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In the jumpy, suggestible universe of Gabe Sherman, Wall Street sleuth, things really are that simple: The beleaguered financial overclass creates value, in a rationally ordered system of maximally awarded talent. And the clueless public sector, intoxicated on post-meltdown regulatory prerogative, meddles with the primal forces of nature, skews executive compensation downward, panders to the blurry “populist” agenda of the Occupy Wall Street Crowd, generally foments market uncertainty and other forms of intolerable chaos so that presto, before you know it, we have “The End of Wall Street As They Knew It.”

In other words: To your crying towels, bankers! Correspondent Sherman is on the scene, and no howling distortion of recent financial history you care to offer is too outlandish for him to faithfully record! After duly huddling with a couple of dozen financial titans, our reporter has arrived at a chilling verdict: “what emerged is a picture of an industry afflicted by a crisis it would not be flip to call existential.”

Perhaps not—but what is exceedingly flip is brother Sherman’s account of the origins of the crisis.

Sure, there was that awkward business that sent the global finance sector to the brink of ruin, plus a devastating tsunami in Japan and whatnot—but the true culprit sending Wall Street titans back into their bedrooms to listen to Interpol on auto-repeat and cut themselves is of course the specter of government regulation. The Dodd-Frank financial reform act, a largely toothless measure lousy with loopholes and lobbying dosh, becomes in the alternate universe of Adam Moss’s New York magazine a rash bid to expropriate the expropriators. Even though the full provisions of the already anemic bill don’t go into effect until 2016, the very thought of a somewhat straitened financial playing field so terrifies Wall Street’s stout corridor of wealth creators that, well, they’re bidding farewell to the most valuable commodity of all—their big swinging dicks. “The government has strangled the financial system,” Dick Bove, an especially excitable and frequently mistaken bank analyst, tells Sherman. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

You see, by force of the Volcker rule—a watered-down version of the central Glass-Steagall protections separating out commercial and investment banking that were disastrously repealed in 1999—Wall Street is re-thinking everything, from the scale of its year-end bonuses to its “core value to the economy.” And Bove, for one, preaches that all this doom-and-gloom thinking can’t help but be self-fulfilling: “These are sweeping secular changes taking place that won’t just impact the guys who won’t get their bonuses this year. We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.” Another unnamed informant tells Sherman that the financial industry is gearing up for a state of near permanent pay-austerity at the mere thought of the Volcker rule, which doesn’t kick in officially until July: “If you landed on Earth from Mars and looked at the banks, you’d see that these are institutions that need to build up capital and they’re becoming lower-margin businesses. So that means it will be hard, nearly impossible, to sustain their size and compensation structure.”

Never mind that this diagnosis is diametrically opposed to the Bove-ian school of market alarmism, which holds that banks are being starved of desperately needed leverage and credit; this unnamed fearmonger sees them in a frenzy to raise capital, and one thing the Volcker rule undeniably seeks to achieve is minimal capital requirements to prevent speculative lending from veering once more into toxic chaos.

No, for Sherman, all that’s needed to stoke the proper mood of Misean panic is to rouse the specter of frightened bankers, and a few quick-and-dirty quarterly profit reports.

From the moment Dodd-Frank passed, the banks’ financial results have tended to slide downward, in significant part because of measures taken in anticipation of its future effect. Since July 2010, Bank of America nosed down 42 percent, Morgan Stanley fell 25 percent, Goldman fell 21 percent, and Citigroup fell 16—in a period when the Dow rose 25 percent.

Other economic journalists might conclude that this downturn was a set of long-overdue market corrections, and given the broader turn around in the actual manufacturing economy, by no means an indication of worsening conditions—for investors and workers alike. Some radical others might even suggest that the shredded headcounts at the financial firms played a part in their own downturn in revenue. But while from his evidently privileged vantage in the driver’s seat of the Doc’s Time Machine, Sherman can divine all sorts of mischief arising from the yet-to-be-implemented provisions of Dodd-Frank, it does bear reminding that since 2010, BofA has been forced to eat a sizable portion of the toxic mortgage debt it acquired amid its spectacularly ill-advised purchase of Countrywide; Morgan has suffered tremendous losses in its Japanese operations and has, like most banks, been spooked by its exposure to the Euro-debt crisis (funnily enough, the firm’s US-based investment-banking operations—ie, the shop most directly affected by the dread Volcker rule, has booked profits amid all the tumult abroad); much the same general picture holds at Goldman, which as you may recall, has had more than its share of legal contretemps thrown into the bargain . As for Citigroup—the company whose very grotesque merged existence was the deregulatory excuse for repealing Glass Steagall—it’s been a basket case for so very long that a 16 percent loss in profits over the past two years seems cause for celebration, Volcker Rule or no Volcker Rule.

Indeed, for all of Sherman’s gullible huffing and puffing over the destructive reach of our new financial regulatory state, no one seems to have told the nation’s financial system this dire news, to judge by the actual behavior (as opposed to the opportunistic media rhetoric of its leaders). Yes, it’s been a rocky couple of years. And sure, Wall Street has lately shed plenty of jobs—who hasn’t? But in a report to investors inconveniently released one day ahead of Sherman’s dispatch from the existential trenches, Goldman Sachs—which continues to enjoy bullish stock performance amid its profit setbacks—announced this bit of non-emasculating news:

From a financial markets perspective, the environment looks quite friendly. The combination of better growth news and easier monetary policy is always welcome. In addition, we recently argued that corporate profit margins may still have room for further gains, despite the fact that they already stand at record levels from both a bottom-up and top-down perspective.

