How politics hijacked science and religion

This is precisely what is happening across American society. As Americans self-segregate into red and blue neighborhoods, workplaces, friend groups, and media silos, conservatives and progressives are both succumbing at an increasing rate to the ideological temptation of laying everything wrong with the country at the door of a single group of people — in this case, one another. Partisans on each side see everything they don’t like as something laced with the poison of their opponents’ politics: “The problem with this country is that Democrats/Republicans [pick one] are in it.” Things as important as religion and science, with all their particularities, have to be subsumed under the regnant idea of each ideological faction, from which political ideologues derive the meaning and moral categories governing their lives. And so, the agnostic Republican sides with religion, believing religion to be conservative, and the Democrat with not a modicum of scientific knowledge preens about “the scientific consensus,” believing the scientific method itself to be inherently progressive. As politically engaged Americans have settled on the idea that our political opponents are the source of all our ills, every square inch of American life, including science and religion, has been claimed as either red or blue. But this was not inevitable. The “tranquil moods and peaceable times” Coleridge wrote of are always available to us if we want to pursue them. To regain them, we have only to make peace with the fact that we are limited creatures abroad in a world of boundless multiplicity that cannot be corralled either by ourselves or by our enemies into the claustrophobic confines of a single idea.