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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. 90 minutes before

accused mass murderer Anders Breivik began his killing spree in Norway on July 22nd, he emailed his

intentions to more than a thousand people with a 1,500-page manifesto attached. He's hardly the first accused murderer to publicly declare and justify his intent,

and it's clear why such miscibs are irresistible to journalists looking for any explanation.

And yet, when they're as lengthy as Breivik's or the Unabomers, they're often not fully read. This is Bill O'Reilly on Monday.

Now on Sunday, the New York Times headline, has horrors emerged? Norway charges Christian

extremists. A number of other news organizations like the L.A. Times and Royd has also played

up the Christian angle. But Breivik is not a Christian. That's impossible. No one

believing in Jesus commits mass murder. Jeff Charlotte is a Dartmouth professor who frequently

writes about religion and is one of what is presumably a very small number of people who took

the weekend to read 1,500 pages of Breivik's thoughts. Charlotte says that he was

struck by just how American Breivik's work is, and also by how much it's been mischaracterized.

For instance, there's that issue of Breivik's Christianity. At one point, he says, I'm not particularly

religious. And so people who are doing sort of find and search in this massive document find that and say,

oh, good, he's not Christian.

And then they don't read the pages and pages and pages where he sort of slowly talked about his evolution.

And by the end of the manifesto, he is really quoting scripture a lot more and talking about his ideal of how a Christian state

should be run. It becomes more and more invested in faith, first is a kind of a weaponized thing,

that faith is going to prepare him through what he calls Bible battle verses, but then goes

...