Sarah Palin, "City on a Hill," and fundamentalist dog-whistles

[starroute]

I'm not sure if this has been noted here before. I was just chatting with my son about Palin's use of the phrase "American exceptionalism" as if that that was a *good* thing. He hadn't been familiar with the term, so I pointed him to both the Palin quote from the debate and the Wikipedia entry on it.

He raced through that entry and out the other side -- to the Wikipedia entry for "City on a Hill," a phrase which Palin also used, attributing it to Ronald Reagan. She said near the end of the debate, "And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here."

It turns out her use was more than just a shout-out to the unreconstructed Reaganites. Here's that Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill#Modern_usage

After the phrase was used by Ronald Reagan, the fundamentalist Christian movement in America took up the phrase "city upon a hill" as a sort of code word to describe their vision of bringing 'Christian Values' into government.

In August 2007, Larry Witham, author and proponent of Intelligent Design, previously known for promoting fundamentalist Christian arguments in his books "By Design: Science and the Search for God Encounter Books" and "The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion" released a new book called "City Upon a Hill: How Sermons Changed the Course of American History". His web site states his next book will be titled The Proof of God.

[hootinholler]

1. Is there a comprehensive list of dog whistles? n/t