By

When I was a kid — I was about 12 I think — and relatively new to atheism and its social burdens, I had a little run-in with a sincerely religious classmate. He simply would not believe that my non-belief in religion was even possible. He was sure I was lying or being provocative for the hell of it. As a test, he pulled out a little picture of his favorite god from his wallet, and dared me to tear it up. I did, and he was suitably shocked. After a moment of stunned speechlessness, he said something weak, like “err… oh wow!”

I was reminded of this little episode when a little clip from CNN did the rounds a couple of days back. It features a religious conservative being visibly stunned speechless by the revelation that you do not need to swear on the Bible to assume an elected office in the United States. Ted Crockett really appeared to believe that a Muslim politician could not hold office because “You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America…a Muslim cannot do that, ethically, swearing on the Bible.”

Like my old schoolmate, this guy was genuinely shocked to learn he was wrong in a fairly trivial way. Unlike my old schoolmate, however, we’re not talking about a 12-year old boy. We’re talking about a man who appears to be in his late fifties or sixties, and has held an elected office.

Like many others, once I was done chuckling, I found myself wondering: how is it even possible to arrive at, and hold, this particular sort of bizarre false belief, about swearing-in ceremonies being necessarily tied to the Bible in a non-theocratic state?

The belief is not a trivial sort of false belief. It’s what computer scientists call an abstraction leak, like the deja vu moment in The Matrix that reveals a glitch in the simulation. A low-level, seemingly minor phenomenon that is not explainable within the reality in which it is experienced.

The belief strikes a secular imagination as more than just false. It seems not even wrong. It’s an unnatural sort of false belief that doesn’t lend itself to an obvious explanation. So to understand it, we have to ask, in what sort of reality would this be a natural kind of false belief?

Let’s establish just how surprising this little episode actually is, in a non-theocratic political context.

It is easy to imagine a conservative Christian politician believing that all elected officials should swear on the Bible.

That is not what happened here.

It’s easy to imagine a paranoid ethnonationalist believing that all Muslims want to impose Sharia on the rest of us and therefore should not be allowed to hold office, if they’re allowed into the country at all.

That is also not what happened here.

I can even imagine not knowing the specifics of prescribed swearing-in procedures (I don’t), but that kind of ignorance isn’t enough for this kind of mistake to be natural. We all participate in a million mindless little ceremonial rituals of various degrees of sacredness to different kinds of participants, and we don’t generally hold weird false beliefs about them, despite not being experts in matters of priestly detail.

This is not a question of unusual ignorance about a ceremony.

Nor is this mere stupidity, or ignorance of the principle of separation of church and state, or failure to correctly infer the implications of the principle.

In fact, earlier in the interview, Ted Crockett (the spokesman) spars briefly with Jake Tapper (the anchor) on precisely that subject, and seems unfazed by it. He’s at least heard the phrase. It just doesn’t fit into his belief system the way it does in Tapper’s:

TAPPER: Does [Roy Moore] believe that the Christian Bible should be the law of the United States of American

CROCKETT: This country was founded on the Christian Bible…[elaborate run-on assertion about English mosaic law and old and new testaments]

TAPPER: This country has a separation of church and state and we have laws that are not rooted in the Christian Bible

CROCKETT: You don’t understand…

TAPPER: I think I understand…

CROCKETT: You don’t understand…

TAPPER: Here’s my question…

CROCKETT: You do not understand…

TAPPER: Here’s my question for you…

[predictable exchange on homosexuality]

CROCKETT: …You people want to to take the whole… 2 or 3 thousand years of history and y’all just want to throw it out the window as if you’re going to make your own rules, your own man-made rules, and do whatever you want…

What this exchange reveals is clear: Crockett is aware of the relevant political context. He simply does not recognize the primacy of secular constitutional authority over religious authority, and in fact believes the reverse pecking order holds. And this isn’t a contingent, what-if belief about a hoped-for religious social order. It’s the foundation of his active reasoning about the prevailing social order.

He has a coherent — to him — account of secular constitutional authority flowing from religious authority. An account within which the separation principle is to him a minor matter of operating procedure, not a basic axiom.

