Did God prank-call Scott Walker?

Slate columnist David Weigel has a piece titled "Why Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker Credits God for his Political Success." Weigel has Walker's new memoir, "Unintimidated," which has a bit in it about something we talked about back in February 2011 (during the big protests): A prankster pretending to be David Koch got through on the phone to Scott Walker, who talked to him for a while, even as he said things like "You gotta crush that union" to try to get Walker to blurt out something that would be used against him. From Weigel's summary:

[W]hen Murphy/Koch asked about the wisdom of “planting some troublemakers,” Walker said his team had “thought about that” but dismissed it.

Walker haters used that "planting some troublemakers" business as much as they could. (In March 2011, when Meade was physically attacked by protesters, a woman pointed and said "These are Walker plants.")

Back to Weigel, summarizing Walker:

The governor claims that he “hesitated” to take it, and “was upset that my staff had let the call get through to my office, making me look so silly.” He never actually “thought about” the fake troublemakers—he now writes that he “did not want to insult Mr. Koch by saying that we would never do something so stupid.”...

“Only later did I realize that God had a plan for me with that episode,” writes Walker. After his press conference, he picked up his daily devotional and saw the title for Feb. 23: The power of humility, the burden of pride.

“I looked up and said, ‘I hear you, Lord,’” writes Walker. “God was sending me a clear message to not do things for personal glory or fame. It was a turning point that helped me in future challenges, helped me stay focused on the people I was elected to serve, and reminded me of God’s abundant grace and the paramount need to stay humble.”

I can't really tell if Weigel (or the Slate headline writers) think Walker is getting too religion-y here and is claiming that God has special messages and plans for him. (Is Scott Walker a God plant?) I can't even tell if Walker is honestly describing his stages of processing the unpleasant incident. But I do think this account is conventional, mainstream religion. Something bad happens, and you realize that God had a plan. You extract a lesson that lightens the burden from the past and redirects you toward a future.

You don't even need God in the mix to indulge in this sort of positive thinking. What doesn't kill atheists makes them stronger — don't you know?

But Walker haters are going to want to use his religion talk against him. They use anything they can against him. I'm going to be looking out for this, because there's a tendency amongst the media elite to mock religion, to assume — like a governor assuming he's got true supporter on the phone — that everyone they're talking to thinks that anyone who feels God's presence in his life is weird, scary, and surely not to be trusted with the levers of power. They're quite wrong. Especially if they are writing on the internet, where everyone sees what they are saying.

And 90% of Americans believe in God — or as Gallup charmingly puts it "More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God/Professed belief is lower among younger Americans, Easterners, and liberals." (I love the "Continue to," which implies: Come on, people, after all the evidence, what's your problem?!)