Holly Berman: The Revealer has long maintained that most reporters don’t pay enough attention to the intellectual development of religious subjects, particularly those defined by their acceptance of and adherence to a creed. So Raffi Khatchadourian’s New Yorker profile of “Azzam the American” — AKA, Adam Gadahn, an American Christian convert to Islam who now works for Al Qaeda — ought to be welcome. Khatchadourian devotes space to Gadahn’s hippie Christian fundamentalist youth, death metal adolescence, and Orange County conversion. And yet, the parts don’t seem to add up. That may be because Khatchadourian buys into government attempts to “profile” converts like Gadahn, an approach that views their faith as a kind of pathology. It’s violent enough to qualify for that term as a metaphor, but as explanatory description, noting that most converts are lonely young men doesn’t do much. The piece is still worth reading as a portrait-of-the-terrorist-as-a-young-man. In fact, Khatchadourian’s exploration of the “obscure musical subculture” of death metal (likely less obscure to most Americans than the New Yorker) is the best part. If only he had taken Gadahn’s Christian fundamentalist upbringing — which Khatchadourian doesn’t seem to understand as such — and his Islamic education as seriously, we might have a better sense of his ideological formation. In 2004, Revealer writer Julia Rabig took a different approach, locating Gadahn within the storied history of the O.C.