Now for the part of the exchange that went viral:

TAPPER: Judge Moore has also said that he doesn’t think a Muslim member of Congress should be allowed to be in Congress. Why? Under what provision of the Constitution?

CROCKETT: Because you have to swear on the Bible — when you are before — I had to do it. I’m an elected official, three terms, I had to swear on a Bible. You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America. He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that, ethically, swearing on the Bible.

TAPPER: You don’t actually have to swear on a Christian Bible, you can swear on anything, really. I don’t know if you knew that. You can swear on a Jewish Bible.

CROCKETT: Oh no. I swore on the Bible. I’ve done it three times.

TAPPER: I’m sure you have, I’m sure you’ve picked a Bible but the law is not that you have to swear on a Christian Bible. That is not the law. You don’t know that? All right. Ted Crockett with the Moore —

CROCKETT: I don’t know. I know that Donald Trump did it when he — when we made him President.

To an irreligious mind like mine, or even a socially religious mind, this sounds completely insane. How do you even get to that kind of argument? And it’s not a joke. It’s not a troll. He’s not hoping to bluff his way through with a belief he does not actually hold. It’s not a belief about an abstract ideological position.

He appears to actually believe it. It does not occur to him that a hostile television journalist with an opposed ideological bias might challenge him on that particular point (or he’d have been more prepared to counter it).

Because he is simply not even aware that it’s a weak belief, open to attack, let alone a demonstrably false one.

Secular versus Religious Induction

To understand what happened here, consider what it takes to reason from an ordinary, low-grade knowledge of the law (say half-remembered high school civics where you scored a C grade) to the conclusion that a Muslim would have an issue with the swearing-in ceremony because the Bible is necessarily a part of it.

Clearly you’d have to answer the question, “How would a practicing Muslim be sworn in?” with “using a Bible” before you even get to a potential conflict.

The secular among us would guess “using a Koran.” We’d never even get to the apparent conflict. It’s a simple problem in inductive reasoning starting from the axiom of separation of church and state, and the principle of freedom of religion.

With an ordinary amount of data about how political processes work and minimal general knowledge of the sacred books of various religions, you’d get to “any book or object that is sacred to the oath taker will do, so a Muslim would likely choose the Koran.” The whole chain of reasoning would be almost subconscious.

The folk-legal theory intuited by a secular imagination is that the process is designed to let people import ritual significance into a ceremony from their private sacred belief system, whatever that might be. The ceremony has some signaling utility among true believers, and is harmless theater if non-believers go through the motions.

But if you are sincerely religious, your first axiom is that your book is objectively special. Not just an ordinary thing of special subjective significance to you. Its role is not empty and ceremonial. It’s not just an equal member of some largely interchangeable set of books. For Crockett, replacing the Bible with the Koran in a process changes the meaning of the process as surely as replacing gold with plastic in a piece of jewelry changes its objective market value. It’s a kind of assumed-universal functional fixedness.

My classmate in childhood made the same mistake. He assumed his picture I tore up casually had objective significance for all, a sort of magical religious property that would exercise its power over me whether or not I chose to believe in it. To me it was just another piece of paper.

This explains the glitch in the matrix that Crockett experienced. What to a secular imagination is a trivial matter of inductive extension within a set of similar objects (the set of sacred religious texts) would be a category error for a theocratic mind. The Bible is sui generis. Other religious texts live in a different mental filing cabinet. To even contemplate substituting another text for it as a source of religious authority requires a reboot and reification, and a different, meta way of thinking about the ceremony.

For Crockett, the Bible is the active source of sanctity from which the swearing-in process derives its fundamental authority. Crockett’s earlier reference to “you’re going to make your own rules, your own man-made rules” clearly reveals this belief structure. The presence of the Bible in the “man-made rules” is not an arbitrary thing, but essential to the idea of constitutional authority somehow flowing from religious authority.

To him, the human constitution is a secondary source of authority. Note that we don’t require him to be particularly devout, or a good Christian, or a saint. The quality of his adherence to his faith is not relevant, only its existence. We just need to assume his religiosity is not fake, and the false belief makes sense.

