On Sunday night, Rima Fakih became the new Miss USA. She will soon compete in the Miss Universe Pageant and promote the Miss USA "platform" of "increasing awareness of breast and ovarian cancers."

"For two years [Trump's] managed to wrap a boring, anachronistic beauty pageant around America's most roiling political issues" one journalist notes. Indeed. There should be nothing particularly newsworthy about a pageant started in the 1950s to promote a line of swimsuits – and now a money-making venture for Donald Trump. But rising above the fray also seems anachronistic. Last year Carrie Prejean's sex tape and support of Proposition 8 revivified the culture-wars debates. And this year. Well … what is the story exactly?

Reading the coverage of Rima Fakih is a bit like going down the rabbit hole. There is not one story but rather a half-dozen. Most seem like old chestnuts, and at first glance each seems to have limited relation to the others. There is, of course, the story of the hometown girl inspiring others. Fakih says, "I want Michigan to know that my title should be a significant symbol that Michigan is going to go right back to where it was." And there is, related, the story of the immigrant made good: Fakih is the first immigrant to win the title, an "Arab-American" and "Lebanese-American" who, as the AP reported, symbolizes "a victory for diversity" during an age of stereotyping.

Because she is from Dearborn, Michigan and also Muslim (or possibly half-Muslim, or perhaps a "Muslim who celebrates Muslim and Christian holidays") there are of course other stories as well. She is a cultural bridge. She is a weapon. Or she is a terrorist – her family connected to Hezbollah. Or she is a Muslim whom Hezbollah rejects because she shows too much skin. Or she is the most recent opportunity for humorists to show how crazy Americans "wing-nuts" are in their attempt to link her to terrorism.

But before we get distracted with those Muslim and Lebanon stories, let's remember that there is also the story of this beauty pageant's quite forthright embrace of the objectification of women, and perhaps their exploitation. So there are pictures from  a pole-dancing competition and commentary on connections between swimsuit competitions, underwear modeling and soft porn. An NPR commentator grouses, "The decline and fall continues."

But wait. This is also a story about another sort of immigration – the illegal kind. Miss Oklahoma, the first runner-up in the pageant, was asked about Arizona's new immigration law, and gave a diplomatic answer. But the story circulates that she lost the competition (to an immigrant!) because her answer was "un-PC." Fox News weighed in: "Conservative answer = Points lost. Liberal Answer = Brownie points."
 
One might think that this multiplicity of stories shows the happy complexity of the event as well as journalists' ability to report it in many ways. We might rejoice that it's not just one story. But on second look, it appears that the stories resonate with one another more than we might expect.

Illegal immigration in Arizona is linked to fears of "Arab" and "terrorist" infiltration; Western women's exploitation and objectification is linked to controversy over the burqa. And so on. No one has to mention these common subtexts, but their influence is there, just beneath the surface.

We might ask – as I do – if each of these stories "has legs" insofar as it trades on these fears and stereotypes and amplifies those aspects of the other stories. There might be little that's truly newsworthy about Rima Fakih's coronation, but the stories about her in the national (and international) coverage bear closer attention. Whoever figures out how to put a name to the resonances that have eluded capture this week will help us better understand the way our religious and social anxieties shimmy across the stage – and in the news media.

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).