But no such merely empirical considerations can hope to stand up against the wrath of a stable of mainly unnamed bankers! Why, just look at Goldman itself, where Sherman reports that “months before the Volcker rule is set to kick in, star traders began [sic] to leave in droves.” And Goldman has lately shuttered its proprietary hedge-fund shop—in recognition that the line of essentially free credit that the Fed has opened up to investment houses may at last be about to dry up.

This, too, might well be seen as a sign of comparative health in the broader economy—especially with Goldman itself sounding so bullish on the investment climate, with the dread implementation of the Volcker Rule a scant five months away. After all, easy credit is what creates unsustainable bubbles in the first place, as even the most cursory study of the 2008 debacle shows. But not so in Shermanland! Even breakaway hedge shops are booking fairly lackluster profits (despite the obscene tax advantages they continue to enjoy)—so you know: Panic, everybody! Only Sherman is even less clear in explicating just what the cause for alarm is supposed to be in this case—while banks' hedge-fund divisions are curtailed under the Volcker rule, hedge funds themselves need not tremble before its pending implementation. There’s the bad economy, yes—but it’s just as important, he insists, to note that the hedge sector is “as overbuilt as the housing and credit markets that drove its profits,” with the overall number of hedge funds exploding about 16-fold (610 to 9.553) from 1990 to 2011. One would assume that a slowdown in an oversupplied speculative sector is not, you know, a bad thing by itself, either—especially given that even the most diehard Randians would be hard-pressed to demonstrate that hedge funds create economic value of any kind. But Sherman nonetheless frets on behalf of hedge managers that “the easy obvious plays are oversubscribed, which shrinks margins.... Many have predicted a hedge-fund shakeout, and it seems to have started. Over 1,000 funds have closed in the last year and a half.” It’s evidently a taken-for-granted, second-nature kind of axiom in today’s American economy that an “industry” made up entirely of “easy obvious plays” is integral to our very survival.

Or at the very least, it’s a great enabling premise of lazy, overclass-osculating, dick-obsessed magazine journalism. Witness Sherman’s closing brief for the productive wonders worked by yon investment class:

It’s certainly true that Wall Street’s money played an important part in New York’s comeback, helping to transform the city from a symbol of urban decay into a gleaming leisure theme park. Consciously or not, as a city, New York made a bargain: It would tolerate the one percent’s excessive pay as long as the rising tax base funded the schools, subways, and parks for the 99 percent. “Without Wall Street, New York becomes Philadelphia” is how a friend of mine in finance explains it.

Well, Gabe, I have news for you and your friend in finance: For the vast majority of people living in the glorious and gleaming leisure theme park known as Michael Bloomberg’s New York, Philadelphia looks pretty goddamn inviting (and not just for delusional “sixth borough” hipsters). For one thing, the city’s schools have lately taken to looting state budget funds to make up for shortfalls; the city’s parks are already relying to a disproportionate degree on private donations to run themselves—except, of course, when the mayor wants to unleash city cops to displace and round up those irksome unproductive kids protesting wealth inequality. And do NOT get us started on the regressively funded, frequently inoperative subways, OK?

Then again, New York magazine is, God knows, a gleaming theme park all its own, and it’s perhaps best not to disturb the placid reveries of its well-appointed editorial brain trust. Yes, sustaining the enabling fictions of New York-style policy analysis does involve adducing sweeping assertions from the thinnest air: “The rising tide of the real-estate and credit markets lifted all boats,” Sherman burbles, apparently in reference to hedge funds, but a quick Google search for “Long Term Capital Management” will rapidly disabuse any civilian in the real economy of such a ludicrous notion. (And the ever-fallacious “rising tide” thesis is especially laughable when applied more broadly in today’s America.) Likewise, Sherman’s wind-up paragraph preposterously announces that “the strictures that are holding the banks back now are tighter than any since the thirties”—certainly news to any financial regulator of the mid-twentieth century, when off-shore mutual funds were heavily prosecuted and hedge funds were much more regulated (even without mandatory SEC registration); or to the economic policymakers of the Great Society era, who enforced corporate tax rates north of 40 percent, more than twice of today’s post-Dodd assessments. But why should we expect any other version of events from the hallowed precincts of Adam Moss’s TriBeCa wing of the great New York theme park? For as this week’s cover story plainly demonstrates, nothing can be considered real in this abject weekly’s pages unless it comes straight from the mouth of a banker.

Chris Lehmann is the co-editor of Bookforum and is the author of Rich People Things.

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To be fair, the app—the brainchild of a pair of entrepreneurial Indiana-based Catholic brothers, Patrick and Chip Leinen—is not designed to supplant the traditional rite of confession, spoken in anonymity to a real-life priest sequestered in a box. It’s more in the nature of a confession aid—a customized digital enounter tailored to the special needs of a particular sinning demographic. “A priest won't have the same examination as a teen girl or a married man,” Patrick Leinen told the Catholic News Agency. "You will get something unique to you.” A scalable examination of the human conscience may not yet prompt a boom in digital contrition—at least not until it’s somehow customized further to work on an Angry Birds platform—but it’s something of a formal breakthrough for a faith tradition that hasn’t exactly made “user-friendliness” a watchword. (One also assumes that if the Church-sanctioned app solicits a confession of sexual abuse from a member of the clergy, it will trigger a Mission Impossible-style immolation of app, phone and—who knows?—user.)

