Ever since he first washed up from that basement in Mazar-e-Sharif last December, Taliban John Walker has been the object of seemingly endless speculation. And for good reason. After all, it’s not every day that the well-off, coddled children of Marin County, Calif. — an affluent and notoriously "progressive" (in all the loopiest senses of the word) enclave north of San Francisco — get caught fighting other people’s religious wars. How did he get there in the first place? What could have possibly driven a privileged young American into the arms of a fundamentalist theocracy half way around the world?

In a Dec. 10 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, renowned black scholar and Hoover Institute Fellow Shelby Steele attempted to answer these questions. According to Steele, the fault was less Walker’s than Marin County’s, a place steeped in "a certain kind of cultural liberalism". Walker, Steele explained, had grown up in an environment committed to the twin ideals of cultural relativism (or the belief that all cultures have an equal claim on truth and value and that no culture, not even one’s own, has special access to these things) and self-realization. In Marin, he continued, young people like John Walker are encouraged to experiment with other cultures as part of a greater quest to "follow their inner selves" and "discover their true identity."

It sounds nice enough. But there is a dark underside to Marin’s distinctive breed of dayglo voluntarism, Steele argued. "There is another message as well: that traditional American history, culture and religion are without any special authority … worse, historic racism and sexism may leave these American offerings with less moral authority than foreign options." Steele’s view, in short, was that it was only natural for Walker to flee the identity he was born with in favor of a more "authentic," non-Western one. Taught from early childhood to revere "victim cultures" and to despise his own, Walker’s reincarnation as holy warrior was entirely in keeping with his upbringing. By the standards of Marin, argues Steele, Walker was both a good son and a good pupil.

Steele’s column was met with more than a few raised eyebrows on the left. In editorial after editorial, liberal journalists — normally so tolerant of hyperbole — suddenly reinvented themselves as skeptics. As Richard Cohen wrote in an entirely typical editorial for the Washington Post:

But wait. There were 3.629 million births the year John Walker was born and he is the only one, so far as we know, who wound up joining the Taliban … So it could be that cultural liberalism, white guilt and all that other stuff do not account for why John Walker turned out the way he did. Maybe he fell out of his highchair when he was an infant. Whatever the case, it seems a bit silly to load all this ideological and cultural freight on one person and turn him into the personification of a vast, and dated, political movement.

Scott Rosenberg, writing for Salon, took a similar line. Citing the explanation offered by John Walker’s father, Frank Lindh, for why his son joined the Taliban (that he had read Malcolm X’s autobiography), Rosenberg points out that: "Many millions of high school students have read it since. Of those millions, Walker is one of what can only be a microscopic number of supposedly self-hating white Americans to be persuaded by Malcolm’s story to convert to Islam. And he is almost certainly the only one to take up arms against his country." According to these critics, by seizing upon the story of John Walker as a parable of liberal decadence, Steele and other conservatives intentionally and opportunistically mistook a special case for a representative example. Walker is a freak, liberals argued, and nothing you could say about him reflected on the values of Marin or other liberal communities.

As a matter of fact, they’re all wrong. Simply pointing out, as Steele does, that Walker was raised in a milieu in which young white males are encouraged to disown the culture into which they are born does not in itself explain why Walker should have ended up in the ranks of the Taliban. After all, many millions of other young Americans have been raised in equally liberal settings without becoming soldiers of fortune in the service of radical Islam. And yet to assume Walker is a sort of freak of nature and leave it at that is also a bit too easy (and, for liberals, suspiciously convenient). Is it really a coincidence that Walker moved, as if by stages, from one increasingly radical rejection of Western identity to the next? And is it irrelevant that, in doing so, he was consistently rewarded and encouraged by his elders?

There is a paradox at the heart of John Walker’s story, one which has so far received little or no attention. No one disputes that Walker was raised in a permissive environment. He was allowed to design his own course of studies, was encouraged by his parents to experiment with different cultures, was held to no rules, and was never without financial support in his increasingly weird adventures. His was, in many of these respects, a typical Marin childhood. So what made Walker throw in his lot with the Taliban, arguably the most oppressive and authoritarian regime on the planet? That’s the paradox. On the face of it, permissiveness would only seem to breed more permissiveness. In Walker’s case, however, permissiveness seems to have bred something like a taste for tyranny.

Understanding this paradox is key to understanding Taliban John. And in order to do this one must take another look at his upbringing. Much has been written about the progressive private academy Walker attended in Marin and the mosque he joined after his conversion to Islam at the age of 17. Yet Walker’s home experience was arguably more important. In his mid-teenage years, Walker discovered the world of hip hop music. Like so many young white suburbanites, Walker was attracted by the confidence and energy of the mainly black world of hip hop. Soon he was a regular yo-boy, not only dressing and acting the part but also logging many hours at online hip hop chat sites. There, he pretended to be African-American and complained bitterly of his experience of white racism. An absurd chapter in the life of the adolescent Walker, to be sure, but not so unusual in today’s America.

The decisive moment in Walker’s journey — at least according to his father, Frank Lindh — came when Walker first read Malcolm X’s autobiography. The same year, Walker followed Malcolm’s example and converted to Islam. On this version of events, closer to Steele’s than to that of Cohen and Rosenberg, Walker’s transformation into a radical Islamicist was indeed due to his exposure to a larger culture of white guilt. Hip hop led to Malcolm, Malcolm led to Islam and Islam led to the Taliban. All roads, in short, led to Afghanistan.

