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The wall-to-wall Palin coverage only adds to her celebrity veneer. It's not helping. I am diametrically opposed to just about everything about her politics, and even I am starting to feel a little defensive of her.
Half of this article is a legitimate expression of concern for how certain religious practices and the beliefs that tend to go along with them negatively affect public policy (especially foreign policy). But it's not a straight line from glossolalia to nuclear disaster, so you need something of more substance to turn an article about Palin's religious upbringing into something resembling relevant commentary in this election. The other half of this article is trying to do that, but we don't have enough information so it comes across as trying to spin cobwebs into castles. The quote about the Iraq war and God's will is a good example of this. From the little context we have, it sounds to me like it could be something I've prayed many times (Lord, show us the part of this terrible destruction that You can fill with new life). Maybe she was talking there about God's will in the sense of some international pre-apocalyptic conflagration, maybe not. Maybe she takes AoG theology very seriously, maybe she's just an incredibly savvy, ambitious woman who knows a harness-able demographic when she sees one. We don't really know. But if we take those words and project our fears into them and turn her into a caricature, it reflects more poorly on us than on her.
We have to be careful about our tendency to parade certain religious beliefs and practices out like some kind of freak show in order to whip ourselves into a political frenzy (it's kinda' the liberal equivalent of tent-revival-level rhetoric, which I do not mean in a positive way). Most people will hear "speaks in tongues" and think "nutty, scary, bad, eeek!" but I've been to AoG services a number of times -- some of them are truly frightening in the way this article implies. Others are just plain sweet. Glossolalia can come across like a particularly angry psychosis, but it can just as often be like the cooing of a mother over her child. Once I attended a service and began to weep in the middle (my father had just died), and this group of people surrounded me and started "speaking in tongues" in the most comforting, gentle way I could imagine. It really depends on the people, the preacher, and the way they understand their practices in relationship to the larger world.
Look, once a week I drink wine and eat bread that has been mysteriously transformed through consecration into the body and blood of my Lord and Savior. That's pretty nutty too, on the face of it. It has deeper resonances for me embedded within my tradition, but it's hard to understand that if you don't learn a lot more about who I am as an individual and how my specific congregation explains and contextualizes that practice. And since we don't know enough about Palin to do the same for her spiritual practices, we really aren't doing much more than reacting viscerally to how different her background seems to us. This is the type of histrionic guesswork that happens when a candidate is being so completely cloistered from the media. The appropriate response is to demand more access to her, not to rush to our spinning wheels with a bag full of cobwebs.
