As I understand it, only the Presbyterians and the Reformed churches are rigorously Calvinist (Protestant Reformed) in the sense that John Calvin and John Knox would recognize this distinguished denomination today. Huguenots were French Reformed. Together with the Lutheran, Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, and Episcopal churches, Presbyterian and Reformed denominations comprise Mainline Protestantism.

Then you have the16th-century religious socialists of the Radical Reformation: Pietists and pacifists like the Quakers, Mennonites, and Amish.

Palin is a Fundamentalist, however. I think Jeff Sharlet (The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power) has the best recent treatment of Fundamentalism, which IIRC he says owes a lot to American phenomenon Jonathan Edwards. I’ve gotten up only to page 163.

But it’s easy to observe that combustible conditions exist on the American frontier (or in the hinterlands of Alaska) when you mix personality, disdain for schooling, and opportunities for leadership in fringe Christian churches. And sometimes Bill Kristol, on a Weekly Standard Alaska cruise, is lovestruck with one of these rare creatures and thinks she’s the future of what was once a Grand Old Party.

It’s my understanding that Calvin taught that human reason was corrupted by the Fall, along with every other aspect of humanity. Thus he rejected the Thomist doctrine that proper use of human reason would support faith in revealed truth. For Calvin and his followers, human reason might contradict revelation, and in such case reason must be rejected.

Most American Protestant denominations are Calvinist, the principal exceptions being Methodists and Episcopalians, both of which are offshoots of the Anglican Church.

The rest is mine.

Sitting here in these chairs . . . .

Well-educated listeners rightly expect this part of Palin’s introductory clause to resolve happily with “we.” Alas, she continues to massacre the clause with “that I’m going to be proposing but.” The participial phrase not only dangles but is nonsensical as well.

The question unresolved by Daniel’s editorial exercise is why? Why the nonsensical speech elements?

My guess is that these nonsense elements are her versions of throat-clearing. It could be her nervous habit. Because she is wired for speech, but not educated for thought, she resorts to random vocalizations a little bit frantically until, whew, finally, she manages a declarative sentence.

A few things strike me about Sarah Palin’s speech patterns and personal style. First, cognitively, Palin appears to be exquisitely wired for speech simply as a psychomotor matter.

Palin also strikes me as an aural learner, not a visual learner. This learning preference arms her with the ability to adopt any number of phrases that she has heard here and there. Phrases that are essentially without content (like “it’s our privileged obligation”) and which she tosses into her word salads like cherry tomatoes. Her physical presence and her fluency provide the vinaigrette that, to some, like Paglia, makes the salad palatable.

Recall too that her social milieu, fringe Assembly of God meetings and charismatic prayer groups, have influenced her speech with the impressionistic, fuzzy patterns of group supplications that range willy-nilly from the spirit of witchcraft at the library, to churchgoers’ druggy teenagers, to Angela’s lost schnauzer, to Ted and Donna’s struggle with infertility.

In supplication (prayer) mode, Palin has become accustomed to careening from topic to topic–none of them logically related. Again, in her AoG milieu, where well-educated listeners are not present to ask “WTF?”, Palin creates the appearance of coherent speech with resort to linking words and phrases like: also, over there, again, there again, just, and so on. And political speeches, for Palin, are perhaps another form of prayer: it’s a supplication addressed not to God but to potential believers in her.

(As an aside, Daniel, since theology is your forte. Take a look at AoE doctrine and tell us what you think. I’d appreciate it.)

Furthermore, and this is utter speculation, Palin may have found that the combination of her physical beauty, personal charm, and curious force of will (what people describe variously as magnetism, the “it” factor,” her “sparkling” personality) utterly disarm most of her listeners.

Here’s the thing: her charmed experience with disarmed listeners has made her linguistically lazy–and she was never linguistically fit to begin with. So, on a national stage, dealing perhaps for the first time with incredulous listeners unaccustomed to the cadences of Wasilla AoG prayer meetings, Palin blames aghast listeners. It’s their partisanship, not her incoherence.

So I agree with Larison, who has owned this subject from the beginning, along with Sully, and Kevin, quoted below:

Despite all the grief she’s gotten, I continue to think that the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate represents the breaking of a consensual cultural barrier far more fundamental than most people realize. It’s not just that she was inexperienced (Spiro Agnew and John Edwards weren’t much more experienced than Palin when they ran for VP) but that she was — obviously, transparently, completely — uninterested in and uninformed about national policy at nearly every level. We’ve simply never seen someone so completely unmoored from the normal requirements of national office before. She was chosen purely at the level of celebrity, and an awful lot of people seemed to be just fine with that.

Palin’s got the cadence of church and the King James Bible and shakespear — where the order of the sentence isn’t as importance as the words — in her speech; she’d be more comfortable reading Shakespeare then anything on the NYT bestseller list.

Even more important, she has little understanding of what the modern meanings of most of the words she uses are. She may still believe that American exceptionalism means we make great stuff, grow great people. etc., and has nothing to do with invading other countries alone.

So Sarah Palin has a Charlie Parker-esque gift for improvisation? That wasn’t the impression I got from listening to her in interviews. I’d say that Palin’s use of language more closely resembles the tin-eared screeching of a junior high school saxophonist. Paglia also says that the Democrats deployed a “shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage.” What, is she annoyed that they stole her shtick?

“Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

Now lets rework that first sentence to normal speak.

“Sitting here in these chairs, I am going to propose solutions to the challenges facing our states. Governors are held accountable. We are not one of many casting votes on legislation. Governors aren’t able to get away with that.

Yes I deleted the Obama slam… It is too bad she seems to be writing her own material. But in normal speak she could make sense, in her preacher speak, that will be impossible. She doesn’t seem to understand the election is over. Continuing her attacks on Obama seem to damage her and yet she continues her attacks. She really needs to study. She needs to familiarize herself with policies. Bone up on actual issues, propose some actual solutions. Those solutions could be energy related. Verbally presents herself poorly. All we really know about Sarah Palin is conservative men seem turned on by her. Well that is weird.