The Times Online reports on Ingrid Betancourt’s recent meeting with the pope. Apparently Ms. Betancourt had been a rather lukewarm Catholic, but experienced a tremendous deepening of her faith during the last six years she spent in captivity in the Columbian jungle, praying the Rosary and gaining intimate knowledge of the Bible, which she now views as “an instruction manual for happiness.” Pope Benedict himself played a role in this rediscovery of her faith, for his prayers and public support for her provided vital consolation.

All in all, a heartwarming story.

There are reasonable criticisms that can be made of Sarah Palin, both as governor and a vice presidential selection. Yet little of what we have seen in the last six days has been either reasonable or critical (in the traditional sense of the word). Instead, much of the left and many in the media simply lashed out at Palin, particularly at her family.

And not only the fringiest parts of the political fringe: A writer at the Washington Post attacked Palin for the fact that her seventeen-year-old daughter was going to have a baby. A writer for The Atlantic openly questioned whether or not Palin’s four-month-old baby, who has Down’s Syndrome, was actually hers. The utterly unfounded suggestion was that the baby was Palin’s daughter’s and that the governor had faked her pregnancy. Proof of the baby’s birth was demanded.

Again, we are not talking about an anonymous blogger at Daily Kos—this is the commentary from the Washington Post and The Atlantic Monthly. And there was more—much more—where that came from.

So why? What is it about Sarah Palin that convinced so much of the left to objectify and assault her so quickly, and with such manifest maliciousness? There are many reasons, but four of them stick out in particular, each having to do not with Palin’s politics, but with her family.

1) Trig Palin’s Down’s Syndrome is a challenge to their ideas about what represents worthwhile life. The fact that this Down’s baby was carried to term and not aborted is statement that his life has the same value as all life. This is an idea with which the left vehemently disagrees. Here is the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus discussing her own opinion of Down’s babies in an online chat earlier this week:

I had my children at ages 37 and 39, old enough that the risk of Down syndrome was elevated, as it was for Palin, and my doctor recommended amniocentesis. Had the results indicated any abnormality, I have little doubt that I would have made a different decision than did Palin.

As such, the left sees Baby Trig as a provocation. Note today the commentators complaining that Trig has become a “prop” for Palin’s candidacy simply because the family took turns holding the four-month-old in public last night. (Perhaps these observers simply have no understanding of how infants are handled and cared for.) Instead of being viewed as just another baby, Trig is seen by the left as a little Terri Schiavo—an assertion of the value of all life and an affront to their belief that there are differences in what constitutes meaningful life.

2) Which leads, of course, to abortion. Palin’s family is a double-rebuke to the culture of abortion. First, there’s Palin’s decision not to kill Trig because he has Trisomy 21. Then there is seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin’s decision to not to kill her baby.

Contrast this with Barack Obama’s statement that he would keep abortion legal so that if one of his daughters were to “make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” This statement is freighted with meaning: Obama views out-of-wedlock pregnancy as a mistake (which is sensible); he views such a resulting baby as punishment (which is less so); and he has strong feelings that should such a situation occur, he would not want his daughter to carry the baby to term. It is, objectively speaking, a pro-abortion statement.

3) Then there are Palin’s religious views. She is a lifelong Christian who belongs to an evangelical church. No further explanations should be needed about the provocations which emanate there from.

4) Finally, there’s the fertility. The Palin family’s five children would have been unexceptional forty years ago, but today constitute something of a fertility freak show. They’re the type of people for whom the epithet “breeder” was invented. The U.S. fertility rate sits just below the replacement level and is only that high because of the greater fertility of Hispanic immigrants. According to the most recent census data, only 1.1 percent of non-Hispanic white women bear five or six children over the course of their lifetime. By contrast, 22.5 percent of these women never reproduce. The percentage of childlessness among women rises in a straight line with educational attainment.

Why the worry about this? First, there’s the fact that few of Palin’s tormenters can understand the fact of her large, traditional family. That is certainly not the way in which they have structured their lives.

Second, there is the left’s long-standing concern about overpopulation, which has become a staple of modern environmentalism, beginning with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb. Ehrlich preached a Malthusian near-future in which hundreds of millions would perish by famine as the world’s unchecked population growth spiraled to infinity. As it happens, Ehrlich’s predictions were entirely incorrect: Not only has increased food production reduced famine to a weapon of political conflict, but the world’s population growth has slowed to a crawl. Fertility rates around the globe are falling and world population will peak around nine billion by 2050. From there, we will experience population contraction.

But Ehrlich’s prognostications never fell far out of favor, particularly with environmentalists who take it as an article of faith that the planet is already overcrowded. To them, the prodigious Palin family is surely seen as taking more than its fair share.

And finally, there is the concern that the amped up fertility of people such as the Palins will lead to a less progressive future. In an influential 2006 essay in Foreign Policy, demographer Philip Longman warned of the “Return of Patriarchy” as religiously orthodox and fundamentalist populations were reproducing at much higher rates than post-modern and secular populations. The result, Longman worried, will eventually be a return to a less politically and culturally progressive era.

