America by Heart

by Sarah Palin

  They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

  For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and good will among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

  Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

  And for us at home—fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them—help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

  Many people have urged that I call the Nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

  Give us strength, too—strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

  And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

  And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment—let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

  With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace—a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.

  Ronald Reagan once quoted Abraham Lincoln as saying, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

  I know the feeling.

  I pray all the time. I always have. Saying a prayer was the first thing I did when I learned I was going to have my first child and it was the last thing I did before I stepped out in front of more than forty million viewers to give my speech at the 2008 Republican National Convention. I asked God to crush my “self” and give me His strength and grace for that time. I asked Todd and our kids to join me in prayer, seeking not self-glorification but an opportunity to freely express what I believed God had put in my heart to share. I also turned to prayer backstage at the vice-presidential debate in 2008, although Piper scolded me for “cheating” when I asked her to pray with me that God would have His way and His words at the event that night!

  And I’m not alone in my reliance on prayer. We are a prayerful country. What’s more, I think it’s significant that we pray not just in times of danger or crisis, such as during the Normandy invasion or the 9/11 attacks, but in quieter times as well. We pray for inspiration and guidance, and also pray in thanksgiving and gratitude. We even have a quintessentially American holiday, Thanksgiving, devoted to precisely that purpose.

  I recently came across a collection of American prayers that shows the many ways we turn to our Creator to thank Him, to remember Him—and sometimes, to beg for His help.

  One prayer is from a genuine American hero, Harriet Tubman. What a thrill it was for me to visit her home in rural New York a couple of years ago. As the collection notes, Harriet Tubman was called a “nineteenth-century Moses” because she was once a slave, and when she found her freedom, she devoted her life to freeing others. She never lost a person while helping them make their escape on the Underground Railroad, and she credited her faith for her success. Here’s the brief prayer she would say as she began one of her daring rescues: “I’m going to hold steady on You, an’ You’ve got to see me through.” It says something that a remarkable woman like Harriet Tubman—a woman courageous enough to defy slavery and strong enough to save hundreds of her fellow men and women via the Underground Railroad—would put her faith and fate so blithely in God’s hands. Her wonderful little prayer is a good reminder to those of us with less courage and less strength that we can accomplish more if we just do the same.

  Another of my favorite prayers is also a poem (or is it a poem that is also a prayer?) by Emily Dickinson. It’s a simple, logical explanation for a faith that is as deeply felt as it is unproved—and unprovable.

  I never saw a moor,

  I never saw the sea;

  Yet know I how the heather looks,

  And what a wave must be.

  I never spoke with God,

  Nor visited in heaven;

  Yet certain am I of the spot

  As if the chart were given.

  Another prayer I really love, believe it or not, was one Elvis Presley reportedly used to say. The story goes that before every performance he would find a quiet place offstage and say this one-line prayer: “Send me some light—I need it.”

  Pretty much says it all, eh!

  But my favorite in this wonderful collection is a prayer that is as modest, wide-open, unassuming, and free as this country. Fittingly, it’s called “A Cowboy’s Prayer.” It was written by Badger Clark, who was later named the first poet laureate of South Dakota. I love this prayer for its gratitude for freedom, its honest appreciation for hard work, and for its author’s simple yearning to be a better man:

  O Lord, I’ve never run where churches grow,

  I’ve always loved Creation better as it stood

  That day you finished it, so long ago,

  And looked upon your work, and found it good.

  I know that others might find You in the light

  That’s sifted down through tinted window panes,

  And yet I seem to feel You near tonight.

  Let me be easy on the man that’s down

  And make me square and generous with all;

  I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town

  But never let them call me mean or small.

  Make me as big and open as the plains,

  As honest as the hoss between my knees,

  Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,

  Free as the hawk that circles down the breeze!

  I thank you, Lord, that I am placed so well,

  That you made my freedom so complete;

  That I’m no slave to whistle, clock or bell,

  Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.

  Just let me live my life as I’ve begun

  And give me work that is open to the sky;

  Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,

  And I won’t ask for a life that’s soft or high.

  Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.

  You know about the reasons that are hid.

  You understand the things that gall and fret;

  You know me better than my mother did.

  Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said

  And right me, sometimes, when I turn aside,

  And guide me on the long, dim trail ahead

  That stretches upward toward the Great Divide.

