Tom Swift Writer’s Notebook

What is it about female writers named Miller? I so disliked Sue Miller’s The Senator’s Wife that I will not anytime soon consider reading another of her novels, no matter how many of them land on the New York Times bestseller list. Judith Miller, of course, helped sell the public on a bogus war. And it is seldom that I read Newsweek religion reporter Lisa Miller without encountering a head-scratcher or two. Saint Sarah, this week’s cover story, contains this one: “[Sarah] Palin has her faults, but the left is partially to blame for her ascent. Its native mistrust of religion, of conservative believers in particular, left the gap that she now fills.”

First of all, I kinda-sorta think I know what Miller is trying to say here, but her prose is blurry at best and safely imprecise at its worst. Her point can neither be easily opposed nor supported with evidence (otherwise, she likely would have backed it up with some). More important, filling a gap says absolutely nothing about that gap’s merits. Palin fills a gap, sure. So did David Koresh. So did Timothy Leary.

In the same piece, Miller all but calls Palin the heir apparent to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Dobson, people whose views should be scrutinized by left and right, by believers and non-believers, and by religion writers on staff at large-circulation magazines. Affording the new Preacher-in-Chief respect simply for the fact that she occupies the pulpit is not only disappointing, it’s potentially damaging. That sort of deference, after all, is what allowed Robertson a forum in which he said (to take one example off a heavy heap) that Haitians deserved their fate. Yes, many Christians dismissed his statement, but many fewer distanced themselves from the idea behind the words, which is that God causes suffering as punishment for sin — an opinion (all too common in the Bible) that breeds social complacency. It’s much easier to avert the eyes when you think the sufferers had it coming. Even if Palin did not support Robertson’s precise statement about Haiti, does anyone, given her public views of God’s active role in world affairs, think her take is much different?

“Neither party should … [pander] to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.” So said the 2000 edition of John McCain. I wish the 2008 edition of John McCain had remembered those words before he, wittingly or otherwise, anointed one of their successors.

Even more, I wish religion writers like Miller realized that their balanced respect for all views, no matter how much suffering those view may cause, are also “to blame” for Palin’s “ascent.”

Tags: Lisa Miller, Newsweek, Religion, Sarah Palin, The Almighty

This post was added on Thursday, June 17, 2010 by Tom Swift at 05:26 and is filed under Reading Material, Soapbox, The Almighty.