{"id":133,"date":"2010-12-11T10:40:36","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T10:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/hardly-anyone-including-me-is.html"},"modified":"2010-12-11T10:40:36","modified_gmt":"2010-12-11T10:40:36","slug":"hardly-anyone-including-me-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/hardly-anyone-including-me-is.html","title":{"rendered":"Smart’s kidnapper not crazy enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Smart.jpg\"<\/span>\"dbmitchell.jpg\"<\/span>Hardly anyone, including me, is likely to lose any sleep over yesterday’s verdict<\/a> in federal court in Salt Lake City that found David Brian Mitchell guilty of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart and transporting her across state lines for purposes of sexual activity. And yet, it’s hard not to believe that Mitchell is crazy as a bedbug–as in a paranoid schizophrenic suffering under the delusion that God ordered him to acquire many wives in order to be equipped to combat the Antichrist in the End Times. Peggy Fletcher Stack, the Salt Lake Tribune<\/i>‘s exemplary religion writer, has a long take-out<\/a> exploring the conundrum of distinguishing an inspired prophet from someone who’s merely insane.The feds ended up trying Mitchell because a state judge found him mentally incompetent to stand trial.<\/p>\n

Maybe Mitchell was faking it, but pretty much everybody, including the Tribune <\/i>editorial<\/a> applauding the verdict, thought he was crazy–just not crazy enough not to deserve to be found guilty. For my part, I don’t think that, short of spending all his time rolling on the floor and foaming at the mouth, a man who did to a teenage girl what Mitchell did to Smart, was going to be able to avoid a guilty verdict, no matter what the clinical diagnosis was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hardly anyone, including me, is likely to lose any sleep over yesterday’s verdict in federal court in Salt Lake City that found David Brian Mitchell guilty of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart and transporting her across state lines for purposes of sexual activity. And yet, it’s hard not to believe that Mitchell is crazy as a bedbug–as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nSmart's kidnapper not crazy enough - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/12\/hardly-anyone-including-me-is.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Smart's kidnapper not crazy enough - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hardly anyone, including me, is likely to lose any sleep over yesterday’s verdict in federal court in Salt Lake City that found David Brian Mitchell guilty of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart and transporting her across state lines for purposes of sexual activity. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}