Before Sarah Palin was on the John McCain ticket, the Rev. Mark Bartling was undecided.

He’d make the joke, “If God intended us to vote, he’d give us a candidate.”
The day Palin was announced as GOP presidential hopeful McCain’s running mate, that changed.

“With Sarah Palin, I think God has given us a candidate,” said Bartling, 69, a retired pastor and high school teacher in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.

But that raises an interesting issue.

While Palin has Bartling’s support in leading the nation, she could not vote or be a pastor in his church body, as women are prohibited from these roles.

For Bartling, that’s not difficult to reconcile.

“We happen to have in this country what is called ‘separation of church and state,’” he said. “God rules both, but he rules with different rules. In the state, God rules with the law. In the church, God rules with his Holy Gospel of grace and forgiveness.”

He compared the difference to football and soccer: There are a lot of similarities, but you don’t play football according to the rules of soccer.

Palin has been billed as a favorite of conservative Christians, even though many of those Christians come from traditions where rules prohibit women from top leadership positions. Like Bartling, those I talked to this week who support Palin find no inconsistency here.

Church is one place. The state is another.

“For me, it’s kind of a moot issue,” said Roxanne Munns, 36, a member of Bethany Evangelical Free Church. “Palin is not going to be my spiritual authority. … God has obviously gifted her in the political arena and she is doing what God has called her to do.”

Munns, like Bartling, named Palin’s stand against abortion as a major reason for supporting her.

At Bethany, women cannot be pastors, and the church’s overseer board, which currently has seven members, must be all male.

The Rev. Corey Sateren, senior pastor at Bethany, pointed to 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 as Scriptural passages showing the authority men have in the church.

“It has nothing to do with ability. Probably many women have more ability to pastor a church than men do,” he said in an interview after the Thursday night vice presidential debate. “It’s just a reflection of what God instituted when he created man first and women second.”

But God doesn’t lay out any biblical definitions of who can and can’t be in governmental leadership,

49-year-old Sateren said, other than that they must have good biblical ethics.

I asked him to clarify: So God is not concerned with the genders of leaders of state, but God is concerned with the genders of leaders of churches?

I had it right, said Sateren, who said he supports McCain and Palin.

Of course, not all conservative Christian churches are led by males, and as Marggi Porcari pointed out, women can hold some leadership roles at Bethany. The 52-year-old La Crosse resident is director of ministry there.

“There are clearly differences between men and women, but I don’t see limitations. I see appreciation for our differences in what we can bring to the church,” she said. “It really just boils down to what the Bible says and how you understand what the Bible says.”

Joe Orso works part time for the La Crosse Tribune and the Franciscan Spirituality Center. Opinions in this column are his own.

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