Certainly I was interested in reading about the unlikely match between the "coarse New York billionaire and the prim Indiana evangelical" that is now running our country, which is why I quickly reached for the New Yorker's piece on Vice President Mike Pence.

With a headline of "The Danger of President Pence," I knew where the article was going, but I hoped there might be solid, factual, even fair-minded gleanings about Pence's faith and how his God connection guides what he does.

The bottom line: I found little there that other writers hadn't already covered. The feature began like this:

On September 14th, the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who last year published a book titled “In Trump We Trust,” expressed what a growing number of Americans, including conservatives, have been feeling since the 2016 election. The previous day, President Trump had dined with Democratic leaders at the White House, and had impetuously agreed to a major policy reversal, granting provisional residency to undocumented immigrants who came to America as children. Republican legislators were blindsided. Within hours, Trump disavowed the deal, then reaffirmed it. Coulter tweeted, “At this point, who doesn’t want Trump impeached?” She soon added, “If we’re not getting a wall, I’d prefer President Pence.”

The piece goes on to describe how little attention has been paid to Pence (who refused to be interviewed for the piece) until now, when people are longing for anyone, anything to replace Trump. And that Pence, with his political experience, conservative moorings and connections, may be as dangerous as his boss or even more so (you know, all that religion stuff).

The New Yorker then went on a long digression about Pence’s connections with billionaires Charles and David Koch. (Not surprisingly, the reporter, Jane Mayer, did not mete out the same criticism to multi-billionaire George Soros and his contributions to Democrats but then again, this part of the piece is recycled from her recent book “Dark Money” about conservative fat cats ).

Any fresh religious content is surprisingly skimpy, when you consider that this is a profile on a very devout man. Starting in his college days:

Here's some advice for journalists venturing into religion-beat terrain: Be careful when you get into church-history arguments with Calvinists, because you may be predestined to fall into error.

What we are talking about here is the profile of Betsy DeVos that ran the other day in The New Yorker. DeVos, for those following Citizen Donald Trump and his evolving cabinet, has been proposed as the next Secretary of Education.

The Big Idea in this piece (the stuff of politics, of course) is that she is a crucial figure in the world of big, scary GOP money that is on the wrong side of history. This is captured perfectly in the overture:

After choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who are loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this pattern to name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multilevel marketing empire, comes from the very heart of the small circle of conservative billionaires who have long funded the Republican Party.

Trump’s choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase the role of charter schools, which she has long championed.

Lots and lots of GOP money lingo follows. What will interest GetReligion readers comes later, when New Yorker veteran Jane Mayer ventures into the building blocks of the DeVos worldview, as well as her bank account. The result is a fascinating thread in the Twitter-verse that explores what some would call "post-truth" issues in the world of digital fact checking.

Here is the crucial material in the feature, as it currently reads on the magazine's website:

DeVos is a religious conservative who has pushed for years to breach the wall between church and state on education, among other issues.*