I doubt there are very many people who would think it was a good idea to add trial lawyers to the mix of pain and suffering in Newtown, Connecticut. But I find myself hoping there will be at least one good litigator on the scene in the coming months.

Twenty dead first graders, gunned down by a mentally unstable boy in a young man’s body: this is a scene both too common in America and worse than any like it in my lifetime.  I live 2700 miles away, and yet when I dropped my two fifth-graders off at school this morning, the thought crossed my mind.

“I might never see Ben and Sam again.”

“Oh, Dear God,” I prayed. “It could happen as easily here as in Connecticut. Those dead kids could be my sons. The sorrow those families feel could be ours. “  On my short drive home, I cried for the dead in Newtown, and for the fear of mayhem coming to my boys. And prayed for it to never happen again.

And that’s when I thought of the trial lawyer.

I don’t want anyone to sue the school district. That principal died trying to protect those kids, and so did those teachers.  They did their professional best, and then went beyond, laying down their lives for the kids they loved. Their survivors do not deserve to be hauled into court.

No, the trial lawyer I am praying for will sue the estates of Adam and Nancy Lanza. Adam for doing the shooting, and Nancy for giving him the means.

Nancy Lanza collected guns. She taught Adam how to shoot them.  She did both of these things knowing that Adam had mental health problems.  Whether she ever had an inkling he could be a mass murderer, I don’t know.  But she made crucial decisions that opened the door to what he did.  If she had used better judgment about whether to have guns in her house, those little kids and their teachers would still be with us.

By all the accounts I have read so far, Nancy Lanza was not an evil person. After her divorce she was left on her own to care for Adam.  I assume she did the best she knew how as a mom. So why am I so keen that her estate be sued? Why can’t I just let her rest in peace as one of her son’ victims?

Because Nancy made choices that cost other people their lives, and her choices were reckless of the danger she was putting other people in. When she decided whether to buy another gun, she took into account the gun’s monetary cost on one hand, and on the other the enjoyment she would have adding to her collection. But she did not take into account the costs she was imposing on her neighbors.

The biggest of those costs was the chance that her guns might fall into the wrong hands at the wrong time and be used to kill someone.  Whether Nancy recognized her son as a threat or not, she knew that there are people in every community who cannot be trusted with guns.  If she handled her guns, or stored them, in a way that made it possible for an unbalanced person to get to them, then she ought to be liable for the consequences.

We do something very similar to this in our law of attractive nuisance.  If a family puts in their backyard something as innocent and fun as a swimming pool, but leaves the yard inadequately fenced, or the gate open, and a neighbor’s child gets in and drowns, the pool owners are liable.  It’s not that there’s anything wrong with having a pool.  It’s only that, when you put in a pool, you have to take other people into account. And specifically, you have to understand that children find pools irresistible. Their parents cannot keep constant vigilance.  Kids elude our supervision every day for long enough to escape our yards and enter others’. So the law says that if you put something on your property which will foreseeably attract kids, you are liable for what happens to them unless you’ve taken reasonable precautions to keep them out — like a fence designed to prevent kids from climbing over it.

We have no problem with you owning a pool. But we do not let you make your neighbors pay for your pool with the lives of their children.

The same thing should apply to guns.  There are people in our world who are attracted to guns, who would find them as attractive as a pool is to a grade schooler.  If you put guns where these people can get them, you have to expect that sooner or later they will get them.

Maybe there was a day when foreseeing your gun would be taken didn’t automatically imply the gun would be used to kill first graders (or anyone else).  But we are well past that day now. Adam Lanza is only the latest in a long series of killers who used other people’s guns.  We are no longer surprised to learn of another random mass shooting, or another tortured soul targeting someone they blame for their pain. If your gun is taken from you, you no longer can be surprised that it was used for evil.

That ought to make you liable for what happens when your gun is taken by another. You are the one who could have done something about it, by being more careful with your guns, or by not owning them in the first place. It’s your job to see that your guns do not fall into the hands of a killer, and you should be strictly liable for the consequences.

