In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni bemoans the ubiquity of unfounded belief in a piece called “True believers, all of us.” Criticizing Rick Perry’s Christian Prayerfest for its reliance on magical thinking, he adds that that thinking isn’t limited to religion:

Seeking relief from the country’s woes through a louder, more ardent appeal to God strikes us as too much hope invested in too magical a solution. It suspends disbelief and defies rigorous reason. But if we stick with this honesty thing, don’t we also have to admit that to varying degrees and with varying stakes, there’s magical thinking in secular life, and that it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers? Didn’t the debt-ceiling showdown show us that? . . . Faith-based is right. We all have our religions, all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now. And if yours isn’t a balanced-budget amendment and a government as lean as Christian Bale in one of his extreme-acting roles, it might well be a big fat binge of Keynesian stimulus spending. Liberals think magically, too, becoming so attached to a certain approach that they wind up advocating it less as option than as panacea.

He goes on to criticize the Head Start project (which according to a recent study produced few benefits for its participants), the policies of corporations, and even the reliance of baseball on statistics—the new “sabermetrics” approach.

Bruni’s right to decry policies enacted without supporting evidence, as well as their persistence in the face of counterevidence. Those are, of course, aspects of religion. But one can’t claim that every government policy is a complete shot in the dark. Medicare, of course, was enacted that way, as well as Obamacare, but in such cases we rely on reasoned judgment, and the odds are that giving medical care to people who lack it will help them. Whether alternative policies might provide better care is, of course, another question, but we can’t simply enact one big policy after another and then judge their results post facto.

But at least Bruni admits that religion is useless in the financial crisis we face now:

To get us out of this mess, we need a full range of extant remedies, a tireless search for new ones and the nimbleness and open-mindedness to evaluate progress dispassionately and adapt our strategy accordingly. Faith and prayer just won’t cut it. In fact, they’ll get in the way.