As you can see, each of these facts about Sarah Palin touches upon deep sources of antagonism. Her opponents quickly intuited that the particulars of Palin’s story, on their own, stand as challenges to some of the most integral parts of their worldview, whether or not she ever makes them explicitly.

It isn’t any of Palin’s specific policies or ideological beliefs which have so antagonized the liberals (although they surely dislike her for policy reasons, too). They simply hate her for who she is.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published the results of a survey last week suggesting that “a narrow majority of the public [believes] that churches and other houses of worship should keep out of political matters and not express their views on day-to-day social and political matters.”

As one might imagine, many secular pundits have pointed to the survey as evidence that Americans are becoming less and less interested in religious values and voices in the political sphere.

Not so fast, says Colleen Carroll Campbell:

There are several problems with those readings. For starters, more than 70 percent of Americans told Pew pollsters that a president should have strong religious beliefs, and 64 percent said they believe politicians today express their religious beliefs too little or the right amount. That’s not exactly the profile of a nation ready to eject God from political life.

As for the idea that the poll marks a rejection of religious conservatives and their values, it is noteworthy that the increase in concern over politicized religion did not come from secular liberals. It came from social conservatives and from Americans who regard America’s major political parties as insufficiently friendly to religion.

Campbell’s points are well taken. If social conservatives are the ones suddenly expressing a certain mistrust of the religious language found in political rhetoric or of the political overtones found in religious sermons, one can hardly conclude that the problem lies in religion or in the moral convictions that it may form.

Instead, it seems as though social conservatives are becoming increasingly skeptical that the religious vocabulary so often employed by both political parties will actually translate into results they hope for or that the political pulpit is the best tool to bring about the change they seek.

Just a reminder that this Saturday begins the monthly Witness for Life rallies in New York City. The schedule is:

8:00am Mass at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral (263 Mulberry St.–enter at Mott St.)

8:45am Rosary Procession to Planned Parenthood (26 Bleeker St.) Silent prayer there.

10:15am Benediction at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral

10:30-11:00am Social and Pro-Life Presentation in church hall

The event is organized by the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, the Sisters of Life, and the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants.

Adding to the high number of personal attacks Gov. Palin has received since she was announced as Sen. McCain’s pick—and not just standard allegations of inexperience or discrepancies in her record, but personal jabs such as those that have been made against her as a woman and mother—Palin is now being attacked as a person of faith.

Apparently it’s shocking to some that Palin once spoke at a church about faith in everyday life. The poor church that hosted the video online had to shut down its website after the story broke due to the overflooding media attention.

I’m not sure why no one believes that I mean the actual words I write, but all I said was that the “red meat” talking point of the anti-Palin press was wrong: She didn’t mention the word abortion in her speech last night.

Yes, the picture she presented was pro-life: “You could argue that the dwelling on her family helped make the point nonverbally. . . . And you’d be right,” I said.

But she didn’t mention the word abortion in her speech last night. My only purpose in the post was to note the point, as an answer to the rapid Palin haters.

Let’s dwell on it for a moment, however, as long as we’ve reached this point by a misreading what I wrote.

The key is the long-term fight against abortion, and for that fight, public rhetoric is as important as personal action. Maybe more important. Palin is pro-life, but how is she going to speak to the nation about it? Not just in this election, but in all the elections in which she is going to figure now that she’s a fixture on the nation’s political stage? We do need to know.

Consider these lines from our brilliant friend Hadley Arkes in the pages of this magazine:

In 1999, when he was preparing for his first presidential campaign, Mr. Bush took soundings among prominent conservatives, and the word went out: he was emphatically, decisively, on the side of the pro-lifers. He could be depended on to do the things that President Reagan and his own father had done before him to preserve a coalition that included pro-lifers. But, as the report went, he did not feel that he could “lead” with the issue of abortion. Either it was impolitic to make this question his defining issue, or he did not feel confident of his own facility in making the argument. He would speak on this vexing issue only when it was absolutely necessary for him to do so.

The result of a president who would walk the walk but not talk the talk was, as Hadley lays out in detail, not entirely a gain for the pro-life movement.

It’s not always wise merely to parrot the talking points of the two campaigns—the Republican talking point that Palin is going to be a leader of the pro-life movement, even though we haven’t yet heard her speak about abortion, and the Democratic talking point that the speech was pandering to the social-conservative base, even though it never mentioned abortion.

The visceral hatred so many of my peers from elite universities feel for Sarah Palin does not come from mere snobbish revulsion at her association with backwoods culture, with mooseburgers and ATVs. Many of us who exulted over last night’s electrifying speech have little in common with her, and, despite her manifest intelligence and good humor, might well feel more comfortable having dinner with the Obamas than with the Palins. The hatred comes from the threat she poses to their idea of what the American order should be and what place in it they are owed.