A different example might clarify this. You don’t need to assume I’m a racecar driver to infer that I drive on the right side of the road in the US by instinct. If you saw someone drive on the left side in the US, you’d assume they’re coming from a left-side-driving country. It’s not a bad-driver mistake or a doesn’t-know-traffic-rules mistake. It’s a glitch-in-the-matrix mistake. An abstraction leak. One caused by inhabiting a subjective reality that does not match objective reality in some critical ways that you haven’t yet noticed.

Crockett’s use of confirmatory evidence is revealing. He cites his own 3 experiences of being sworn in with a Bible. He cites Donald Trump being sworn in with a Bible. His data set lacks disconfirmatory evidence, and like most humans, it is not instinctive for him to seek it out. So faced with a belief falsification, he just piles on the irrelevant confirmatory evidence.

That part is human. You and I would instinctively do that too if one of our basic low-level beliefs were suddenly undermined. In the driving example, if I’m driving with left-hand-drive instincts in a right-hand-drive country, and see a car oncoming, I’d instinctively swerve to the left and expect the oncoming car to swerve to its left, and a collision would occur.

Programmed beliefs are hard to resist.

I imagine that to Crockett, separation of church and state is a little Santa Claus lie (“Of course the constitution is real kid!”) you tell naive little atheist children who “don’t get it”, as he repeatedly asserts. From his point of view, Tapper is missing something completely obvious, and perversely pretending Santa Claus is real.

Of course constitutional authority flows from Biblical authority. Of course we drive on the left side of the road in the US. You don’t get it.

CRASHHH!

Reasoning from Certainty

Stepping back, the characteristic feature of the theocratic mind is that it reasons from subjective certainty (on the validity of a text in this case) as a starting point. Start with what you viscerally feel to be the most true things you know, and then tackle the problem of forming beliefs about new, uncertain, or ambiguous matters.

To reason from constitutional authority to the principle of subjective choice in what text to swear on is not just an alternate theology. It is a different kind of reasoning.

For most of us, belief in the constitution is not a matter of religious faith, but a sort of pragmatic and contingent acceptance of a piece of human reasoning that is open to critical scrutiny. The principle of separation of church and state is not a secular-religious axiom but a political science proposition we are capable of bracketing and debating (not necessarily well, but without undue reverence).

There are of course constitutional originalists to whom the constitution has religious sanctity and the founding fathers the status of apostles, but that’s a different matter. Most of us don’t relate to constitutions that way.

The theocratic mindset reasons from certainty to uncertainty. The secular mindset reasons from contingent belief to contingent belief.

Reasoning from certainty is actually a very odd and fragile mindset that can only exist under conditions of extreme isolation, coupled with uncritical belief in the validity of a textual source over empirical experience.

All humans suck at seeking out disconfirmatory evidence, and none of us deal particularly well with it. But most of us have experienced it. It takes living in a protected Alabama bubble, an escaped reality, to make this sort of mistake. And it takes theocratic cognitive foundations in a book.

Most of us can think of one or more experiences of having a sense of absolute, visceral certainty being invalidated by an inconvenient and undeniable fact. I called this an UnAha experience in a really old (2008) post, The UnAha! Experience.

Your particular set of UnAha experiences may not include mathematical counterexamples like mine, but I bet you’ve had several experiences of a subjective mental bubble of absolute, visceral certainty being popped. And I bet you have examples both trivial and deep. In some cases you probably figured out why you were so certain but wrong (“Oh, I thought I was facing north, not south, that’s why I was sure we had to turn left here” or “Oh, I forgot we drive on the left side here”), and in other cases you probably never quite figured it out.

Whatever your particular set of UnAha experiences, it likely left you primed to not entirely trust reasoning from certainty, particularly from textual certainty. It’s easy, it’s quick, it feel solid, it feels reassuring. After all you start on firm ground, you build stable inference structures based on internal logic, you ought to get to equally stable new ground.

What could possibly go wrong?

It takes a few painful certainty crashes to learn the answer to that question.

In a way, I have a certain amount of sympathy for Ted Crockett. His crash was genuine, which means the underlying belief structure is at least sincere.