  Whether it’s a cross in a desert or a prayer in a time of national crisis, evidence abounds that America is a deeply faithful country. That doesn’t mean we’re all the same religion or even all regular churchgoers. I think a lot of us feel the same as the cowboy: We see God in the beauty of mountains and lakes and the other glori
es of His creation, not necessarily always through stained-glass windows. I know Alaskans can relate. We see God in Mt. McKinley, our majestic glacial carvings, and the breathtaking vistas right outside our front doors. And we look to our Creator, not just for our freedom, but to be better men and women. It’s a pity that some have a problem with that. But as for me, I’m going to continue to seek God’s blessings. I need Him to “right me . . . when I turn aside.” And to guide me on that “long, dim trail” that stretches “upward toward the Great Divide.”

  Nine

  Our North Star

  I was very pregnant with Trig when Todd and I took a rare few hours between official events on a Saturday in March 2008 and went to the movies. We had just attended the start of the Iditarod sled dog race in Anchorage, so we decided to thaw out inside a warm movie theater before attending a town hall meeting. The movie we watched was Juno.

  There’s a scene from this memorable movie that I think says a lot about how many of us experience our faith. You’ll recall that the movie is about a young girl, Juno, who finds herself pregnant at sixteen. She goes on to have the baby and put it up for adoption. And because she chooses to have the baby, when the movie came out there was a lot of talk about whether Juno had a pro-life message. Some insisted that it did, while others objected just as stridently that there was no anti-abortion theme.

  I remember thinking that both sides got it wrong. There was no preaching, in-your-face message about abortion in the movie, either pro or con. Director Jason Reitman was subtler and, I think, more clever than that. The scene in which Juno ultimately chooses not to have an abortion shows how.

  From the moment she finds out she’s pregnant it seems like a foregone conclusion that Juno will, as she says, “nip” her problem “in the bud.” And sure enough, she makes an appointment and goes to a clinic. There’s an abortion protestor outside whom Juno basically ignores. But just as Juno is about to enter the clinic, the young, sweet protestor says something that seems to affect her. She yells, “Your baby has fingernails!” And Juno pauses. She continues into the clinic, but you can tell she’s struggling. Inside, she sees the heavily pierced receptionist texting as she monotones a greeting and asks Juno to fill out a form. “Don’t skip the hairy details,” the receptionist says, bored. “We need to know about every score and every sore.” Then she offers Juno a free condom, boysenberry-flavored. Juno can’t take it. She leaves. “I’m staying pregnant,” she tells her friend.

  You could argue (as some did) that there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell in Juno if she had an abortion in the first fifteen minutes—certainly nothing very funny. But it strikes me that the reason she rethinks her automatic decision to have an abortion—hearing that her baby has fingernails—sends a very understated but powerful message. Despite all the rhetoric designed to make abortion just another “choice” that Juno and her friends grew up with, she ultimately recognizes that there is a living being growing inside her. It is a life she didn’t ask for. It is an inconvenient life at the time. But it is a life nonetheless. She just can’t bring herself to destroy it once she imagines it as something human, as opposed to an abstract “problem” to be “solved” by a routine medical procedure.

  Most Americans, I think, are a lot like Juno. They don’t think in ideological or political terms about their religious faith. They may not even be actively religious at all—but they still want to do the right thing, and they want to see others do the right thing as well. Our culture encourages this by doing something unique and, I think, highly exceptional: it takes fundamentally religious values such as the sanctity of life and secularizes them without surrendering their morality. America has a special ability to take the truths and moral lessons of religion and put them to work in ways that benefit everyone, regardless of their faith.

  I don’t know what Jason Reitman’s religion or his politics are—and it doesn’t matter. He made a pretty great movie with a subtle but powerful message that I recognize from my faith. Maybe others see it, too; maybe they don’t. But everyone who sees the movie understands that Juno makes a moral choice. She doesn’t act in accordance with anyone’s politics but according to the dictates of her own conscience. And the morality that informs that conscience is found in the great religious traditions of America.

  Reitman isn’t alone in sneaking traditional messages into his work. I’ve been tough on Hollywood in this book, but I’m also a fan of director Judd Apatow’s films. Movies such as Knocked Up (in which a young woman becomes a mom thanks to a one-night stand with a slacker) and The Forty-Year-Old Virgin (self-explanatory!) deliver the same subversive moral messages that can be found in Juno. The uniquely American twist is that the morality served up by these movies is a side dish that comes with a main course of bawdy frat house humor. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat agrees: “No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism.”