Even though intellectual elites have largely abandoned socialism, most continue to believe that politics is about operating a complex machine called society. The people best equipped to operate this machine are those with big brains who have studied this machine most intently and at the highest level. That is to say, political power (or at least decisive political influence) should go to people like them, who majored in International Relations, follow the details of G8 meetings, parse statistics and read legislation for fun, campaign door to door, trawl the blogs and read Foreign Affairs obsessively. In short, they wish to equate competence with wonkishness. One of the reasons they so love Sen. Obama is that they think that, with their wonkish devotion to the study of issues, they could well be among his three hundred foreign-policy advisers.

Enter Sarah Palin from Wasilla, Alaska. By wonkish criteria she is barely more equipped to run this country than any other adult chosen at random. Intellectual elites cannot bear to think that, politics being a practical affair, practical knowledge is more important than knowledge of facts and facility with complex analyses.They do not want to believe that having done comparatively small things well equips one better for the use of power than having encyclopedic knowledge of large things. But so it is.

Knowledge of essential facts is, of course, essential to good political leadership, but such facts are relatively few and are usually well within the grasp of someone with normal intelligence and decent secondary education. In picking their leaders, the average voter rightly cares less whether candidates have scholar’s expertise than whether they have manifested tenacity, courage, good judgment of people and affairs, moral integrity under pressure, and the ability to wield influence effectively. These characteristics can be displayed at least as well in Wasilla as in Bryn Mawr and are honed far better by vigorous participation in ordinary life (indeed, from things as banal as family crises, PTA meetings and small-town controversies) than by seminars and policy debates.

As Thomas Sowell has said, most higher education is just expensive insulation from reality. It’s no surprise if the insulated are afraid that, in Sarah Palin, an uninvited visitor from the real world has come to undermine their credentials and usurp their privileges.

I think it’s understandable for Joseph to be hungry for more–but, as FT’s Denise Vaccaro notes, the one we really need to hear from on abortion is the head of this ticket John McCain. He’s the one who would be leading this country and nominating justices to the Supreme Court. Let’s see if his speech this evening satisfies.

Last week, we posted an interview with First Things editor Joseph Bottum on his article “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.” Since that was such a hit, we’ve decided to add more interviews for your listening pleasure.

R. R. Reno, features editor at First Things and professor of theological ethics at Creighton University, has interviewed another author whose work is featured in the August/September 2008 issue. This time, we hear from Robert S. Miola about his review of Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome.

The entire interview can be heard below, or you can go directly to its Google Video page for more options on downloading it. Enjoy!

I have to disagree, Joseph. Sarah Palin didn’t talk about abortion, and I don’t think she needed to. And it’s not just because everybody already knows her pro-life position (thanks, if nothing else, to the media’s harrumphing on that count), nor was it because she didn’t want to turn off the soccer moms or the hockey moms or whoever else.

When she stood up on the stage before all of America, with her pregnant daughter by her side and her Downs syndrome baby on her shoulder, she reminded us exactly where she stands on abortion. Her daughter’s and her own decision to keep and love their babies may not have been the most politically expedient or personally easy choices, from the hockey-mom perspective, but they speak far louder than words.

And actions, not rhetoric, Palin promised last night, is what she’s all about: “Among politicians, there is the idealism of high-flown speechmaking, in which crowds are stirringly summoned to support great things. And then there is the idealism of those leaders . . . who actually do great things. They’re the ones who are good for more than talk.” At least in pro-life matters, Sarah Palin stands with the latter.

At the Democratic convention, Bill Clinton declaimed that the world is more impressed “by the power of America’s example than by the example of America’s power.”

At the Republican convention, Sarah Palin declared, “In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.”

As the poet R.S. Gwynn remarks, “Ah, antimetabole—gets ’em every time.”

Well, Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech seems to have been rapturously received among conservatives.

So much so, that you don’t have to go far to find sneering comments about Palin’s delivery of “red meat” to the conservative base.

Here’s the curious thing, though: Not once in her speech did she make any mention of abortion—the center of the social-conservative issues.

You could argue that the dwelling on her family helped make the point nonverbally, and her phrase “a servant’s heart” was a way of reaching out to evangelicals. And you’d be right.

Still, the absence of any use of the word abortion suggests that she was not playing to the base. Rather, she was playing to the suburban moms for whom abortion is not a driving issue, one way or the other.

I can’t say I like it; she’s pro-life and needs to say so. How we talk about abortion is as important as how we attempt politically to overturn Roe v. Wade. But given the energy Palin’s nomination has generated in Republican circles, the McCain-Palin campaign may imagine it’s got the social conservatives locked up, and so it makes the target the squishy middle.

At the very least, however, we need to hear less about how the speech last night was pandering to the base—about its being red meat for social conservatives to feed on. I liked Palin and her speech, but, as a pro-lifer, I’m still hungry.