A curious op-ed piece by Stacy Schiff on truth in a faith-based culture, be it of the religious or secular variety.

An excerpt:

More than 60 percent of the American people don't trust the press. Why should they? They've been reading "The Da Vinci Code" and marveling at its historical insights. I have nothing against a fine thriller, especially one that claims the highest of literary honors: it's a movie on the page. But "The Da Vinci Code" is not a work of nonfiction. If one more person talks to me about Dan Brown's crackerjack research I'm shooting on sight.

The novel's success does point up something critical. We're happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance religious conspiracy theory than to examine the historical fiction we're living (and dying for) today. And not only is it remarkably easy to believe what we want to believe. It's remarkably easy to find someone who will back us up. Twenty-five years ago George W. S. Trow meditated on this in "Within the Context of No Context." Then it indeed appeared that authority and orthodoxy were wilting in the glare of television. Have we exterminated reason in the meantime? ...

... Facts seem important. Facts have gravitas. But the illusion of facts will suffice. One in three Americans still believes there were W.M.D.'s in Iraq.

And that's the way it is.

My perspective is that "truth," for many people, is what they choose to believe.

Faith offers an answer in the fact of demonstrable facts that tend to contradict the faithful one's beliefs. In fact, holding onto one's faith despite a mountain of contradictory evidence is a perverse sign of the strength of one's faith.

I went to a U of T political seminar this past winter at which two former U.S. congressmen were speaking.

My questions to them were this: "Why do so many American voters appear to be appallingly ignorant, and why does the benefit of that ignorance accrue mainly to the Republican Party?"

Interestingly, neither one denied it.

One, a Democrat, chalked it up to cosmopolitanism. People from the major cities on the coasts are more comfortable with multiculturalism and people from different backgrounds.

In the heartland (aka 'flyover') states that tend to support Bush, you have religious, patriotic people who are deferential to authority and who don't have very many sources of information to them.

And if they hear on the tractor radio that Eye-Rak has WMDs, well, then it's good enough for them.

That may be the way it is, but it's scary.