Betsy Jackson voted for John McCain in 2008. She greatly admired Sarah Palin. She thought the Alaska governor was brilliant and witty, and that she took a ferocious beating from the media because she was a woman in the limelight and that’s what the media does to such women. Jackson also loved that Palin did not keep her Christianity “quiet.”

These views are not unusual for someone in Jackson’s demographic. She is what she calls a “spirit-empowered” evangelical Christian, meaning one strongly influenced by Pentecostal practices. She is sixty-one, a gracious, gregarious, attractive woman with a big laugh and…