By Peter Manseau

Introducing... Revealer fiction. Relax, fact fans, The Revealer isn't about to go all literary on you. (For that, you need to head over to our sister site, Killing the Buddha.) But longtime Revealer collaborator and former West Coast editor Peter Manseau has recently published his first novel, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter. It's a murder mystery, a romance, and a meditation on religion and media. Manseau is also the author of Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, and editor of Search, a magazine about religion and science. In March, Henry Holt will publish his next nonfiction book Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead, and in July Beacon will publish Believer, Beware: First Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, co-edited by Manseau.

Translator's Note

The collaboration between Itsik Malpesh and myself is perhaps one of the more unlikely literary associations in recent memory. At the time of our first meeting, in the fall of 1996, he was already a nonagenarian, I was just 21 years old. He was a Russian Jew reared in an era when the czar’s days were numbered; I was a Catholic boy from Boston born at the end of the Nixon administration. Having endured seventy tumultuous years in the United States, Malpesh had experienced far more of this nation’s history than I had, yet he nonetheless considered me the authority on our common culture, about which he was voraciously inquisitive. A five-minute conversation with Malpesh might include questions concerning public access television, North American birds, desktop publishing software, and subscription rates for Sports Illustrated, all delivered in a well-practiced English still thick with the Yiddish he preferred.

During one visit, he quizzed me on the price of season tickets to Camden Yards, assuming I would have an answer readily at hand.

“Mr. Malpesh, how could I possibly know that?” I asked.

Before responding he studied me with troubled eyes, as if at his age stating the obvious was almost too much to bear.

3 October 2008
11:01 AM: Plenty of pundits pounced on Palin's resurrection of failed Civil War general George McClellan in last night's debate (apparently, she meant General David McKiernan, who is alive), but not many noticed her erasure of near four centuries of history when she attributed John Winthrop's 1630 description of New England as "a City upon a Hill" to Ronald Reagan, who in his farewell address -- like many presidents before him -- declared the U.S. a "shining city upon a hill." Here's Palin: "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." Darn straight! We're rewriting history, and we are going to not let the "mainstream media" say we're sorry! According to Winthrop, though, it'll be the Lord who'll hold Sarah to account. His next sentence reads: "soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world."

16 September 2008
6:13 PM: Will McCain's Palin pick revive his once-high hopes of winning Latino votes? Will mainstream media be able to comprehend the overlap of the Latino, evangelical, and Pentecostal demographics? The answer to the first question, says B. Adriana Venegas-Chavez, is: Possibly. The answer to the second is to be found by inference from the links Venegas-Chavez gathers: Probably not.

10 September 2008
6:22 PM: "As the Bush era comes to a fitful close, and the American presidential elections approach, the Christian evangelical movement that brought the Republicans to power in 2000 is, to all outward appearances, losing its political influence. The strange spectacle of the past eight years, in which fire-breathing preachers from Colorado Springs and Lynchburg appeared to be crafting American policy, looks to be over. But Sharlet's book puts an end to any such thoughts." Josh Nathan-Kazis reviews The Family for Israel's oldest paper, Haaretz. My bet is that he wrote it before McCain picked Palin...

10 September 2008
11:10 AM: ABC reports that two of the books Palin's church allies in Wasilla may have singled out for censorship are Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous, and Pastor, I Am Gay, by a Wasilla area pastor named Howard Bess who describes himself as conservative. Go Ask Alice is well-known, a classic of campy anti-drug literature for teens believed to have been authored by a Mormon youth counselor named Beatrice Sparks. Plenty of sex and drugs, but not exactly liberal; and Sparks' next book, Jay's Journal, is the story of a boy who commits suicide after getting involved with the occult, a warning that may have been better received by members of Wasilla Assembly of God. Pastor, I Am Gay is another matter -- ABC interviews author Bess, but apparently nobody looked at the book. Librarians Against Palin reports that Bess says he donated two copies to the Wasilla library; they were stolen; and he donated more. What's the story of this book? (Here's a short review on a Christian website.) Why didn't ABC have someone read the books in question? At the very least, there's a new question of censoriousness that arises. It's bad enough to censor any book; even worse when the author is your neighbor.

9 September 2008
7:16 PM: Evangelical Palin's fans are comparing the governor to the biblical Queen Esther, whom her pastor said Palin took as her role model when she was elected. The Nation's Jon Weiner outlines some of the pitfalls of that parallel here. And, a few years ago, anthropologist Omri Elisha made an even more startling connection here on The Revealer: Bush is a Queen Esther, too.