Being no strangers to the hierarchical cast of Catholic devotion themselves, the Leinens cite the authority of the papal bureaucracy—namely, the directive from Pope Benedict XVI calling for greater engagement with the social media platforms favored by today’s youth. The Leinen brothers also took pains to win the imprimatur of South Bend Bishop Kevin C. Rhodes, and collaborated on the finer points of the app’s graduated sin-inspection software with a pair of priests, Thomas G. Weinandy, the executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices, and Dan Scheidt, pastor of Queen of Peace Catholic Church in the nearby Indiana town of Mishawaka.

Still, for all this ex officio punctiliousness, one can’t help feeling that a confession app is a bit off-base. For one thing, it’s aimed at generating a profit, costing $1.99 per user. Has the senior Church hierarchy really forgotten that a mere six hundred years or so ago the open retailing of priestly forgiveness furnished a central grievance of the Reformation?

More troubling still is the question of anonymity. Yes, we are assured, the security protocols of the confession software are sound, but there’s a more fundamental reason that iPhone apps fall under the generic rubric of “social media”—users generally employ them in complete indifference to their surroundings, further denaturing the increasingly porous cultural boundaries that separate out public and private conduct. While the app may ultimately land a wrongdoer in front of a duly solemn confessor in the designated sanctum of a church, completing a subjective moral inventory isn’t something that’s meant to be done during some dead time on a conference call, or while you’re impatiently scouring the departure board at Grand Central Station.

In other words, it’s probably best that the buildup to confession be inconvenient, with a minimum of media distraction involved. According to all manner of Christian moralists, divine judgment is a harrowingly solitary affair, and one reason that the priest in the confession box is concealed—apart from ensuring full anonymity to both parties in confession—is to symbolize the impersonal nature of god’s judgment. Without that screened-in generic symbol of divine authority, Church fathers reckoned, confessors would be apt to conceal their mortal sins out of a sense of personal shame. Initiating that same process via an iPhone app, by contrast, is a bit like trying to administer extreme unction via a Netflix stream. There’s a reason that a fully mechanized vision of the confessional was trotted out as a joke, after all, in Woody Allen’s futurist farce Sleeper (back in 1973, that is, where the innovation seemed laughably remote, and Allen was still capable of executing convincing jokes on film).

Viewed from the logic of the new information age, a digitized confession is but another step in the broader diffusion of the vital human stuff of soul, intelligence and selfhood—the cyber-utopian, new-machine dynamism that Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson hymn (in different keys, to be fair) before the mirror each morning in their own rote and priestly fashion. Still, for all the soothing appurtenances that attach to way-new digital faith, it’s hard to see how the duly wired believer can significantly advance behind the dour Catholic counsel of Blaise Pascal: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

Chris Lehmann has been our religion columnist.

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Never mind, for starters, that the protests—and the Mubarak regime’s ineffectual crackdowns on the mass dissident movement—aren’t yielding a great deal of reliable information to anyone, inside or outside Egypt. Never mind, as well, that Republican presidents going back to Eisenhower were very much devoted to standing by, with, for, around and about the Muslim Brotherhood. And never mind that even the great GOP power savant Dick Cheney, speaking at the same Young Americans for Freedom lovefest marking the centenary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, insisted that this is far from a ripe moment for public disclosure of U.S. objectives.

“There’s a reason why a lot of diplomacy is conducted in secret,” the former vice president said, before reminding the Gipper faithful, in an uncharacteristic note of realism and restraint, that the “the bottom line is, in the end, whatever comes next in Egypt is going to be determined by the people of Egypt.” Asked what he thought was going to happen in Egypt, the onetime architect of a U.S.-engineered new order in the Middle East replied simply, “I don’t know.”

But such empirical cautions are impermeable to Palin, for the simple reason that any political pronouncement by Sarah Palin is first and foremost a pronouncement about Sarah Palin. This became quite apparent when the interview with CBN reporter David Brody turned to matters of faith proper—a turn that Palin herself introduced, tellingly, when Brody asked her how she handled criticism from the mainstream press. “You know,” she replied...

I’m reminded so often of 2 Timothy 1:7 knowing that God does not give us a spirit of timidity or of fear, but he gives us a spirit of power and love and a sound mind. A sound mind so that we can keep things in perspective. We can stay grounded, we can know what is real, we can know truth, so just calling on that verse, reminding myself over and over again what’s God promises, that gets me through the tough times.

OK, then. First off, replying to putative detractors in the American media by citing the authority of the imprisoned Apostle Paul, in the last epistle he penned from jail in Rome prior to his death, is by itself far from compelling evidence of the ability to “keep things in perspective.”

More to the point, sophronismos, the Greek phrase Paul uses here to characterize the mental outlook of the convicted Christian, and rendered as “sound mind,” more accurately translates as “discipline” or “self-control.” Its intended meaning is conveyed more sharply by its opposite term, akrasia, or self-indulgence. This, in other words, would be strike two in Palin’s gloss on Paul, since by the account of Vanity Fair’s Michael Joseph Gross, one of her most common rebukes to staffers is “I have the power to ruin you.”

As for the finding of truth, well, Palin pretty much has the inductive logic of Paul’s directive backwards here. He’s exhorting the believer—in this case Timothy, the young bishop of the Ephesians—to trust in the pre-existing truth of God, imprinted upon the faithful by the fact of their conversion. The idea here is not so much to employ divine grace to seek out truth as to draw upon the inward character of God’s truth as a repository of strength amid the early Church’s many afflictions and institutional quandaries. Nor does this point involve any recondite with biblical Greek; it’s right there in the preceding verse, 2 Timothy, 1:6 (KJV): “Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.”

