Mark Oppenheimer: “When politicians have to belong to churches, and when religion journalists seem to write only about churches, we can feel pressured to join up, sign on the dotted line, profess allegiance. Or, in our refusal to, we can be unwittingly pushed into a camp of extreme atheism that actually is no more comfortable. Most of us are somewhere between camps: pious one day, sentimental the next, skeptical on alternate Sabbaths.”

Oppenheimer offers his thoughtful defense of religious inconsistency in a relatively new journal called In Character. Its first editor was Naomi Schaeffer Riley, whose first book — a miserably underreported puff piece on well-behaved college students as the salvation of us all — epitomized hackery. I wrote off In Character when she opened the premiere issue with a series of softballs for billionaire Steve Forbes on how he practices thrift, but with Oppenheimer (whose first book was a brilliantly researched, well written examination of how the 1960s transformed American religion — in charge, it’s become a genuinely interesting magazine, despite its deadly dull mission statement: “In Character aims to foster a deeper appreciation of these virtues within our communities, our families and ourselves.”

Oppenheimer, recently the author of a terrific piece in the NYT Magazine on an evangelical college’s first dance, manages to fulfill that mandate even as he subverts it, offering up in the latest theme issue on “self-reliance” a series of essays that complicate the concept and contradict too-easy conservative celebrations of the notion. “Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance,” writes Bill McKibben, a sometimes nature writer who takes on the self-deception of the back-to-the-land romance that afflicts conservatives and liberals alike. Amy Benfer explores the love lock between adolescent girls and Ayn Rand, and then puts an end to the affair: “For the best example of the contradictions and limits of rational thought and self-reliance, one has to look no further than the life of Ayn Rand.”

The only real endorsement of self-reliance as a wholly worthwhile goal comes from a collection of quotes gathered by the otherwise smart and funny critic Alana Newhouse. Maybe she meant to be smart and funny, in subtle fashion, when she gave the final word on self-reliance to Carlos Castañeda: “We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

A corollary drawn from Castandeda’s work, new-age fictions masquerading as anthropology about a mystical Indian who teaches Castañeda how to turn into animals, might be: “We either tell the truth and produce real scholarship and journalism, or we make shit up and sell millions of books. The amount of work is the same.” Except that it’s not — intellectual honesty, a virtue with which Oppenheimer has infused In Character, is lot more difficult than the self-satisfied celebration of virtue the magazine used to peddle. Oppenheimer knows that, which is why he responds to William James’ admiration of the “healthy-minded” among us with a quote from an essay by Susan Wolf: “I don’t know whether there are any moral saints. But if there are, I am glad that neither I nor those about whom I care most are among them.”

–Jeff Sharlet