Inside Faith, And Outside

A reader writes:

I was appalled by Wieseltier’s suggestion that you were an anti-Semite — anyone who has followed your work closely would cringe at the idea — and am now pleased that he did the right thing to clarify his knee-jerk comment. And your response this morning furthers the debate, a good thing. I’d like to take that argument a step further, though.

When you offer a detailed critique of evangelical Protestantism in America, I may agree with the vast majority of your points (and I do), but I know you’re writing about that culture with no lived-in knowledge of the complexities and nuances of why evangelical Protestants think and behave in the ways they do. That’s why some of the Obama smears in Pennsylvania shocked you but didn’t surprise me in the least — I could see them coming from miles away. Similarly, I could offer my own opinions on the narcissistic impulses of certain strains of Catholicism or the Kristol/Lieberman faction of American Jews who conflate this country’s interests with Israel’s, but those opinions, informed or not, would lack a deeper ring of truth because I haven’t lived the experience. That’s why a writer like Reza Aslan is so important — he can describe and interpret the dangers of militant Islam and the larger internal conflict within Islam in far more illuminating ways than, say, Wieseltier or Peretz.