Robert Thurman of Columbia University has his own grievance with Palin’s Religion. In his mind, what sets the Palin-Muthee connection apart from that of Obama and Wright is that she has gone beyond association and incorporated church teachings into her political addresses and policies. From this he intuits that Pailn might well make life changing decisions for Americans (like a nuclear fallout, for instance) based on “avowedly non-rational religious beliefs.”
In response to why journalists are not questioning Palin on her faith he posits: “Journalists are wrongly held back by thinking that this would violate some sort of privacy boundary, which boundary is a vestige of the previously long-respected conventional notion that church and state should be kept apart in American public life. But this boundary is violated by candidates being chosen not for their qualifications and competencies, but precisely for their extremist religious beliefs, under the reasoning that they will mobilize support from a ‘base’ that shares those beliefs.”