There’s more on Ana Marie Cox‘s Christ confessional if you can possibly stomach it.
As one reader put it, Cox is “really milking this thing.”
The remark came to a follow-up piece to a Daily Beast story about the Guardian columnist and Democratic pundit recently coming out of the closet as a Christian after falling into “a deep, personal dark hole” in her life. It’s always positive to root for someone’s climb out of a serious rough patch.
But after Cox wrote the story, she then felt a burning need to write about how pleased she was by the reaction to her piece. “Thank God I was wrong: What I learned about opening up about my faith,” the headline blares.
The first one was semi-touching and semi-believable. The second one? Let’s take a breather.
In it, Cox talks about humility and how evil the ego is. “It’s difficult to write about redemption without humblebragging,” she writes, somehow preempting anyone from declaring that she’s humblebragged her relationship with Christ. “…I am human so my ego will always need checking.” See here if you can handle a first-person reaction piece about her story.
She even manages to — God help us — quote Taylor Swift.
Cox: “With a week’s worth of responses behind me, I can report that my fear of judgment was legitimate—haters gonna hate—but also that I was proven wrong in the most wonderful way: I found amazing warmth and generosity that far outweighed criticism and negativity.”
She also apologizes to the good, open-minded folks in the LGBT community who were, of course, offended by her use of the phrase “coming out of the closet” because only they are allowed to use it. “I apologize for using that language,” she writes. “It is an obviously imperfect metaphor—as I note in the piece, there is nothing marginal about believing in God.”
Honestly, I don’t care about how people reacted to her piece. Nor do I think a phrase in the English language is personally owned by any one group of people. (As for her original story, I’m comfortable in reporting that a coworker told me he thinks I’m a little cynical about the whole thing. I’m sure he’s right. And I’m also sure there’s good reason why I’m a reporter, cynical and don’t buy everything I read. By the way, Newsbusters is also cynical — the site sharply questions her newfound faith, reporting that just six months ago Cox compared the Christian conservative agenda to Islamicists. How very Christian of her, huh?)
Can we possibly — and I get that the answer here is a clear no — just have her original story without her reaction to her own story?
Despite her lengthy explanations about writing about faith being an exercise of the ego, she writes, more like warns, “Publicly proclaiming my faith has, basically, given me the best response I’ve received in my professional life. It would be easy to conclude that I should write about it more.”
Oh God.
In her podcast interview with The Daily Caller‘s Matt Lewis, Cox promised, to herself really, that she’d step back for awhile after the rollout of her newfound faith and the media bonanza that accompanied it. Meaning that after granting interviews to Breitbart Radio and TheBlazeTV‘ Dana Loesch and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” she was going to be humble and gracefully stop the press hits on it for awhile.
Awhile meaning what, a few days?
Let’s hope she follows her own wisdom. Because if we have to read more about her story or the reaction to her story, or the reaction to the reaction of her story, I think I’m going to hell for the next post I’m going to have to write about it.