Sarah Palin’s JerUSAlem and Pentecostal faith: a hysteric symptom of American utopianism?

Colloquy 17:70-82 (2009)
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Abstract

The United States of America embodies the utopian claim that people from any religious persuasion can identify America as their homeland. This is traceable in the history of non-conforming Protestants fleeing persecution in Catholic Europe. Their establishment of utopian communities also involved the appropriation of land from the original owners and an imperative to will ignorance of this as a criminal act. The perpetuity of this legacy can be seen in the twenty-first century return to religion and the identification of America with economic opportunity rather than as socio-geographic entity. While many are still attracted to migrate to the United States, even more people live vicariously in an American utopia via increased modes of consumerism, invoking anxiety about its impact on the non man-made world. One of the largest and fastest growing religious parallels with economic opportunism is the Pentecostal movement and its eschatological speculation of life after death. Although its national beginnings are debatable, the term “Pentecostal” has become synonymous with the aesthetics of American capitalism and its focus on technological immortality. Its growth can largely be attributed to the solipsistic metonymy of America’s constitutional separation of Church from State. While secular materialists may invest in this separation to imagine the death of religion, the growth of Pentecostalism is proof that this separation was germinal. Pentecostals are known for their millennial speculation of Armageddon, and this begs the question as to the political potential for sociopathic anarchy. In The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn presented an extensive study on nonconforming Protestantism around this prospect and concluded: The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolu- tionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still. Cohn’s focus is on radical cults of the 1960s and he does not think religion plays a part in their development. Is this because religious mystical millenarianism no longer exists, or because it exists but it is neither revolutionary nor anarchical? The answer may lie somewhere in the shift from the modernist and secular sixties to the postmodern and post-secular mood of the 2008 presidential campaign. This was characterised by both Democrats and Republicans rallying to win the Evangelical vote and culminated in the nomination of Sarah Palin, the Governor of Alaska. Palin was appointed to represent a religiously based political right and her membership with a Pentecostal church enhanced this possibility. She expounded extremist solutions for climate change and economic growth but failed to rally a great deal of support. Was this because her religious-utopian focus on the supernatural made her a volatile yet inevitably weaker candidate?

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