Malcolm Gladwell, the author of numerous best-selling books and a writer for The New Yorker, recently made a surprising stop on the publicity tour for his latest effort, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. At Glenn Beck’s television studio in Dallas, where his online show is filmed, the two men discussed faith, the mainstream media, and Gladwell’s career. Beck, dressed in a suit and donning a colorful blue bowtie, was nevertheless playing it cool: far from the ringmaster presiding over a circus of conspiracy-theorizing and racial pot-stirring, the former Fox host was calm and relaxed.

Indeed, Beck seemed surprised to see Gladwell in the flesh, but the tone of the conversation—pleasant, agreeable, religiously-themed—struck me as surprising. The interview began when Beck scolded the mainstream media for ignoring the faith-based aspects of Gladwell’s new book. “It’s an odd thing,” Gladwell responded. “By the end of the book I realized what I really wanted to talk about was faith...The weapons of the spirit.” Beck asked whether Gladwell himself was spiritual, and Gladwell responded that although he grew up in a religious household, he “drifted away,” and “with this book I am coming back.” He added: “This book was a weird journey for me.”

Listening to all this seemed like a weird journey for me, as someone who has closely followed Gladwell's career. I have read nearly everything Gladwell has written—I wrote a long piece for The New Republic about him in 2009—and I had never sensed a spiritual or religious dimension in his work. (I did criticize him for writing a form of self-help book, a genre that often has a religious tinge.) So I decided to call Gladwell up and discuss some of these issues with him.

Gladwell was working on an article, but he was solicitous and engaged, and answered all my questions. When I asked him why he had chosen to go on the show of someone known for racially insensitive remarks and deranged political commentary, Gladwell said that Beck was an “important member of the media community,” and that when you enter into a contract with your book publisher, you are obligated to get the book out to as many people as possible. (After we got off the phone, Gladwell also emailed me a “disclosure statement” he wrote on his website about book writing, and how book authors and magazine/newspaper writers have different obligations and responsibilities.) He added that it isn’t necessary to agree with the views of everyone who is interviewing you.

What most interested me was Gladwell’s claim about the book’s religious content. On this subject, Gladwell seconded what he had said to Beck, essentially arguing that different people read the book in different ways. “It’s a very interesting experience—I was in Salt Lake City...and everyone read the book that way,” Gladwell told me. “I must have done six interviews and all they talked about was the faith part. I think it depends where you stand.” He added, in a phrase that one could hear Beck uttering, that “people on the coast” seemed to be ignoring the faith-based aspects of the book. (On his show, Beck claimed that the book was something he himself could have written.)