{"id":154,"date":"2011-01-16T10:35:28","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T10:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/sarah-palin-martyr.html"},"modified":"2011-01-16T10:35:28","modified_gmt":"2011-01-16T10:35:28","slug":"sarah-palin-martyr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/sarah-palin-martyr.html","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Palin, martyr"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Perpetual.jpg\"Anent Sarah Palin’s claim of blood libel and the Washington Times<\/i>‘ editorializing<\/a> about an “ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers,” <\/i>Michael Sean Winters astutely asks<\/a>, “Why is it that conservatives have a fetish for identifying their so-called ‘persecution’ with the
\npersecution, the real persecution, without quotation marks, of the Jews?”<\/p>\n

The
\nanswer, perhaps, is that just as early Christians christened themselves
\nthe “true Israel,” so latter-day Christian conservatives like to think
\nof themselves as Jews when they feel persecuted. I guess this is the
\nJudeo-Christian cross we Jews have to bear.<\/p>\n

Or maybe not. Winters
\nsuggests leaving the Jews out of it and just saying that Palin was
\nthrown to the lions: “Why should Christians be denied a share in the
\nsufferings of Sarah?”<\/p>\n

Why indeed? To be sure, the first Christian martyrs did tend to treat their persecutors in the spirit of Jesus’ words<\/a>
\non the Cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
\nThat’s not exactly the Palinesque approach. Yet the right-wing thirst
\nfor victimhood does mirror the  eagerness with which those thrown to the
\nlions embraced their fate. For the “blood” of these “martyrs” is the
\nseed of the conservative movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anent Sarah Palin’s claim of blood libel and the Washington Times‘ editorializing about an “ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers,” Michael Sean Winters astutely asks, “Why is it that conservatives have a fetish for identifying their so-called ‘persecution’ with the persecution, the real persecution, without quotation marks, of the Jews?” The answer, perhaps, is that just…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSarah Palin, martyr - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/sarah-palin-martyr.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sarah Palin, martyr - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anent Sarah Palin’s claim of blood libel and the Washington Times‘ editorializing about an “ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers,” Michael Sean Winters astutely asks, “Why is it that conservatives have a fetish for identifying their so-called ‘persecution’ with the persecution, the real persecution, without quotation marks, of the Jews?” The answer, perhaps, is that just…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/sarah-palin-martyr.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-01-16T10:35:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/Perpetual.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Sarah Palin, martyr - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}