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At the end of a New Yorker article by Frank Rich analyzing the 2012 election the last sentence said this: “If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can.” (New Yorker, 11/9/12).

That line made reading the entire piece worthwhile, though it is an excellent read anyway. It captures both the hope for our nation and the despair any honest observer of the state of our politics has to feel. Truth is always the hope of a decent and civil society. We rely on it in our courts, in our news reporting, in our churches, in our schools, and in our politics. We Americans believe the truth will finally come out whatever the situation. It may be slow, and sometimes appears to have no chance of surviving, but we still believe it will win the day. As a good friend emailed after the election, “Sometimes the truth wins despite all odds and idiots.”

That, of course, was her perspective on the outcome of this election, but had Romney won, someone on that side might have written the same thing. That is because whatever our political persuasion, all of us want to believe truth prevails. And there is good reason to believe it does. More than a few of the high and mighty have been brought low because truth would not go away.

But the enduring power of truth depends on the value people place in it, and that is what worries me. Ask just about anyone if they value truth and they will say Yes. But ask them if they believe evolution is a fact, that the earth is billions of years old, that global warming is real, that eco-balance is necessary for our own survival, that different religions give expression to a common yearning for meaning and purpose, that education should equip students to think critically for themselves, and in many instances they will chose ideology and dogma over truth.

For this reason I don’t believe falsehood is the real enemy of truth. Anti-intellectualism is. I say this because it is an assault on the value of truth itself. Anti-intellectualism means being hostile towards the intellect and intellectual pursuits, commonly expressed in a suspicion of education, philosophy, science, theology, and of everyone who dares to trust in human reason. We see anti-intellectualism in state text book fights such as Texas, Arizona, Kansas, and other states, and teachers being disciplined or dismissed for objectionable assignments thought to be part of some liberal conspiracy to indoctrinate them. High school teacher Shelley Evans-Marshall was fired from the Academy for Excellence in Pontiac, Michigan when parents complained that it was inappropriate for her to ask students in an upper-level language arts class to write an essay about censorship. Part of their work was to review the American Library Association’s list of “100 most frequently challenged books.” The list included three classics: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Sadly, churches have often been a center of anti-intellectualism where critical thinking is considered an enemy of faith. Turning the Genesis account of creation into science is a prime example of anti-intellectualism. Scholars who teach it for the theological statement it represents have been derided as “intellectuals” or “scholars who don’t teach the Bible.” Some second career adults entering seminary have been warned by their home churches “not to let them destroy your faith.” The great divide within Christianity today is grounded in the difference between churches that believe in critical thinking and those who don’t.

The same is true with the nation politically. Some people refuse to let facts get in the way of their opinions, like the woman in California who used the N-word in referring to President Obama after his re-election on FaceBook, then astonishingly protested when she was criticized by saying, “…apparently a lot of people in Sacramento think I’m…racist. WOW is all I got to say!! I’m not racist…just simply stating my opinion.”

It is easy to dismiss this kind of intellectual poverty as fringe, but I have to wonder if it really is. The one thing I do know is that people who have good minds are as essential to a civil and moral society as people with good hearts. When we believe thinking is a bad thing, the value we place in truth is diminished. And in that kind of environment there is little chance truth can ever command a mandate.