(Submitted by Jane Grey.

Ed: This excellent dissection of the perceptions of religion by those who view, judge, report on and affect the path the to Presidency is an intriguing poke in the eye, revealing the hypocrisy of our press and Washington insiders.)

Ever since the religious refugees set foot on North American shores – and that’s what they were – women and men who walk on American soil have wrestled with the relationship between religious beliefs and political leadership. After all, most Americans believe in something. They don’t find it unreasonable for their political leadership to fall in the same category; in fact, it tends to engender a higher level of trust, kind of like a wedding ring does.

But, in fact, the men who are portrayed so well in HBO’s John Adams miniseries also knew the problems of rulers who regulated religion: English monarchies had risen and fallen due to queens and kings who volleyed back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism as the state religion; Henry VIII finally established the Church of England just so he could obtain a divorce.

John F. Kennedy made waves as the first Catholic President of the United States; something remarkable, not only for the bare fact of his papism, but also, I suspect, because Catholicism had frequently been associated with immigrants: ethnic groups coming to the country to find work. Catholicism, for many, was the religion of the marginalized, and therefore, the poor. Think New York City immigrants.

Mainline denominations have always been trusted in the White House. George W. is Methodist – and so is Hillary Clinton. Whether or not these denominational associations are more like memberships of the Rotary than pious expressions of vibrant faith, is rarely relevant.

But veteran DCer’s have an implicit suspicion of religious expression not tied to the Methodists, or Presbyterians, or Lutherans, Baptists, or even Catholics. For a brief few months, this suspicion bobbed around on the surface as You Tube clips of Jeremiah Wright made their way into inboxes around the country. Barack Obama, far from being Muslim, as a surprising 23% of Texans thought, had been a member of a radical activist congregation for lo, these many years. Politicians and plumbers alike were uncomfortable. Not only could this sink his bid for the White House, there was the disturbing question of whether he really believed any of this. If he did – well – he would appear untrustworthy as a man. Few people would prefer him to believe something honestly, even if it seemed extremist or foreign to middle America; most would prefer to conclude that he had sat, a nominal believer, in the pews.

At this point, John McCain made an interesting decision. He chose not to levy the footage for all it was worth. I respect Senator McCain for being a gentleman in many circumstances.

I’m not sure that that was the time or place.

Not because it’s a legitimate measure of a man to use his weekend church service as a litmus test for how he’ll be in office. But because it would have helped to prime the public to accept less popular denominations as nonetheless legitimate expressions of personal faith.

Bear with me now, as we arrive at Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin has a similar problem to Mike Huckabee’s. Many Americans are uncomfortable with their participation in church. Huckabee used to be a Baptist minister, for crying out loud. Do we want someone who’s given an altar call meeting with the British Prime Minister?

And why should their church attendance raise any flags? Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, and now United Church of Christ members have sat on Pennsylvania Avenue for decades.

There’s a delicate shift in perception, though. Wasilla Bible Church? It has the word “Bible” in the name. Does that mean that, unlike her political colleagues who sit serenely in services across the country, mentally checking off the week’s to do list, or planning strategic meetings during “Come Thou Fount,” she actually believes in her professed faith? It’s at this point that Sarah would do well to realize that the intellectual elites are brand people. Methodist. Ralph Lauren. Lexus. Tiffany’s. Oscar de la Renta.

I suspect that Barack Obama might have had more trouble about Jeremiah Wright, had our new President not had “Hussein” as a middle name. Why? That, at least was identifiable. Yes, as Muslim: but at least it stabilized impressions of him, instead of jettisoning the Democratic candidate into the wild unknown of activist religions.

And now, Governor Palin arrives on the scene, a member of a small, independent congregation in Alaska. She even has a Pentecostal background. And D.C. is all whispers: Pentecostals don’t even recite the Creed. Now, this is hardly a doctrinal battle. The out-of-the-closet leftist media couldn’t care less about the structure of a worship service. It’s a suspicion of brand, a way to stigmatize, a way to marginalize. Like finding out someone’s jewelry is more flea market than Rodeo Drive.

The untethered appearance of an independent congregation easily lends itself to gossips and pundits. I’m sure not a few jokes have been made at her expense – and poor Wasilla Bible’s.

The talking heads and newspaper editors allowed Obama a pass, because they wanted to. They don’t want to allow Sarah Palin a pass, so they won’t. Even if the Governor attended a high church service every week with incense and the Eucharist, they’d find something else to plunder in the attempt to stick her with all the toms in ovens for Thanksgiving, replete with apple in the mouth.

This is an old, old attitude, and not one limited to the snobbery of the liberal illuminati in United States government. The surprisingly uneducated Washington worshippers have forgotten the histories of their own denominations: Methodists began as a grassroots movement known for their “enthusiasm” (read with extreme disdain), by a founder, John Wesley, who’d been mocked as a “Bible moth” at Oxford (he spent so much time with his nose in the Good Book). The Church of England regarded the whole thing with a distant air of disapproval, rather like the Queen’s expressions towards Princess Diana in those tumultuous days.

Now, of course, politicians preen and remind themselves that they have evolved past the days of actually believing the tenets of their denomination, or religion. Anyone who attends an independent church is open to suspicion; a denomination is a club; an independent church is, in their eyes, hardly removed from a cult. The sarcasm drips from well-heeled women, catty in their surmises: they would never be caught dead in Wal-Mart, buying diapers.

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