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The indictment proceeds. Sutton writes:
Mathewes–Green begins her article by poking fun at Branson, explaining that by "11:00 pm … everyone is snug in bed at the Red Roof Inn or the Best Western." Once she establishes that she doesn't take Branson too seriously herself, she opens her tirade against Ketchell. "It's hard for him to see the ways Branson has changed," she writes, because "he finds Branson baffling to start with. He recognizes it as representing one side of a culture war (the other side, it appears) and focuses on that to the exclusion of anything else." She then takes shots at him for his acknowledgements (which is always an easy target for those who can't mount a legitimate challenge at an author's evidence), and tells us that Ketchell is—wait for it—a Catholic(!), implying that he obviously doesn't get Protestants.
Curiouser and curiouser. When I read this paragraph, I was baffled. I didn't remember any reference in Mathewes–Green's article to Ketchell's acknowledgments. She does refer to his introduction, which is a substantial chapter in itself (subtitled "The Moral Vineyards," it runs from p. xi to p. xxxvi in Ketchell's book). But just to be sure, I went back and re–read the article. Nope. No mention at all of Ketchell's acknowledgments. How did that phrase go: "always an easy target for those who can't mount a legitimate challenge at an author's evidence"?
By the way, one of the writers who commented on Sutton's post at Religion in American History was Ed Blum, who has written for B&C and has another piece in the queue (and reviews of two of his books in the mag are pending). Blum took Sutton's assertions at face value—evidently he didn't bother to read the article himself—and added a bit of moralizing of his own. Is this how good intellectual conversation proceeds?
And the business about Catholics and Protestants … . I started to wonder as I read if Sutton was under the misapprehension that Mathewes–Green is an evangelical. In fact, of course, she is the most widely known popular voice of Orthodox Christianity in America. She herself has been quite critical of evangelicals and evangelicalism on occasion. And for some time she reviewed movies regularly for Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic publication. But apart from all that, Sutton has simply distorted what she wrote in her piece. Here is what she said:
Ketchell explains that he began studying Branson because his thesis advisor specialized in Marian apparitions, and the topic of folk religion drew his interest. (Of his own background, he says that his family "has for many generations been staunchly Catholic.") As he thought about a past visit to the Ozarks, "I recalled that in that region one could not find statues of Mary or paintings of St. Sebastian skewered with arrows, yet its religious attractions were comparable mixtures of sacred and secular." (I am stumped as to how a statue of Mary is a "mixture of sacred and secular"; I can only guess that Ketchell considers art intrinsically secular because it partakes of the material world.)
How Sutton got from that paragraph to his response is a mystery, like much else in his piece. But worse even than all these inaccuracies and distortions is the use to which they are put: to charge that Mathewes–Green has systematically, willfully misrepresented Ketchell's book. There is room for disagreement with any review. But Sutton has done both Mathewes–Green and his readers a great injustice. In fact, as will be clear to any impartial reader, Mathewes–Green read Ketchell's book carefully. She raises a number of specific points—here, to take just one example among many:
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