Last week I was in Key West for an event sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the latest in a series of "Faith Angle" conferences that bring journalists together to hear experts on the intersection of religion and public affairs. This particular gathering featured Philip Jenkins on global schism (does the bitter divide in the Anglican Communion portend a wider Christian split along North-South lines?), Richard Bushman on Mormonism and Mitt Romney's candidacy (are Mormonism and democratic politics compatible?), and Ray Takeyh on the structure of the regime in Iran and the disparate groups contending for dominance there.

The assembled journalists represented a wide swath of media, from the upstart Politico, launched just this year, to the venerable Economist. CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, NBC, the Chicago Sun-Times (by the way, Cathleen Falsani's The God Factor is just out in paperback), The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, U. S. News, ABC, CBS, the Boston Globe, Beliefnet, and Newsweek were all there.

So what was there to take home, apart from all the good conversation (itself worth the trip from Chicago)? As usual, Jenkins resisted pat formulas—noting, for instance, that while many Southern Christian leaders are routinely described as "conservative," they often have a good deal in common with American liberals on economic and political issues. This prompted a couple of journalists to wonder if the changing priorities of American evangelicals, reported yet again in the New York Times this week, will be nudged further from the old Religious Right axis as American evangelicals interact more routinely with their Southern counterparts.

From an evangelical viewpoint, what was most interesting about Richard Bushman's session was the overlap between skepticism about Mormons (remember the question: are Mormonism and democratic politics compatible?) and skepticism about evangelicals and Catholics, as expressed in a host of books and articles and op-ed pieces in the last year. Jacob Weisberg's widely quoted piece from Slate, in which he said that someone who believes what Romney believes lacks the "capacity" to hold the highest office in our country, reminded me of similar judgments in the past about women: they are very good at other things, you see, but they lack a certain "rational capacity" that is the birthright of males. (By the way, doesn't it follow from Weisberg's statement that Mormons should be denied the vote, as women long were?) In this vein it's interesting to note how, running on a very different track from the jokes about polygamy, there's a vein of disdainful commentary that seeks to dismiss Mormons by feminizing them—a tactic that may be potent precisely because it is so politically incorrect, and often in contradiction to the stated pieties of the very people it's pitched to. Romney as a candidate? That won't be newsworthy much longer: he has no chance at the nomination. But the issues raised in connection with his candidacy will continue to be relevant, and not just for Mormons.

Like many readers of Books & Culture, I was familiar with the work of Philip Jenkins and Richard Bushman before I went to Key West. The surprise for me was Ray Takeyh, whose recent book Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic I ordered as soon as I got home. Like Jenkins and Bushman, Takeyh—whose father brought the family to the United States from Iran when things began to get dicey there—offered a nuanced account of a story that is often oversimplified. If he's right, we can be somewhat reassured, insofar as the prospect of a nuclear Iran can be reassuring. So, for instance, Takeyh doesn't think that, once it has the capacity, Iran will follow through on the "obliterate Israel" rhetoric with a nuclear first strike. His Iran, for all its dysfunctionality—the regime sustained by a zealous core, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population—is more or less a "rational actor." (And I can imagine an Israeli observer looking over my shoulder and asking, "But what if he's wrong?")

Which reminds me of an interesting if truncated conversation I had with a fellow journalist about the place of rationality in religion and in political life. Maybe sometime we'll have an opportunity to pick the thread up again. It was good to be away from editing and deadlines for a couple of days, talking about such matters over good food and drink, all this only a stone's throw from the water. An eminently rational way to conduct a conference, so it seems to me.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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