9 September 2008
6:53 PM: The Family Research Council -- Washington's one-stop lobby shop for all things fundamentalist -- is warning McCain that picking Palin won't be enough to win evangelical loyalty unless he unpicks his media pals. Writes FRC leader Tony Perkins in an email blast just released, on the subject of what he sees as mainstream media bigotry directed toward Palin: "How the McCain campaign responds is critical in maintaining the intensity and enthusiasm that swept through social conservatives after Gov. Palin's selection as the VP nominee. In the past, there has been an overwhelming public backlash against those seeking to impose a religious litmus test on candidates and judicial nominees... The McCain campaign must stand firmly against efforts to make Gov. Palin's faith a disqualifier." Got that? If McCain wants his new friends to stick around, he'd better be a part of their anti-media backlash.

9 September 2008
1:11 AM: Dan Kennedy's Media Nation blog points us to two helpful Palin perspectives, including a Pentecostal scholar of Pentecostalism who says -- contrary to Steve Waldman's point, below, and my own read of Palin's word -- that it's fair to interpret Palin's statements about Iraq as referencing holy war.

8 September 2008
6:00 PM: Beliefnet founder Steve Waldman's list of "what's scary, what's not scary" about Sarah Palin's religion is a useful, if slightly misleading, tool for journalists eager to find an entry point for writing about the trinity of church, state, and Palin. Useful: Waldman pays attention to language, pointing out that Palin didn't declare the Iraq War "God's plan" but rather hoped that the war to which she is sending her son is God's plan. The former is presumptuous; the latter, understandably imploring. And, of course, he's right that studying the Bible for leadership lessons is not scary -- unless it is. Not useful: Waldman's setting his perspective up as the standard of reason -- and lopping the left and right ends of the spectrum clean off. The fact is, for many Americans, nothing is scary about Sarah Palin. For others, everything is. The reasonable center Waldman upholds is an assertion, not a fact; an etiquette, not a real place. If you recognize Waldman's guide as such, it's a smart, useful articulation of a mildly liberal, establishmentarian perspective.

8 September 2008
2:05 AM: Sharlet: Fred Clarkson of the anti-religious right site Talk2Action told me a couple of days ago that this story would be coming today. Fred thinks the story is huge; I'm skeptical. What's the story? Well, that's the problem. It's complicated. You see, under 1954 amendment to the tax codes, tax exempt organizations are not allowed to engage in partisan politics. That includes churches. But they do, of course, and now a Christian Right group, the Alliance Defense Fund, wants to legalize the reality by organizing "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," on which conservative pastors in 20 states will openly defy the law and, probably, create a test case. This has already been reported, to little fanfare. According to Fred, the big news is that three former IRS muck-a-mucks have joined forces with liberal clergypeople to try to block the event from happening. Outraged? You probably should be -- we're talking about the money machine of the Christian Right -- but I'm guessing you aren't, because I barely understand what I've just written myself. Most people don't know that churches aren't allowed to talk politics. So news of a bid to stop a bid to overturn the ban requires the journalistic equivalent of explaining why a joke is funny. It's hard to get outraged over defiance of a law you didn't know existed. Maybe I'm wrong.If Fred's right -- if the story has legs -- I'll send $10 in Fred's name to the organization trying to stop the ADF from trying to overturn. Only, the organization doesn't seem to have a name...

8 September 2008
12:46 AM: Sharlet: The oldest continuously published magazine in North America -- and the second oldest in the English-speaking world -- likes The Family. Says the United Church Observer: "From the early evangelical efforts of Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century, through the ministry of the Family’s founder, Abraham Vereide, in Seattle starting in the 1930s, to today’s efforts at channeling mainstream American politics by the Family’s current leader and Washington insider Doug Coe, there has been a solid and silent movement to foster a particular kind of obedience to God in America.... Sharlet is a skilful writer who brings eloquence and a sense of wonder to this important story. Though he restrains himself from making judgments, his descriptive abilities encourage us to think carefully about the role of evangelical Christianity in this postmodern world, where everything and everyone is somehow connected."

