Maybe Read a Book Before You Vote

Or at least listen to someone who has. American politics has developed a peculiar intellectual problem. We have become extraordinarily certain about things we know almost nothing about. This is not particularly a Republican problem or a Democratic one. In fact, one of the few remaining areas of genuine bipartisan achievement is our ability to reach sweeping conclusions without doing the tedious work of understanding the subjects underneath them. Consider religion in American history, where the left and right have camped out with strong political conclusions. The conservative version says America was founded as a Christian nation. There is enough truth in that sentence to make it wonderfully misleading. Europe was Christian. Colonial America was overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity. Many of its settlers were Christians. But quite a few of them had also left Christian Europe with little love lost. Some were the wrong kind of Christians. Some were religious zealots. Some belonged to…