But, as is quite oddly plain in Palin’s later description of her devotional routine to Brody, she’s not in the habit of relying on divinely sanctioned truth to curb the deceptive dictates of the human ego. Rather, the disciplinary strictures of scripture seem chiefly to serve in Palin’s world as an ever-encouraging set of offstage prompts, goading the persecuted media victim into ever-greater acts of self-assertion. Indeed, as is the case with her critique of the media, reading the Bible’s word is pretty much a given, something she can airily stipulate as fait accompli—or as she curiously puts it here, something she intends to start doing, in that same vague future in which her remarks on Egypt policy might also make sense:

]Time is our most precious resource. How we choose to spend time I think is a reflection on what’s most important to us. I am going to read my Bible every day. I am going to dig in there and seek God’s wisdom and direction in every step that I take so I prioritize time to make sure that that daily devotion is available. And I will participate in that. But it’s not just carving some time out of the day to read the Word and to journal what you know, I believe I am gaining from the Word, but it is ongoing minute by minute asking God for the strength, for the direction for, He says we can ask for favor, I ask for favor in situations so that I can continue down the path. And it’s the most important thing in my life, my faith, so I prioritize to make sure that I’m spending the time that I need to stay all geared up.

This, to put things mildly, is a weirdly cursory approach to “the most important thing in my life.” Note, first of all, the persistent recourse to the future tense in her reply : “I am going to read my Bible...”; “I am going to dig in there....”; “I will participate....”

Then, more crucially, there’s the appeal to a divine authority beyond the word—the notion of an experiential awareness of God’s “favor” more commonly associated with prophecy than with the routines of daily observance and fellowship. The rhetoric of prophecy is indeed where the action is—at least for any leader of Palin’s national ambition who also needs to galvanize a base of evangelical supporters. It is, first of all, a kind of faith that the exponent can define largely as she sees fit—hewn in a deeply personalized vision of God’s favor, long on individuality (“ongoing minute by minute asking God”), and short on public accountability. Prophets are also, far from incidentally, among the most persecuted and misunderstood emissaries of God’s will, in both the Old Testament and the New. So the mantle of prophecy permits Palin to continue pursuing her own lusty brand of culture warfare on her own preferred Sarah-centric terms. This, remember, is the person who thought the appropriation of the term “blood libel” was an appropriate and measured response to the charge that she had infected American political discourse with violent imagery.

Oddly enough, later in 2 Timothy, Paul advises his young charge to guard against “profane and vain babbling” (2:16) as both Paul’s own captivity winds down and the last judgment approaches. The trick, Paul writes, is to “continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of .... And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Jesus Christ.” (3:14-15) What’s more, he intimates that the distinction that Palin seeks to draw between the written Word and God’s personal favor is largely illusory: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.” (3: 16-17) We can only hope that, someday, Sarah Palin may find time in her busy schedule to get around to journaling that.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist.

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In broader terms, however, American leaders are puzzled by the uprising because so far it has failed utterly to conform to the “Clash of Civilizations” playbook. That is to say, popular revolts in Islamic countries are supposed to be rearguard Islamic protests against Western modernity, unto its innermost parts. That’s why the confrontational rhetoric favored by the Samuel Huntingtons, Dinesh D’Souzas and Daniel Pipeses of the world typically resolves into dark and foreboding talk of the “existential threat" that the antimodern masses in the Arab world represent to the West. That’s also why U.S. political leaders keen to play on such fears harp on their own gift for descrying “moral clarity” amid all that dangerously muddled tolerance preached by the liberal appeasers who shun the brute fact of evil unloosed among a ghastly group of medieval-minded imam-brainwashed zombies, who hate us because of our freedom.

So the wise men seeking to delimit U.S. diplomatic options in the region are rushing to depict a resurgent Muslim Brotherhood as the gravest threat in the uprising—even though there’s no evidence that the Islamist faction is involved in any real leadership capacity at all, or would come into power. The 1979 Iranian revolution is the most prominent instance of a theocratic seizure of power in the Middle East—and the country’s Shia majority, together with the overall assholic comportment of the Islamic Republic’s leaders, have made the Iranian regime widely reviled among its regional rivals, as the WikiLeaks cables have made abundantly plain.

What’s more, at the level of civil society, Egypt supplies few conditions for a militant Islamic movement—for the simple reason that mass Islamic observance is noncontroversial and already key to much of Egyptian identity. As Haroon Moghul argues at Religion Dispatches, “Egyptians know their religious identity is not under threat.” Despite the secular outlook of Mohamed ElBaradei, who may become an opposition leader, Moghul observes he took part in the “Angry Friday” protest by joining in Friday prayers “before going out into the streets. Whether Egyptians identify with political Islam or secular democracy, their Arabness and Islam tend to be mutually supportive, and certainly not incompatible.” That’s yet another strong point of contrast with the Iranian revolution, Moghul notes:

Muslim societies often have flourishing religious institutions and practices, organic and varied. But in the case of Iran, the regime paradoxically undermined that popular and organic religiosity when they sought to enforce faith through the state. This is an argument for keeping religion and politics separate in the Muslim world: in the interest of defending both from the negative effects of the other.

