Sarah Palin returned in full force this week to promote her just-released Going Rogue—and to use media appearances to settle scores with "the media" for its treatment of her during the 2008 campaign.

She was in the flesh at Newsweek (which featured a picture of Palin in running shorts on the cover), on the couch with Oprah, getting chatty with Barbara Walters and cozying up with Sean Hannity for an hour-long love-in.  Playgirl's decision to run pictures from Levi Johnson's photo-shoot on its website only added to the excitement.

Where is religion in Going Rogue?  That question was missing in most of the interviews and press reports, which tended to home in on the political score-settling that adds spice to this 413-page book.  But a number of bloggers have taken up the question. In her On Faith blog at the Washington Post, Sally Quinn is intent on defending against what she calls "Sarah Palin's Rogue Christianity."

In his God and Country blog at U.S.News, Dan Gilgoff gets closer to the heart of the matter. Gilgoff tags Going Rogue as "Christian literature," "written as much for Christian readers as political junkies." He predicts the book "will help establish Palin as much as a Christian figure as a political one."  

Astute, but still not on target. Seeing any kind of separation between Palin's politics and her religion is to misunderstand her as well as her particular appeal. She is a Christian political figure—or a right-wing political Christian—who's also a mom and an Alaskan moose-hunter to boot.

Still, Palin's careful not to scare the swing-voters. As Tara Graham observed in The Scoop during the heat of last year's campaign, Palin soft-pedaled her Pentecostal past, preferring to describe herself as "non-denominational."  "Apparently," Graham wrote, "someone's been playing a game of Pentecostal dodge-ball." In Going Rogue, someone's still playing that game.

To wit, Palin seems almost defensive about her attendance at Wassila's Assembly of God, saying, "There weren't many churches in our small town" and "my family would eventually worship at a nondenominational Bible church." This caginess is most conspicuous when Palin describes her high-school conversion. She says it was the beauty of the natural world that led her to "put my life in my Creator's hands as I sought my life's path." In much of evangelical literature, this would be a come-to-Jesus moment, but Jesus-talk is surprisingly absent in Palin's account of her epiphany and scarce in the rest of the book.  

The most prominent ethical theme in Going Rogue—guaranteed to appeal to social conservatives of all religious persuasions—is Palin's anti-abortion politics. When McCain's call came in August of 2008, Palin was at the Alaska State Fair on a family outing with Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig. They elbow their way through crowds to visit the Alaska Right to Life booth, "where a poster...featured the sweetest baby girl swathed in pink, pretend angel wings fastened to her soft shoulders."  It was a picture of Piper as an infant!  "A staunch advocate of every child's right to be born, I was pro-life enough for the grassroots RTL folks to adopt Piper as their poster child, but I wasn't politically connected enough for the GOP machine to allow the organization to endorse me in early campaigns." Right then, McCain's call comes. The rest of the story unfolds from there.  

The narrative that Palin and purported ghostwriter Lynn Vincent have created conveys Palin's inability (or is it refusal?) to compartmentalize her life—to keep politics here, to put religion over there and to shelter her family from the public gaze. Her identity isn't religious or political or maternal—it's all three rolled into one. It's the scrambling of these boundaries that makes Palin a rogue—and perhaps a harbinger of things to come.   

J. Terry Todd is Associate Professor of American Religious Studies at Drew University and director of Drew's Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. The author of many articles on religion in 20th-century America, Terry is especially interested in religious conflicts over family life and sexuality, and how Christian ideas and practices shape U.S. politics and mass media.