Dear Jason Kehe: Don’t Be a Bigot

(Language warning. I typically try to avoid vitriol in my writing. But at the moment, I’m pretty pissed. For two years as a missionary I had no choice but to stand there and take it when people hated me because of the religion and ethnic group I grew up in and belong to. When a high-profile piece comes after one of the kindest writers I’ve had the good fortune of meeting and one of the most gracious and open-minded religious people I’ve been blessed to learn from, I feel compelled to respond. Prejudice of any kind is unacceptable and ought to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Here is my reply to Mr. Jason Kehe’s article in WIRED, which you can find here, if you want to stoop low enough to give it a click.)

Dear Mr. Kehe.

I was stunned and disgusted by the malice and bigotry towards your subject in particular, and Mormons in general, in your recent article entitled “Brandon Sanderson Is Your God”. I had not realized that such prejudice was permitted to be printed before the public eye.

Let me repeat a few of your sentences back to you. If you fail to see the outrageous extent of your biases, try replacing “Mormon” with the name of some other group that you realize it’s not okay to discriminate against—Jews, Black people—insert the slur of your choice.

“Could it be, finally, because he’s a weirdo Mormon?”
“Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be.”
“Post-Kickstarter campaign, [his] company is now 50-some-people/Mormons strong.”
“It’s no secret: Mormonism is the fantasy of religion. ‘The science-fiction edition of Christianity,’ I’ve heard it called.”

If your article had contained the words “he’s a weirdo Jew,” would it have reached publication? To tolerate rhetoric like this is to tolerate ethnic and religious hatred, plain and simple. To use such rhetoric is to promote such hatred.

The remainder of your article is in a like spirit and your criticism reaches far outside the bounds of propriety. You show nothing but contempt for your subject (“depressingly, story-killingly lame”); your reader (“You’re not ready for [Sanderson’s words] just yet”); your ineptitude at your own craft (“This story has an ending, I promise”); and, bafflingly, Hugh Jackman (“I can’t help it. I burst into tears”). Recounting how you insulted Mr. Sanderson’s writing in front of his wife, you say, “recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to.” You “have to”? You expect your reader to sympathize with your, a literary professional’s, inability to find anything nice to say to your gracious host?

No, Mr. Sanderson’s prose is not transcendent. Mr. Sanderson views the novel differently than you do. While you’ve spent your time gatekeeping the medium as a hallowed monument to grammatical sentences in this malicious sink you intend to pass off as journalism, Mr. Sanderson has been celebrating diversity through his novels, “good” prose or otherwise. He doesn’t care about sentence structure. That you see Sanderson’s word choice as a more important issue than not shitting on someone who welcomed you into his home and introduced you to his family is a more damning condemnation of your moral fibre than I could pen here. Sure, “he is no great gift to English prose,” but neither are you any credit to your craft, Mr. Kehe—this article is all about yourself, about how you’re struggling to meet your deadline because you find your subject so insufferably boring, showing not the finest modicum of the imagination that Mr. Sanderson has built his career on, and so you attempt to pull Mr. Sanderson down with you. “I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for?” you write. Your readers deserve better than your public self-pity at your failure to write the article you wanted.

Mr. Sanderson’s kind response to you exhibited a level of decorum that far outweighs your spiteful character. Your hateful excuse for an article has shown you to be nothing less than a petty bully with an inability to express an iota of gratitude for the hospitality shown to you, and a bigot who repays that hospitality with insults on a kind man’s family, friends, and sincere faith. Such behavior ought not to be tolerated from a child, much less from the front page of a major media outlet such as WIRED and a professional such as yourself. I acknowledge your right to express your opinion, Mr. Kehe, and I urge you to exercise it wisely in the future by keeping your mouth shut.

Your obedient servant,

Eric Christensen Attica