The other argument for popular sovereignty in the Muslim world is far more straightforward: It’s what the vast majority of Muslims actually want. The 2005-2007 Gallup World Survey of more than 30 Muslim majority countries found that, far from hating Western freedoms, most respondents coveted them—especially the freedom of speech and worship. It’s true that they also overwhelmingly endorsed the idea of Sharia law—but that is not a prescription for jihadist theocracy, as witless American commentators and state legislatures are prone to conclude. Sharia, rather, is a cultural tradition seeking to imbue broad ideals of personal conduct under the rule of law—and far from a monolithic regime of hand-amputating, honor-killing and adulterer-stoning one encounters in dispatches from the American right. Here, yet again, the Iranian theocracy has been made the poster regime for a wide panoply of Muslim believers it does not, in fact, actually represent. You’d think a conservative movement so besotted with lip service to the idea of democracy in the Islamic world would pay closer attention to such pesky details.

As Georgetown's John L. Esposito argues, the ultimate basis for Western antipathy among Muslims is not religion or culture, but rather diplomacy: The vast majority of the world’s Muslims dispute that the United States is sincere in its agenda of promoting democracy in the Middle East.

The same Gallup World Survey shows that:

only 24 percent in Egypt and Jordan and only 16 percent in Turkey agreed that the United States was serious about establishing democratic systems.... Failure to respond to the subversion of the electoral process in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Musharraf's Pakistan, the attempt ‘to manage’ and determine the process of democratization in post-Saddam Iraq, and the refusal to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza must be avoided if the West, and America in particular, is to avoid the charge that it operates on a clear double standard.

These perceptions of great-power hypocrisy stand out in still higher relief when contrasted with the benign Muslim views of other Western powers, as Esposito notes elsewhere:

while 74 percent of Egyptians had unfavorable views of the United States and 69 percent said the same about Britain, only 21 percent felt unfavorably toward France. These policy disagreements become especially sharp when we compare Muslims’ perceptions of the United States with their views of its neighbor to the north, Canada—i.e., America without the foreign policy. Sixty-six percent of Kuwaitis... reported unfavorable views of the United States, while just 3 percent assented to unfavorable descriptions of Canada.

Perhaps, in other words, it’s long past time for our exuberant exporters of the American ideal abroad to revise some of the most stubborn articles of their own delusionial faith.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist.

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This year’s Roe anniversary coincides with the indictment of Philadelphia abortion provider Kermit Gosnell on eight counts of murder. Gosnell appears to have been the sort of unscrupulous abortion mill operator you’d find in a Jack Chick comic—an answer to the many fervid prayers of pro-life activists keen to make the public abortion understand as murder in the most brutal and forceful terms. When state inspectors suspended his license and closed his clinic down in February, they noted that he performed abortion in any term of a pregnancy, heedless of basic health, safety or sanitation measures.

They reported finding “blood on the floor and parts of fetuses in jars”—though as the Philadelphia district attorney’s office notes, these conditions prevailed only in the high-turnover main facility of Gosnell’s clinic, which catered chiefly to low-income and immigrant pregnant women in the middle Atlantic. A separate part of the clinic, designed to serve better-heeled suburban white patients, was safer and cleaner, the DA reports. Gosnell himself got rich in the process, even though he was never actually licensed as an OB-GYN, charging about $3,000 per procedure, and making $1.8 million; the DA’s office had found $240,000 in cash in his home.

The grand jury report on the indictments spells out the routine butchery of the Gosnell operation in a wealth of horrifying, heartbreaking detail. Seven of the eight murder counts involve him (or one of his all-too-often untrained assistants) ending the lives of viable fetuses—another routine malpractice alleged in the indictments involved Gosnell blithely disregarding or misrepresenting the gestation of a fetus, so as to sidestep Pennslyvania’s Abortion Control Act, which forbids abortions after the 24th week. Gosnell or his fellow clinicians would terminate these more mature fetuses by crushing their spines or slitting their throats. The one non-fetus count in the indictment is a wrenching character study unto itself: In November 2009, a 41-year-old patient named Karnamaya Mongar died after an unlicensed employee of the clinic administered too much anesthesia to her. Mongar had arrived in the United States just four months earlier together with her husband, after spending almost twenty years in a Nepalese refugee camp; the couple had been expelled from Bhutan along with thousands of other dissidents for taking part in pro-democracy protests, and Mongar’s husband, Ash, had just found work at a Virginia chiecken factory. After a Virginia clinic refused her an abortion because Mongar was in her second trimester, she was referred to Gosnell’s operation; there, a clinic’s aide performed an ultrasound, and while Gosnell signed a form stipulating he’d met with Mongar beforehand, he hadn’t bothered to, instead leaving an aide who was by all accounts his least competent anesthesia hand to administer what the indictment. The initials of both Mongar and her daughter, who drove her to the clinic, were affixed to consent and waiver forms, even though Mongar spoke no English and her daughter scarcely spoke any. Mongar was a diminutive 4’11” and weighed 110 lbs, even well into her second trimester; a competent physician would have taken that into account with her anesthesia; but then again, a competent physician would have actually met with his patient and not signed a form falsely representing that he had done so. Over a grueling six-hour ordeal that sought to chemically induce cramping and labor, Mongar was administered heavy doses of sedative to be kept asleep. As the grand jury report tersely notes, “repeated injections of strong narcotics, administered in accordance with Gosnell’s standard procedure, killed Mrs. Mongar.”

Clearly, there is nothing for pro-choice activists to cheer in this grisly saga. And critics of the absolutist, no-slippery-slope defense of reproductive rights—“abortion on demand, without apology,” as the slogan has it—are seizing on Gosnell’s story as a limit-case of where this reasoning leads. The terms of engagement, as always, are the entirely arbitrary trimester-scheme of fetus viability that the Roe decision bequeathed to the partisans as its own sort of scripture. In the worldview of choice absolutism, as Slate’s Will Saletan writes...