But something else was happening when Walker was 17. Much more, in fact, than Lindh lets on. For even as Walker was reading Malcolm X, his father separated from his mother — herself a recent convert to Buddhism — and moved in with another man to pursue a homosexual relationship. Or such was the news in San Francisco gossip columns in the month following Walker’s discovery in Afghanistan. As PJ Corkery wrote for the San Francisco Examiner: "When Lindh left his family in 1997, it was to move in with a male companion. Yep … The man with whom Lindh lived has since been described as a ‘family friend,’ but other family friends say the men lived as a gay couple." While details of the story have been disputed by Lindh and others since it first broke, it is significant than no one has denied its central claim: that Lindh now lives as a homosexual and that that was the reason he left Walker’s mother.

Never heard about it? Well, there’s no surprise there. While the Lindh story received a lot of coverage in the Bay Area, national news outlets studiously avoided it, even as they devoted round the clock coverage to the Walker case. Apparently, the media elite considers it in bad taste to mention Lindh’s sexuality.* That’s too bad for it is crucial to understanding Walker’s weird saga. Lindh’s homosexuality, for instance, partly explains Walker’s enthusiasm for hip hop culture. The world of hip hop (and especially its gangster rap segment) is a world of aggression and male domination. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of tolerant Marin: violent, misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant of everything that doesn’t neatly fit into its own narrow categories. One can only guess what went on in the Walker household after school but it is easy to imagine young John taking a particular thrill in blasting songs about "punking" enemies while his father sat nervously downstairs. Even if Walker’s interest in hip hop had nothing to do with his father’s homosexuality, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his enthusiastic reading of Malcolm X and subsequent conversion to Islam did have something to do with it and in a very direct way. More so than any other major religion, Islam enshrines the principle of male rule, or patriarchy. This is especially true of Wahhabism, the radical sect to which the Taliban belong. In Wahhabi Islam, society is built around the authority of the heterosexual male. One consequence of this is the total exclusion of women from public life. Another consequence is a spectacularly violent attitude towards homosexuality. In Afghanistan, the one country in which Wahhabism has been fully put into practice as state policy, homosexuals were routinely punished by having tanks collapse brick walls on to them, a punishment that almost always resulted in death. Here was heterosexual authority in its starkest guise. When Frank Lindh deserted his family in 1997, not only did Walker reject his father’s name (until then, he had gone by Lindh), he immediately latched onto the strongest expression of male authority he could find. In short, Walker found a new father.

In these respects, Walker was behaving no differently than any other adolescent male. What he seems to have desired above all was an example of adult masculinity to which he could defer and upon which he could model his growing self. But this is exactly what Marin — and his family — denied him. By being taught shame for his Christianity and European origins, Walker was pushed to reject the one type of masculinity with which he could have reasonably felt at home. Frustrated, he turned to the only masculinity still endorsed by the larger culture, that of the African-American male. But, after his father’s desertion, pretending to be black — something which must have always been awkward for him anyhow — was no longer enough. Walker was ready for a new path; shame and a fortuitous encounter with Malcolm X did the rest. Taliban John was born.

The story of John Walker is in these respects both more complicated and more interesting than anyone could have guessed when he first surfaced in the Mazar-e-Sharif prison uprising. In each of his successive transformations, however perverse they may appear at first glance, Walker revealed a perfectly normal desire for order, authority and stability. This, however, was a desire which Walker’s parents were unable or unwilling to satisfy. Too invested in the narcissism of self-discovery and sexual doubt to consider the consequences of their behavior for their son, Walker’s parents effectively deserted him. When they formally separated in 1997, it was simply the culmination of a long-term process of abandonment. For Walker, the fact that his father left his mother for another man only made things worse, compounding abandonment with what Walker seems to have experienced as deeply humiliating sexual betrayal.

While the particulars of Walker’s case may be as unusual as the fate he discovered in Afghanistan, the type of experience which drove him into the arms of the Taliban most certainly is not. Walker, in the end, is an eccentric case study in the consequences of disorder in the family. He’s what you get — or, more precisely, one example of what you get — when the family ceases to operate as a locus of moral authority. The easy-going non-judgementalism of places like Marin certainly make it easier for families to fall apart in this way. But ultimately the responsibility lies with Walker’s parents, who, true to their generation, dress up indulgence and call it principle.

Steele, in this respect, was right after all, though for reasons that do not seem to have occurred to him. Taliban John is the product of "a certain kind of liberalism". But he is not a direct product: John Walker became Taliban John, not by accepting his parents’ liberalism, but by rejecting it. He had little choice. His parents, together with most of their neighbors, were blinded to a crucial fact: that adolescent identity is made, not found. Just as importantly, they failed to recognize that, if they didn’t do their part in helping their son make his identity, someone else would. But how could Lindh and his wife, Marilyn, be expected to do so? After all, they are themselves eternal adolescents, still experimenting with their identities well into middle age. For John Walker, who is almost certain to spend the remainder of his life in federal detention, it has been a hard lesson. In joining the Taliban, Walker found a new family. He shall pay for it with the rest of his life.

* (Two publications did explore the story further: National Review Online and The Weekly Standard.)