  When people like Douthat point out these moral messages, critics usually reply that such moralism is necessary to sell tickets in America. But that objection just makes my point. For all that is rotten in our popular culture, it seems clear (at least to me) that there is still a fundamental desire on the part of most people, at least some of the time, to be uplifted by our public entertainment. We don’t want to be preached to. Sometimes we just want to laugh and be distracted for a couple of hours from the cares and worries of our daily lives (which is why some of us love to watch sports, too!). But we also want to see our values reinforced and not mocked or belittled on the big screen. Americans stayed away in droves from the bumper crop of anti–Iraq War movies put out by Hollywood in the last couple of years for precisely this reason. The success of filmmakers such as Jason Reitman and Judd Apatow is due to the fact that they believe entertainment can accommodate this moral impulse.

  A European movie might have had Juno get her abortion in the opening scene and then spend the next hour and fifteen minutes smoking cigarettes and pondering the meaning of life. It would have been depressing and boring. Not here. Americans want to be entertained, but we also want to see people do the right thing, even when it’s hard and there is no prospect of being rewarded. Hooray for some in Hollywood for occasionally letting us see that.

  There are many other things about America that prove my point that you don’t have to share my faith to benefit from what faith has given America. As the recent release of the original text of the Big Book illustrates, Alcoholics Anonymous is a great example of how religious values (by another name) have helped millions of Americans.

  True story: Alcoholics Anonymous actually grew out of a religion-based recovery program called the Oxford Group. It was started in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, by a down-on-his-luck alcoholic named Bill Wilson who had a conversion experience in a hospital room while drying out from one of his many binges. By Wilson’s own account, he was engulfed by a white light and God revealed himself to him. He never drank again. He joined the Oxford Group, a Protestant movement of mainly elite Americans trying to recover from addictions. But he quickly broke away and helped create AA in order to attract Catholics and more mainstream Americans. He borrowed directly from religion and psychology to create the famous Twelve Steps. Wilson settled on twelve, he said, because there were twelve apostles.

  Born of a religious conversion, AA has become a creed of personal salvation open to all. It is a secular church of self-help. No other recovery program has helped so many so successfully as this one, which famously calls on participants to begin their journey to recovery by surrendering to “a higher power.” You don’t have to be religious to join AA; you just have to have the desire to stop drinking. But it is the elements it borrows from faith that make the program work.

  Even Americans who’ve never had a problem with alcohol or drugs are familiar with many
of the Twelve Steps—that’s how widespread they have become. They begin by asking participants to admit their powerlessness before their addiction, recognize a greater power that can help them, make amends for past mistakes, learn a new way of life and, critically, help others who are suffering in the same way. All people of faith will recognize the ethical teachings of religion (and not just Christianity) in AA’s Twelve Steps. In short, AA says to its participants, You’re not strong enough to carry this burden by yourself. You need help. Help is here. That’s the feeling I have every time I hit my knees and pray. As a matter of fact, I keep a copy of AA’s famous “Serenity Prayer” taped inside a favorite devotional book. I glance at it occasionally and am reminded of the connectivity it creates among all:

  God, grant me the serenity

  To accept the things I cannot change;

  Courage to change the things I can;

  And wisdom to know the difference.

  The greatest proof of the success of AA is the army of imitators it has spawned. Hundreds of self-help groups use Twelve Step principles to help millions of addicts and their friends and family deal with everything from drug abuse to problem gambling, overeating, and even borrowing too much. If it’s easier for Americans of diverse faith traditions, as well as agnostics and atheists, to acknowledge a “higher power” than it is to invoke the name of God, so be it. The important point is that the Twelve Steps work—and we seem to need them now more than ever.

  The diseases treated by these programs can be too often traced to the bad effects on our society of secularism and its corrosive ideology. It’s an ironic (but very American) twist that we have used a secularized version of religion to try to cure them.

  Former attorney general John Ashcroft—a deeply devout Christian—used to say something I agree with wholeheartedly: “It’s against my religion to impose my religion on others.” What our culture does when it translates religious values into secular terms and applies them to useful ends isn’t about brainwashing or trying to convert anyone—quite the opposite. It’s a way of conferring a rich moral heritage while respecting everyone’s religious freedom.