...there's no moral difference between eight, 18, and 28 weeks. No one has the right to judge another person's abortion decision, regardless of her stage of pregnancy. Each woman is entitled to decide not only whether to have an abortion, but how long she can wait to make that choice.... You can argue that what Gosnell did wasn't conventional abortion—he routinely delivered the babies before slitting their necks—but the 33 proposed charges involving the Abortion Control Act have nothing to do with that. Those charges pertain strictly to a time limit: performing abortions beyond 24 weeks. Should Gosnell be prosecuted for violating that limit? Is it OK to outlaw abortions at 28, 30, or 32 weeks? Or is drawing such a line an unacceptable breach of women's autonomy?

Yes, the Gosnell case does raise these well worn issues anew—though one obvious rejoinder to Saletan’s rhetorical questions is that it’s not too much to ask that the state competently administer both later-term abortion limits and standard medical regulation and licensing protocols.

Still, Gosnell’s grotesque brand of malpractice, in the Mongar case especially, also touches on the emerging new legal and moral battleground of the abortion debate. As Mother Jones writer Sarah Blaustein notes, abortion foes are increasingly citing the well-being of the mother as the basis for restricting and—so they hope—eventually outlawing the procedure all together. South Dakota’s controversial 2005 bill virtually banning abortion was redrafted to stress the alleged long-term mental-health harm that abortions wreak on women who endure the procedure. And the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Gonzales v. Carhart ruling upholding the congressional ban on later-term abortions, employed a version of the same rationale. The majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, conceded that the proposition holding that abortions harmed the mental health of patients was “unexceptionable,” even though “no reliable data” actually upholds that view. In lieu of such data Kennedy cited the anecdotal testimony presented before the South Dakota legislature—even though, as Blaustein observes, that legislation itself contained no exception for the mother’s physical health.

Such acrobatics point up the rhetorically overloaded character of the seemingly never-to-be-resolved moral debate over abortion. For pro-life absolutists, the fetus in gestation possesses a sort of emotional supra-life, despite so much of the legal debate’s preoccupation of just when a fetus can be said to be defined as an independent human life. In this righteous scheme, the crocodile tears shed over the alleged mental health perils the procedure wreaks on would-be mothers almost entirely crowds out the actual plight of people like Karnamaya Mangar, who was no “culture of death” libertine. She had two daughters in addition to the one who drove her to Gosnell’s clinic, and a grandchild as well; in all likelihood, she and her husband reckoned an unplanned pregnancy was an economic burden they couldn’t fathom facing in a strange land on a chicken worker’s salary. And there’s no rhetorical percentage for the anti-abortion crowd to make the debate about victims such as her, since an outright abortion ban would vastly increase the volume of unscrupulous and unlicensed providers like Gosnell in the marketplace, and thereby multiply the body count among women seeking outlawed abortions.

Meanwhile, for pro-choice absolutists, the hard-fought legal goal of women’s bodily autonomy is the higher good that tends to suborn other moral or legal claims. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a stinging dissent to Kennedy, the Carhart opinion rested on “an antiabortion shibboleth for which [the Court] concededly has no reliable evidence.... This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution—ideas that have long since been discredited.”

Still, one can’t help but thinking how little meaning such notions of choice and autonomy wound up having for Mongar, especially after she’d paid so heavily for agitating for democracy in her own homeland. The pat, passionately held certitudes on both sides of the abortion debate fall oddly silent before a system of health care that deliberately ensures a higher quality of basic care for the more affluent—and as the Philadelphia DA observed, even a shitheel like Gosnell knew enough about the real workings of the class-segmented health care market to reproduce its logic in his own facility.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the debate over universal health care is prey to the same theatrically gnat-straining brand of moral absolutism—or what amounts to the same thing, the wan subject of difference-trimming resolutions from clerics that are most notable for their eagerness to sidestep the culture-war landmine of abortion rights. The Gossnell indictment doesn’t note what religious beliefs Mongar may have held, but one thing seems clear: She was a collateral casualty of a sclerotic public discourse that, in its patent disregard for making choice a nonlethal good in a fiercely privatized medical marketplace, can fairly be described as faithless.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist now

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They are, like the country they represent, majority Protestant, according to a new study by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life. But as is the case with the country’s broader Protestant profile, it’s hard to say what, beyond a general feel-good affinity for Jesus, that faith entails. Not surprisingly, the 112th Congress includes stronger contingents of the well-to-do Protestant denominations: it has four times the percentage of Episcopalians, and three times the proportion of Presbyterians, than you find in the general US population.

But the fastest-growing contingent of the Protestant faithful on Capitol Hill are those who don’t specify any denominational leanings. These souls increased by 19 from the last Congress to this one, up to 58 members. Nor is it clear that these are doctrinally non-denominational believers—yes, the schismatic strain in Protestantism is traditionally so robust that not claiming a denominational affiliation can itself be a denominational affiliation—since only two members of the squishy Protestant sample specified such nondenominational membership.

Firm conclusions or demographic trends from this research are necessarily a matter of conjecture—but then, one does well to caution, so is nearly all discussion of religious doctrine. Some Pentecostal observers, mindful of their own denomination’s fervid growth in the spiritual marketplace, have rushed in to suggest the new vaguely churched Protestant bloc in Congress may be charismatically inclined.

