial segregation in Alabama in 1963, his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was both a refutation of racial segregation and a repudiation of those who opposed civil disobedience in pursuit of civil rights—a refudiation, if you will—cast in explicitly religious terms. It is an eloquent letter that all Americans should read. “An unjust law is a human law that is
not rooted in eternal law and natural law,” he wrote:

  I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

  King wrote his letter in response to white clergy who had urged him to carry on the civil rights struggle in the courts and not in the streets. But King defended the civil rights protestors as unsung “children of God” who were “standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage.”

  I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feet is tired, but my soul is rested.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, and thusly carrying our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, appeal to our religious faith and the morality that it informs eventually succeeded, and thank God for that. Just as our Founders couldn’t foresee America surviving in liberty without religion, it’s hard to see how slavery could have been abolished and civil rights achieved in an America without religious faith and values. No one objected to the civil rights movement’s grounding in Christianity, seeing it as somehow offensive to Americans of other faiths, let alone harmful to atheists. People understood that King was appealing to what was best in us, both as Americans and as human beings.

  And yet this selective evocation of religious tolerance continues today when Americans are lectured about who can exercise their freedom of religion, and under what circumstances. The plan to build a mosque just steps from Ground Zero in New York is a good example.

  New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and other supporters of the initiative have argued that not allowing a mosque to be built at a sacred site where nearly three thousand people lost their lives in the name of radical Islam would somehow violate American principles of tolerance and openness.

  I agree with the sister of one of the 9/11 victims (and a New York resident) who said, “This is a place which is six hundred feet from where almost three thousand people were torn to pieces by Islamic extremists. I think that it is incredibly insensitive and audacious really for them to build a mosque, not only on that site, but to do it specifically so that they could be in proximity to where that atrocity happened.”

  Many Americans, me included, feel it would be an intolerable and tragic mistake to allow such a project to go forward on this hallowed ground. Of course the supporters of this project have a constitutional right to build a mosque on private land. But just because they can do something doesn’t mean they necessarily should. This is nothing close to “religious intolerance”; it’s what our Founders called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”—or in this case, their fellow Americans.

  It must be frustrating to those who want to ban religion from the American public square to see our country turn, time and again, to prayer in our moments of need. Since before there was an America, our leaders have met moments of challenge and adversity with appeals to God for guidance, strength, and wisdom. They have spoken, not just for themselves, but for the nation. They have been Democrats and Republicans, devout and less observant, regular churchgoing and CEO (Christmas and Easter Only). Even as early as the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin beseeched his fellow delegates to “appl[y] to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings” when the Convention deadlocked on the issue of congressional representations:

  In the beginning of the Contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the divine protection.—Our prayers, Sir, were heard, & they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a superintending providence in our favor.

  To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine that we no longer need his assistance? I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?

  This propensity to seek the guidance and blessing of our Creator makes us unique among Western nations. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia tells of hearing about the 9/11 attacks when he was in Rome attending an international conference of judges and lawyers:

  That night and the next morning virtually all of the participants watched, in their hotel rooms, the address to the nation by the President of the United States concerning the murderous attacks upon the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, in which thousands of Americans had been killed. The address ended, as Presidential addresses often do, with the prayer “God bless America.” The next afternoon I was approached by one of the judges from a European country, who, after extending his profound condolences for my country’s loss, sadly observed, “How I wish that the Head of State of my country, at a similar time of national tragedy and distress, could conclude his address ‘God bless ______.’ It is of course absolutely forbidden.”

  George W. Bush was often attacked as a “theocrat” or a “Christian fascist” for his unapologetic evocation of his faith. But prayer by American leaders in times of crisis is routine, bipartisan, and good.

  I remember well President Bush’s stirring words at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for Americans to pray on that day. And our commander in chief led us with reassurance and eloquence:

  Our purpose as a nation is firm, yet our wounds as a people are recent and unhealed and lead us to pray. In many of our prayers this week, there’s a searching and an honesty. At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, on Tuesday, a woman said, “I pray to God to give us a sign that he’s still here.”

  Others have prayed for the same, searching hospital to hospital, carrying pictures of those still missing. God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own, yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral are known and heard and understood.

  There are prayers that help us last through the day or endure the night. There are prayers of friends and strangers that give us strength for the journey, and there are prayers that yield our will to a will greater than our own.

  This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance and love have no end, and the Lord of life holds all w
ho die and all who mourn.

  “The prayers of private suffering . . . are known and heard and understood.” How I clung to those words in those frightening days. It was not the first time America had faced a crisis, of course. Fifty-seven years earlier, in 1944, another president—a Democrat president—had prayed with America in its time of need. On the evening of June 6, 1944, as Allied troops battled and died on the beaches of France following the Normandy invasion, FDR led the nation in prayer. And it wasn’t just a speech with a casual reference to the Almighty. It was a full-throated, on-your-knees prayer to a national radio audience estimated at one hundred million, making it, according to some, the largest single mass prayer of all time. Here is what Roosevelt said:

  Last night when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

  And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

  Almighty God: our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

  Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

  They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.