If he or she does not agree with us, he or she can go to hell. If she was educated in our secular system, she would have learned nothing whatsoever about theology, presuming that, if there is a God, he, or probably she, agrees with us. The problem is that her education is not as good as she thinks it is. We, who are presumed to be Republicans (because we are presumed to be stupid), complain that those who are better educated than us (and are therefore better than us) are part of an elite. She votes Democrat because she is well-educated. To be fair to her, she is basing her presumption on data that shows that those who are “well-educated” tend to vote for the Democrats whereas those who are less “educated” tend to vote Republican. If we were as well-educated as she, we would agree with her. This pompous “we,” who is presumably a she, presumes that anyone who disagrees with her is poorly educated, whereas she, of course, is well-educated. We, the average Joe, whoever we may be, are not as “well-educated” as the royal “we” driving the car in front of us. Clearly designed to offend other motorists, it is supremely supercilious and extremely arrogant. Let’s take the second bumper sticker first. I might even say that it taught me a valuable lesson, though not the lesson that my neighbor in the car in front of me meant to teach me. Many moons ago, for instance, I wrote “ The Wisdom and Wickedness of Women” in response to seeing a bumper sticker declaring that “Well Behaved Women Do Not Make History.” Recently, sitting in traffic, I saw this very same bumper sticker on the car in front of me, beside another which declared the following: “What you call the Liberal Elite, we call being well-educated.” The juxtaposition of these two stickers, carefully selected by the car’s owner to teach me a lesson, set me thinking. On more than one occasion my essays for The Imaginative Conservative have been inspired by bumper stickers. It is to believe that we have nothing to learn from the Great Conversation that has animated human discourse for three millennia. Today, to be “well-educated” is to be ignorant of theology, philosophy, history, and the great books of civilization.
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