As Charisma magazine correspondent Jennifer LeClaire notes, if you move the yardsticks back aways from the previous Congress, to the heyday of “mainline Protestantism”—the stuffier strains of Methodist, Baptist and Congregationalist faith—then the trendline would seem to favor the more experiential and less doctrinally rigid Pentecostal types of belief. The percentage of Methodists in Congress has dropped by half over the past half century, with Episcopalians and Presbyterians logging dropoffs between a third and a half. The poor Congregationalists have dwindled from 27 to four since 1961. “The religious composition of Congress shows a continued American religiosity, but one that is decreasingly associated with Mainline Protestantism,” Institute on Religion and Democracy President Mark Tooley reports. "Just as Mainline Protestantism no longer occupies the central place in public life as it did a generation ago, we are seeing fewer and fewer elected Representatives from those denominations.”

Of course, it’s in the interest of the Pentecostal brand to lay claim to the growth of an influential cohort of believers—however fuzzy it may have become in theological terms, American Protestantism is nothing if not entrepreneurial. But there are plenty of reasons that LeClaire’s surmise is plausible. For one thing, one of the significant trends in modern U.S. religion has been the rise of Pentecostalism—which originated as a hardscrabble, itinerant and disproportionately African-American Protestant denomination in the poorer stretches of the South and West—into a full-blown gospel of success. A particularly militant wing of Pentecostalism—the so-called Word Faith tradition—claims the adherence of Sarah Palin, the spiritual godmother of last November’s tea party semi-sweep, and the most signature on-the-make personage in today’s conservative political scene.

More broadly, however, Pentecostal preachers are the face of the new millennial equation of Christian observance with unbridled material well-being, in the preachings of such otherwise diverse figures as Joel Osteen and the aptly named chief shiller of the “prosperity gospel,” Creflo Dollar. It’s also the faith of world-class conspiratorial-nut-cum-presidential hopeful Pat Robertson, and has supplied an important tributary of the secretive “Fellowship” faith of high-powered DC spiritual elitists, chronicled expertly by journalist Jeff Sharlet.

Beyond its growing elite appeal, however, Pentecostalism has been a key formative influence in the rise of modern conservatism. As historian Darren Dochuck shows in his new book From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, the Assemblies of God movement in Southern California was instrumental in channeling the historically Democratic-leaning southern migrant population into the Reaganite GOP. Pentecostalism closely tracked the sudden postwar surge of prosperity among the golden state’s southern exiles—like the seemingly miraculous growth of the Angeleno aerospace exurbs, charismatic Christianity appeared to bear direct witness to the chosen character of a socially conservative yet anti-hierarchical and experiential cohort of southern believers.

Pentecostals also formed the vanguard of the 1960s and 1970s “Jesus People” youth movement in California and throughout the United States, helping to brand spiritual conservatism as a sunny, future-oriented faith, much as Reagan had. The features of Pentecostalism that the Protestant mainline had formerly found so off-putting—the glossolalia and faith-healing exploits of a primitive Church militant—now took a backseat to the slick musical spectacles produced at Melodyland, an early forerunner to regional megchurches like Rick Warren’s Saddleback empire, constructed fittingly enough in a former musical theater-in-the-round, just down the road from Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Anaheim.

Pentecostals helped lead the way, in other words, toward a more self-consciously modern formulation of evangelical conservatism, one that stressed direct communion of believers with the Holy Spirit, and therefore was ideally suited to the explosion of televangelical and megachurch preaching alongside the rise of the evangelical right. Much as the original Assemblies of God was the lead spiritual outlet for displaced and disenfranchised agrarian southerners, so has modern Pentecostalism become the signature faith of the Amerian exurb—promising instant spiritual gratification and material earthly reward in a scheme of salvation that elevates the virtue of the striving individual believer above the mainline Protestant social model of the “priesthood of all believers.”

And for all the talk of the tea party’s incorrigibly libertarian skepticism when it comes to manning the well-dug bunkers of the culture wars, it bears reminding that the last election cycle saw evangelical voters turn out in record numbers—a show of strength that inspired former Christian Coalition leader (and Jack Abramoff crony) Ralph Reed to hail the dawning age of the “teavangelical.” The spiritual profile of the new Congress may be something of a work in progress still—but if its newly empowered tea party vanguard is smart, its members will clamor to herald the political gifts of the spirit in much the same fashion that Ronald Reagan did.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist now.

Photo from Flickr, by John McNab, 1962.

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Nevertheless, even a very "different" worldview can be made to serve as a stand-in for one’s pet nemesis in the toy-soldier confrontation. Since Giffords was among the lawmakers featured in the crosshairs-graphics on SarahPAC’s thuggish pitch to unseat pro-health-reform Democrats from districts that went Republican in the 2008 presidential vote, many left-leaning commentators rushed to equate Loughner’s act with tea-party rhetoric run amok. (Palin’s operation has since scrubbed the graphic from the SarahPAC site, with typically dishonest and self-dramatizing flourishes.) Commentators on the right rallied just as briskly to deride “the media"—the right’s own scapegoat of first resort in culture-war agons—for dragging Palin and the Tea Party into the picture. Conservatives gleefully noted that Loughner counted The Communist Manifesto among his favorite books; the left sniped back that he also included Ayn Rand’s gruesome objectivist fantasy We the Living on the same list. Both sides pinned Mein Kampf on the opposition, in strict adherence to Godwin’s law. (Inexplicably, neither political tendency has come forward to denounce the other incendiary literary entries on Loughner’s YouTube profile; The Old Man and the Sea, after all, is a blueprint for violent mayhem right up there with The Anarchist’s Cookbook—and The Phantom Tollbooth may as well be subtitled “The Turner Diaries.”)

