I will never forget the first picture I saw of Sarah Palin. There she was on the cover of Vogue, in early 2008–the "Governor Issue," no less. Her long, thick hair streamed wildly around her head, her well-toned body pressed against her sleeveless dress. That beauty-queen smile lit up her face. It turned out the cover was a fake, an Internet hoax; the hair, the body, and the dress were all photo-shopped by an anti-Palin website that wanted to make her look as un-gubernatorial as possible.

But that smile was certainly real. It is the smile of a woman who knows she has been saved and hopes you are, or soon will be, too. "I thanked our Lord for every single thing we’d been through," she writes in Going Rogue about the year that began when John McCain chose her to run for vice president. "I believed there was purpose in it all." The most important thing to know about the most popular conservative in America may be that, as a teenager, she vowed "to put my life in my Creator’s hands" and has never doubted that he is guiding her down "my life’s path."

Surprisingly, Palin’s religious convictions were mostly ignored by the reviewers and pundits who rushed to dissect her life after Going Rogue came out last fall and quickly sold at a pace J.K. Rowling might envy. In The New York Times, Frank Rich viewed her as the populist totem of the tea-party moment–"at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from bailouts." In The Nation, Katha Pollitt saw a woman who was more celebrity than crusader: "For her fans she may be a goddess of vitality and truth, but for everyone else she’s the first political female train wreck, the Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan of the Republican Party." The columnist Cal Thomas, a fellow conservative and evangelical, restricted himself to doling out campaign strategy: Palin ought to stop talking like an "angry and disenfranchised outsider," he wrote, and begin to "sharpen her intellect" to attract independents and become a credible threat to Barack Obama in 2012. Other writers praised her as a super-mom and a "regular person" or noted how similar her attacks on "liberal elites" sound to those once leveled by the likes of Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace.

Occasionally, a newly minted Palinologist did quote the ex-governor’s goofy remark that God "intended for us to eat animals" because "He made them out of meat." The cloying letter she wrote to Trig, her Down syndrome baby, in the voice of the Almighty also got some play. Earlier this year, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin reported in their book, Game Change, that Palin believed her nomination for vice president was part of "God’s plan." But the throng of professional chatterers quickly moved on to speculate about how her new job on Fox News might aid or hamper a run for the White House.

And yet her religion is the subject that, in her autobiography, she refers to more frequently, and with more fervency, than she does anything else. How can Palin’s faith be understood? And how might that faith influence her political future?

Going Rogue is both a testament of Christian "witness" and a cleverly crafted work of political propaganda. Each aspect of the book serves the other, and some attention should be paid to why the meld has attracted so many readers. The Christian right’s agenda of "family values" has remained constant for the past three decades–as has the firmness of its loyalty to the Republican Party. But like any political or religious movement, it has to adapt to the times or die. Jerry Falwell is gone, James Dobson is retired, and Pat Robertson makes the news only when he utters some hateful nonsense. However, the success of Palin’s book demonstrates that the Christian right is able to cultivate new leaders–or perhaps that new leaders know how to find it. And they no longer have to be men of the cloth.

During the 2008 campaign, it was easy to get the impression that Palin was a theological wacko. Reporters from outside Alaska discovered that she and her family had long been members of a Pentecostal church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. A 2005 video surfaced showing Palin kneeling on the church dais in prayer, while a visiting Kenyan pastor, Thomas Muthee, blessed her "in the name of Jesus" and added: "Every form of witchcraft is what you rebuke." Pentecostalists were already notorious, outside their own circle, for speaking in tongues and charming poisonous snakes (although the latter is largely a myth). Now, a casual TV viewer could also imagine that McCain’s running mate thought it might be a good idea to revive the Salem witch trials.

Yet, there is no evidence that Palin either believes in witchcraft or had anything to do with inviting Muthee. At the time, in fact, she was no longer even a member of that church, having left in 2002 to join a different, non-denominational congregation. Pentecostalism does happen to be one of the fastest-growing Christian groups, with more adherents in the developing world than in the United States itself. Their core beliefs include a faith in divine healing and premillennialism–the conviction that Jesus can come "at any moment" to render final judgment on a sinful world. But Palin refers to neither precept in Going Rogue.