I'M ON holiday with family in Europe, and I should be too busy relaxing to care about the health-care debate back in America. (After all, The Economist gives us quite decent insurance, thanks.) But "death panels" and "Steven Hawking would be euthanised in Britain" have given me a few thoughts that, since I haven't been obsessively following commentary stateside, I think might be somewhat new. (I'm sure I'm wrong.)

One is to note, as many have done, that famous paranoid strain in American politics. Why are Americans really willing to believe that Democrats are actually Nazis ready to euthanise the old and the weak, all under the clever guise of expanding (not eliminating) health care? Europeans, Americans' closest cultural cousins, do not seem prone to this kind of paranoid thinking.

I'm tempted to connect it to America's peculiar form of religiosity. Americans are not only devout; quite a few believe that an omnipresent God not only can but does hear every thought, and involves Himself in the most mundane things. A prayer to do well on a maths test, or that a parking ticket might be thrown out, is always worth a shot. When God answers, belief in Him is validated, and when He does not, it is also validated. It's up to mysterious God to decide when to show His hand.

Belief in a malign conspiracy may well draw on some of the same kind of thinking, once thinking this way is a habit. The conspiracy is everywhere. It is all-powerful, yet it cannot be seen. Evidence of its existence is seized eagerly. Lack of evidence is seized even more eagerly, to show just how powerful the conspiracy is—it can hide its tracks whenever it chooses. Can't find the death panels in the health-care bill? That's just what they want you to think. Experience of the conspiracy is faith-based and ecstatic; it grows in crowds, who share the exuberant experience. But it is also an emotional response to arcane texts. The bill is the anti-Bible. Everyone's heard of it, no one has really read it, it's far too complicated for the laity to understand anyway, and so trusted authorities will tell you what to think about it.

As Tocqueville, who inspired this blog's name, noted, America's religiosity has given it much of its strength. But I think it may also predispose many to believe the literally unbelievable.