7 September 2008
11:26 PM: "As a Christian," Obama told George Stephanopolous today, "I have a lot of humility about understanding when does the soul enter into …" The dot, dot, dot -- Obama's, not ours -- refers to either an embryo, a fetus, or a baby. Obama dodged the specifics, even as he sought to reassure abortion foes angered by his comment at Rick Warren's megachurch that answering such questions was above his pay grade. But asking them is what Stephanopolous gets paid for, and he blew it, twice: First by allowing Obama to be vague about the end of his own sentence, and then by failing to follow up on this: "I don't presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions...[ellipses mine] abortion is a moral issue." So who does he think does have that theological authority? Stephanopolous should have asked. Not because Obama -- or any presidential candidate -- should necessarily be sounding off on theology, but because Obama passed the buck. Ok, but to whom?

28 August 2008
4:52 AM: "On the fiery issue of abortion, the Democratic Party has been taking small but notable steps to the right." What's that? "Whining" from the no-compromise left? Hardly. That's The Wall Street Journal's fine religion reporter Suzanne Sataline, reporting on the growing presence of anti-abortion politics in the Democratic Party, on display in Denver for those with eyes and ears. Some Democratic activists will want to dismiss this story as a media attempt at extracting conflict from a unity fest; others will welcome it. But most of the media is simply ignoring it, which is too bad -- this is one of the few interesting stories of the convention.

27 August 2008
8:11 AM: This essay from The Nation on "Obama and King" -- which would have been better titled "Obama and the Kings," as in Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. -- is a week old but it's must reading in preparation for Obama's Thursday speech, which will be given on the 45th anniversary of MLK, Jr.'s, "I Have a Dream" speech. Writes Adele Oltman, author of a new book called Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow: "Obama has not been shy about encouraging Americans to associate him with Martin Luther King Jr. and the modern civil rights movement. Although the two men signify how much our world has changed in forty-five years, there are manifest differences between them that are worth recognizing. At times, Obama evokes a Christianity that in this day and age resonates more with the conservative Southern black Baptist theology of Martin Luther King Sr."

22 August 2008
3:05 AM: The Network of Enlightened Women (NEW) "defines what conservatism is," a NEW leader tells Politico's Helena Andrews. Unfortunately, either NEW or Andrews is keeping it a secret -- this story on a possibly important movement of conservative college women provides no details about what they believe. Here's guessing religion plays a role in their commitment to "culture war" -- but better than guessing would be some facts. NEW needs old-fashioned reporting, not puff piece "service journalism."

20 August 2008
5:55 PM: Brad Greenberg, author of the L.A. Jewish Journal's "God Blog," points us to Kathleen Parker's WaPo column in which she argues -- with no animosity toward Rick Warren -- that "tthe winner," of the Saddleback "debate" "was Warren, who has managed to position himself as political arbiter in a nation founded on the separation of church and state. The loser was America." And mainstream media, which made yet one more case for its growing irrelevance by ceding the traditional role of the fourth estate -- questioning the candidates -- to a power pastor who calls both senators his friends.

20 August 2008
4:56 PM: No mainstream pundit has gotten Rick Warren's Saddleback forum for the candidates more wrong than The New Yorker's usually astute Hendrick Hertzberg. "With his genial personality," Hertzberg writes of Warren, "his emphasis on happiness over hellfire, and his instinct for (relative) moderation, he reminds me a little of the young Henry Ward Beecher." Beecher, of course, was a proto-progressive, and, after a fashion, a libertine, famous for intimate friendships with younger women; Warren is indeed genial, but he's also conservative, theologically shoulder to shoulder with his angrier brethren of the Christian Right. A couple of days after Saddleback, he instructed Sean Hannity in the finer points of Liberation Theology, declaring it communism under cover and the basis for the even more monstrous Black Liberation Theology, which Warren claims is a doctrine of "black supremacy." Hertzberg, apparently, missed that show. In fact, it's questionable whether Hertzberg has had any close encounters with real live Christian conservatives."Christian denominations take all manner of views of homosexuality," he writes, "but it’s hard to find a Christian these days who insists that simply being homosexual—having a gay or lesbian orientation—is sinful in and of itself." Tell that to James Dobson. Hell, tell it to Rick Warren.

I believe that he [God] gives us opportunities every couple of years to communicate the gospel worldwide through secular media and we consistently blow it. A congressman in trouble, that's the time. A family member gets himself in horrible trouble, that's the time. A preacher gets himself in awful trouble, that's the time.