{"id":262,"date":"2008-09-10T10:16:55","date_gmt":"2008-09-10T10:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/09\/christian-teflon-and-moral-rel.html"},"modified":"2008-09-10T10:16:55","modified_gmt":"2008-09-10T10:16:55","slug":"christian-teflon-and-moral-rel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/09\/christian-teflon-and-moral-rel.html","title":{"rendered":"Christian Teflon and Moral Relativism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there&#8217;s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she&#8217;s new, she&#8217;s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don&#8217;t really matter.&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8211;John Feehery, a Republican strategist.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2008\/09\/09\/AR2008090903727.html\">This quote <\/a>struck me for a few reasons.  First, it validates what I&#8217;ve been saying that Palin has an impenetrable coat of Christian Teflon.  The more she&#8217;s attacked &#8212; a.k.a. persecuted &#8212; the more popular she&#8217;ll be.<br \/>\nSecond, the &#8220;little facts&#8221; he referred to related to whether she actually opposed the Bridge to Nowhere and earmarks, as they&#8217; campaign has repeatedly declared. So what she actually did is irrelevant compared to her being &#8220;new,&#8221; &#8220;popular&#8221; and an &#8220;insurgent.&#8221;<br \/>\nHe may be right in political terms but this strikes me as the ultimate in moral relativism. There&#8217;s no such thing as truth or untruth &#8212; or at least it doesn&#8217;t really matter.   What matters instead is energy, emotion, and which team your on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there&#8217;s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she&#8217;s new, she&#8217;s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don&#8217;t really matter.&#8221;&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Christian Teflon and Moral Relativism - Steven Waldman<\/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\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/09\/christian-teflon-and-moral-rel.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Christian Teflon and Moral Relativism - Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&#8220;The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there&#8217;s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she&#8217;s new, she&#8217;s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent. As long as those are out there, these little facts don&#8217;t really matter.&#8221;&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/09\/christian-teflon-and-moral-rel.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Steven Waldman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-09-10T10:16:55+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"swaldman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Christian Teflon and Moral Relativism - Steven Waldman","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/stevenwaldman\/2008\/09\/christian-teflon-and-moral-rel.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Christian Teflon and Moral Relativism - Steven Waldman","og_description":"&#8220;The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there&#8217;s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she&#8217;s new, she&#8217;s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent. 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He's also the author of the Founding Faith: Politics, Providence, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which has been published by Random House. Before co-founding Beliefnet in 1999, Waldman was a political journalist, serving as National Editor of U.S. News & World Report and National Correspondent for Newsweek. 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