Can Evangelicals Get Behind Palin? Yes.

Last week when the rumors and stories began wildly circulating about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, many talking heads speculated whether or not her family situation would affect how much support she received from her political base, namely Evangelical Christians. Clearly, they were referring to Palin’s pregnant teenage daughter Bristol and the fact that Palin’s not a stay-at-home mom to her 5 children (Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and newborn Trig). The pundits were of the opinion that conservatives couldn’t and wouldn’t support a woman who was governing a state instead of ensuring that her 17-year old daughter wasn’t having sex and getting pregnant.

Bloggers, especially at liberal blogs like DailyKos, suggested that Palin’s candidacy was itself a flagrant assault on the “Christian” idea that women should be stay at home moms and forego having a career in order to have and mother their children. A Daily Telegraph columnist (Liz Hunt) asked “How can she reconcile such a high-profile job as ‘veep’ – a ‘heartbeat’ away from leadership of the free world and all that – with bringing up 5 children?” Many other news outlets made similarly sexist comments which are detailed in an archived blog post of mine (Entitled "Obama gets something wrong...Again!")

The problem with all of these incredible suggestions is that pundits and bloggers are working from what is a very obsolete idea about what Evangelicals think, especially regarding women in the workplace. The following provides a few interesting numbers:

From a Pew Survey released this summer:

Should women return to their traditional roles in society:

            22% of Americans say “yes”

            32% of born-again white Protestants

*Not exactly a huge difference. Next generation Protestants are even closer…

In 1988:

           Only 33% of 18-35 year old Evangelicals believed that “women should take care          of running the home and leave the running of the country to men”

In 2001:

           Only 20% of 18-35 year old Evangelicals agreed

In 2007

           0.3% of women attending non-Catholic religious institutions said they would      likely become a full-time homemaker (That’s 99.7% who would have different    careers).

Evangelical women place a similar emphasis on having a family:

           80% of Evangelical women said it was “very important” compared to 73% of   non-Evangelical women.

In summary, a quote from a WSJ article

“So have Evangelicals accepted the sexual revolution? Yes and no. While they generally agree that women should have careers, evangelical women and men still have some traditional social views – that sex should be reserved for marriage, that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that the possibility of abortion on demand, far from being a key to women’s happiness, is simply wrong. In other words, like most Americans, they have rejected the more radical elements of feminism.

Another newsflash for pundits, perhaps.”

 

Naomi Schaefer Riley, 9/5/2008, WSJ

http://people-press.org/ (Pew Survey)

Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation by James Davison Hunter, 1988

            University of Chicago Press