Don't Worry About Sarah Palin

There’s almost a mantra among east and west coast liberals that it’s okay to speak to God, but it’s not acceptable for God to speak to you. I can understand this. Liberals I’ve known have often spent time in therapy where they’ve been taught to distrust those voices in their heads.

This isn’t necessarily bad. My father spent time in the state mental hospital. Dad met a chain-smoking schizophrenic there who insisted that God had ordered him to murder his mother.

Besides, look at the conflict we already have over religion and politics in this country. Imagine what would happen if people started saying, “God told me to vote for Barack Obama.”

“Your god is the AntiChrist.”

“Sure, pal. Baal was pro-life, too.”

As a woman with a mentally ill father, I’ve learned to use judgment with human voices, too. In particular, I distrust people who tell me how “God” wants me to vote. Surely, Jesus sent his Holy Spirit to eliminate these middle men.

This year I had a visceral reaction to Sarah Palin. Maybe it’s that speech she gave at the Republican Convention. Palin reminded me of every cheerleader who snubbed me in high school, every Christian woman who implied I’d go to hell simply because I’m pro-choice.

I was consumed with rage. And because I don’t consider anger to be a healthy state of mind, I prayed about it. I told God, “I just don’t know why I’m so mad at this woman.”

A voice in my head said, “Don’t worry about Sarah Palin. She’s not going to win.”

In a sermon I heard once the minister said the most commonly repeated phrase in the Bible is “Fear not.” The way I can tell the voice in my head is God’s is that the first two words generally are, “Don’t worry.”

The funny thing is, I hadn’t prayed about who’d win the election. But soon after that, Wall Street began its meltdown, and John McCain’s poll numbers began dropping.

What was happening in our country wasn’t the miracle. The miracle was that after praying, I stopped worrying.

The Pro-Life God

For years I was the unrepentant feminist in a Bible study with a group of fundamentalist women. One night, these women described their god. He was unforgiving, incapable of healing us from our past and had a vendetta against women.

I listened, dumbfounded. In 30 years as a Christian, I’d never known the awful god these women described. I didn’t want to. So I quit the Bible study.

As a former charismatic, one of my gifts is discernment of spirits. I was curious what spirit was oppressing these women. My answer came as a bumper sticker: God is pro-life.

There were many pro-life gods in biblical times. Yahweh wasn’t one of them. To see this, one needs to read no further than the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son became the foundation for the Judeo-Christian faith, establishing the precedent for Yahweh’s future sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ.

By contrast, the pro-life gods the Bible mentions were fertility gods like Baal and Ashtoreth. Though not mentioned by name, Isis, Aphrodite and Diana exerted an influence over Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures.

Fertility cult emphasis on reproduction negatively impacted sexual morality, in particular corrupting religious and political leaders. Old Testament prophets like Elijah and Hosea didn't quibble over whether life began at conception, but whether the offspring of fertility cults were children of spiritual adultery. The Apostle Paul responded to Greco-Roman fertility cults by promoting celibacy as the favored Christian lifestyle.

The medieval Church dealt with European fertility goddesses such as the Norse goddess Friga, from whom we get the word Friday, and the Celtic goddess Eoster, from whom we get the holiday Easter. Celts celebrated Eoster with rabbits, symbolizing fertility, and eggs, symbolizing new life. Catholic popes rescheduled Christ’s resurrection from the Passover to Eoster, hoping to stamp out this fertility cult by superimposing Christian symbolism.

I don’t see the pro-life movement as a Christian political movement, but a revival of pre-Christian spirituality, bringing the faith full circle from opposing fertility cults to embracing them as "God's worldview.” The pro-life god’s, that is. Not Yahweh’s.