Most of this rampant political branding of the Despised Other can, and should, be written off to the desperate point-scoring outlook of the pundit world. But it also bespeaks a little-noted and more serious impulse: to make a delusional event somehow intelligible, arising from a discernible set of motives and designed to achieve a clear (if senseless) public end. It seems likely that Loughner was expecting to declare himself a sovereign ruler—so as to reward himself a fiat currency of his own devising?—in the wake of his crime. But we need him not to be simply a sad, burnt-out weirdo, any more than we can accept that the cast members of “Jersey Shore” are simply alcoholic dullards. This same quest for utter public certainty is a defining feature of the retrograde ideologies of communism and militia-ism that interested parties on all sides set out to denounce. You might even surmise that something like this comforting retreat into absolute postulates drove Loughner mad; or you might not, but it is, at any rate, at least as likely a culprit as The Phantom Tollbooth was.

Religion is another name for the effort to impose a fanciful narrative order on an uncooperative universe, and it’s often baffled me why we don’t own up to it more broadly in our public discourse. Oh, sure, there’s a longstanding theory of political belief as a surrogate—or “functionalist,” as the sociological jargon has it—form of religion. But it’s not so much that we cleave to ideology as a substitute for religion; rather, we typically find political affiliations shoring up the more basic foundation of our identities, even if just by the simple power of exclusion. Take the so-called sovereign citizens movement—the political formation that Loughner’s rantings seem to be in closest accord with. The Anti-Defamation League writes that sovereign adherents subscribe to:

an unusual form of right-wing anarchism that focuses, on the one hand on the importance of local control and, on the other hand, on the avoidance of virtually all forms of authority and obligation. Sovereign citizen ideology justifies these goals by claiming that at one time there was an American utopia governed by English "common law," a utopia in which every citizen was a "sovereign," and there were no oppressive laws, taxes, regulations or court orders. However, a conspiracy gradually subverted this system, replacing it with an illegitimate successor.

By the time America took its currency off the gold standard, sovereignty theorists hold, “the United States government was completely illegitimate, using emergency war powers and other unlawful measures to rule unconstitutionally.” From here it’s but a short step to the various self-dramatizing, and all-too often, self-destructive, flourishes of the sovereign citizen, living within U.S. borders, but proudly outside the country’s governing power (at least in his—and oh boy, are these autodidactic souls ever usually men—own private scheme of governance). Hence the rather bloody litany of the sovereign movement’s public exploits: your Montana Freemen uprising of the 1990s; the smug, ostentatious antics of Timothy McVeigh’s sovereign-minded confrere Terry Nichols at McVeigh’s court proceedings; and just last year, sovereign tax protestor Jerry Kane and his son’s slaughter of two Arkansas police officers. Kane, who had been killed with his son in an ensuing shootout at a Wal-Mart parking lot that wounded two other officers, was a sovereign prophet for the post-meltdown age, holding seminars purporting to show how lienholders could dodge mortgage obligations and foreclosure proceedings, even though his counsel had no actual foundation in law.

But as it happens, the efficacy of these remedies ultimately matters less than the mystical power believers ascribe to them. Groups such as the Freemen dub themselves “Christian patriots,” while last spring, a clutch of Christian militia members in Michigan called the Hutaree planned to stage an attack on local law enforcement as part of the run-up to the endtimes. It’s true that Loughner disavowed organized religion—writing a propos of the government’s illegitimate currency that he refused to “trust in God.” But it’s hard to know what else to call a belief system that outfits an adherent so thoroughly for citizenship in an alternative reality. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, the sovereign community—or as it’s sometimes known, the redemption movement—shares many affinities with the separatist subculture of the fundamentalist world (right down, it seems, to the literalist misreading of key founding scripture):

Once in the movement, it's an immersive and heady experience. In the last three decades, the redemptionist subculture has grown from small groups of like-minded individuals in localized pockets around the nation to a richly layered society. Redemptionists attend specialized seminars and national conferences, enjoy a large assortment of alternative newspapers and radio networks, and subscribe to sovereign-oriented magazines and websites. They home school their children so that a new generation will not have to go through the same learning curve that they did to see past the government's curtain to the common-law utopia beyond.

It bears repeating that Loughner’s relative interest in this, or indeed in any, formal political subculture remains largely a matter of conjecture—though according to a memo obtained by Fox News, the Department of Homeland Security has suggested that he had a “possible link” to the kindred anti-Semitic and racist American Renaissance group. (A link that the racist assholes at American Renaissance, for their part, deny.) It seems that at the least, some variant of the sovereign faith recommended itself to this confused kid, and he adopted it as a sort of private religion—that being, by the way, Freud’s definition of neurosis. Armed with the bogus certitudes of an alternate theory of the authentic American republic, Loughner could envision a new currency, an improved English grammar, a career as a terrorist—all while fantasizing about the unconstitutionality of the community college from which he would soon be suspended.

All of us are neurotics, to varying degrees, and we all cope with our condition by succumbing to recuperative fantasies of our own—like, oh, depicting a glyph-like assassin as an adherent of a rival ideological tendency. But then again, the other luxury that comes with a religious world view is the dogmatic conviction that woolly irrational beliefs only belong to heretics.

Chris Lehmann is our religion columnist now.

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