Rhetoric Race and Religion
Most people in their right minds consider Sarah Palin’s statement about using waterboarding to “baptize” terrorists as insensitive at the very least. It further reinforces the notion that she will say or do nearly anything to grab a headline, even if it is at the expense of her own integrity, and perhaps that of her political cohorts or even her faith.
She’d be doing all of us a favor if she’d simply stop talking publically. But in as much as she continues to be afforded a microphone and speaking pulpit, we get to bear witness to her attempts to improvise a caricature of herself on the fly.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the statement to me is not the brazenness of it, or even the apparent lack of self-awareness or personal filter. It’s that she’s actually speaking on behalf of a significant – albeit shrinking – subset of Christian culture in the United States. It’s the strain that believes that the Prayer of Jabez (a prayer about expanding one’s spiritual territory) is a Manifest Destiny of sorts from Jesus to his followers. We’re to reach to all corners of the earth, emboldened with a “be assimilated or be eliminated” mentality at our backs.
Though this sort of violent rhetoric and behavior enjoyed its peak some centuries ago during the Crusades, the vestiges of imperialist Christian entitlement lingers even today. But the reason that such statements, even if uttered by someone in a position of public influence, come off as silly and absurd rather than chilling is because the beast of Christendom has, in large part, been defanged by the post-Christian culture.
In short: the rest of the world has stopped paying much attention.
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