God, Family, and Country

The always provocative and often misguided Jacques Berlinerblau thinks that Sarah Palin’s approach to public service is profoundly mistaken. 

He takes as his point of departure this statement: “When we serve, we devote ourselves to God, family and country .”  Here are snippets of his commentary:

The order she refers to, “God, Family, Country” comprises a bewildering conflation of priorities, recklessly emphasizing the personal over the civic.

Palin works from the assumption that one enters public service not to uphold the constitution, not to defend the nation, not to enrich the lives of citizens, but to honor God.

Whose God, you ask? That’s a great question in a society as religiously diverse as our own. From Palin’s vantage point the answer to that can only be: my God and my interpretation of God. Which, chances are, won’t be your God and your interpretation of God . . . .

Taking the Silver Medal in Palin’s hierarchy is “family.” Her emphasis is perhaps psychologically understandable, given the ferocious battering that the Palin clan, most notably the children, has endured in the press over the past few years.

Yet once again, a politician does not seek elected office to better his or her family . . . .

As for the last of Palin’s priorities, it should have been her first and arguably her second and third as well. Americans are certainly allowed to believe that their God is much more important than their country. But those Americans ought not run for high office.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this farrago of misunderstanding and perhaps willful misinterpretation, but his last remark is as good as any.  To repeat: “Americans are certainly allowed to believe that their God is much more important than their country [gee, thanks]. But those Americans ought not run for high office.”  So someone who takes the Pledge of Allegiance seriously (“one nation under God “) is thereby unsuited, in Berlinerblau’s view, to hold high office.  To state it another way, someone who regards public service as (in the traditional sense a calling is unfit to serve.  Only those who think that politics and government are above all else should serve.  Another name for those who have this view of government is totalitarian .  Thanks, but no thanks, Professor Berlinerblau.

Whatever one thinks of Palin’s substantive political views or capacity to lead, her priorities, as stated, are quite normal and within the American mainstream.  St. Augustine (see Book XIX of The City of God , which I just read with about fifty sophomores as part of our core curriculum) would approve and insist that, within the limits of one’s primary responsibility to God, one could be a good and dutiful citizen.  Such a citizen would not (as he puts it) be seized by earthly goals and goods, but would appreciate them at their true worth.  Such a citizen would not regard himself or herself as essentially omnipotent, capable on his or her own of solving all our problems.  More precisely, such a citizen would not regard government as omnipotent.  If our problem is sin, our solution is not government, but God.

Berlinerblau makes a mistake, common among many secularists and some Christians, in assuming that a person who takes his or her religion seriously must thereby regard government as an instrument of proselytization and salvation.  On the contrary, St. Augustine teaches us, government is meant to deal with our temporal ends (e.g., health, safety, and morals, so far as they conduce to living peaceably together).  This is a vision of limited government.

Then there’s family.  Here it strikes me that Berlinerblau is simply being willfully obtuse.  A person who didn’t consider family before embarking upon a political career, who simply didn’t care about the impact of that decision on his or her spouse and children, would be some sort of monster.  Everyone recognizes that public service comes at some cost to one’s family.  Sometimes the cost can be too high.  Taking that cost into account, and thinking first of all of those who are dependent upon you, before you enter into public service is the hallmark of a responsible parent.  And to be frank, I wouldn’t vote for someone who evidently didn’t care about his or her spouse and kids.  In other words, putting family first doesn’t imply nepotism, but rather ordinary human responsibility.  Berlinerblau couldn’t have seriously put forth this objection.  

In my view, Sarah Palin’s priorities are normal and not at all politically disqualifying.  Berlinerblau’s objections, on the other hand, give me the kind of doubts about his capacity for citizenship that he expresses about Palin.  Well, not really: I don’t think he’s really a totalitarian.  He just plays at being one so as to attract attention.