You don’t get to leave that job to a school principal under fire, or a teacher desperately defending her first graders.

I want every gun owner on notice: you can own a gun. The Second Amendment guarantees that.  But you cannot make your neighbors pay for it. If someone else gets your gun, and kills with it, you will be held liable.

I am hoping there is a good trial lawyer in Connecticut who can bring the lesson home.

This fall I ran another one.  It was gorgeous, perfectly calibrated to be fun even if the election got lopsided.  It was fun.  We had 25 participants.

I came in 22^nd.

There were a dozen students in the contest, kids about 20 years old.  All but one of them beat me.   There were eight other faculty or staff in the contest. All but one of them beat me.     There were four others (alums, etc.) in the contest.  All but one of them beat me.

I stank, especially for someone who is supposed to have some expertise in the subject of politics. Why?

I didn’t stink because I lacked information. I had access to the best political web sites and columnists, and read widely in them, all along the political spectrum (except the extremes on either end).  I read the quantitative sites and the more seat-of-the-pants gut-feeling sites.  I knew who Nate Silver was when he was still an obscure baseball stats guru.

I didn’t stink because I’m stupid.  I am stupid, maybe, about a lot of things, but I have some evidence that I am smarter than a lot of other people. Exhibit A: I’m married to Melanie, and no one else is, even though they all had the first 28 years of her life to lock her up before I came into her picture. Exhibit B: I have been given 28 straight one-year contracts to teach at George Fox, each year a separate decision by a series of deans and provosts that “Yes, we want to keep this guy.”  Exhibit C:  Except for one year as an expansion team, I have never had a losing record in a fantasy baseball league in twenty seasons of competition mostly against people with PhDs.  Exhibit D:  There has only been one day in my entire life that I have lost at a game of Boggle. If that doesn’t give me enough not-stupid credentials, I can come up with some more.

But I stank this time around in the prognostication contest. And Sam Miller – a guy about whom someday I will say I knew who he was when he was still an obscure baseball columnist – explains why in his column for today.

Miller did a little study of predictions made in the offseason by collections of anonymous baseball executives and scouts, generally certifiably smart people.  He discovered that their ability to see the future was almost imperceptibly better than picking predictions at random.  Instead of getting coin-flip prediction right 50% of the time, they them right 52% of the time.  On multiple choice questions on which they had an average of a 26% chance of getting the predictions right, these experts got 30% right.  Most of the time – 96 – 98% of the time – they didn’t know anything that made a difference in their predictions!

Miller explained how this could be so:

I think there are two possible ways of explaining this low success rate. One is based on the work of Philip Tetlock, who spent 20 years studying thousands and thousands of pundit predictions. He concluded that expert pundits are barely more predictive than random chance.

First, as the skeptics warned, when hordes of pundits are jostling for the limelight, many are tempted to claim that they know more than they do. Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers.

…(B)ecause they self-identify as experts, they naturally view and present themselves as more certain than they should. It might also be the case that it is more satisfying to have an interesting opinion … than a conservative but accurate opinion.  (Emphasis added.)

What good would it have been for me to just parrot Nate Silver and predict a 303-235 Obama win in the Electoral College?  I wanted to have insight, something I made on my own, not just picked up off the floor while wandering the internet.  So I worked harder, found an item here, a fact there, a flaw in Silver’s analysis of 2010. I collected explanations for discrepancies between state polls and national ones – Silver’s own explanations, of course, but many others.

I put my pieces together, and saw a surge for Romney just beneath the surface of the numbers. I picked Romney to win 283-255.

Instead he lost.  And so did I, to a bunch of people, mostly students, who are happy to win even without a special dollop of contrarian brilliance.  And, as Miller points out, that’s the way to succeed in a market environment, where there are a lot of people who have an interest in supplying good information competing for the attention of other people who have an interest in getting good information.  The best information “is publicly available and gets priced into our expectations.”

Once that happens, it is very hard for one person to add value. I have to remember this in the future: it is very hard, or even impossible, to do better analysis than is done by a marketplace, including a marketplace of ideas.  As Miller says,

a team that puts too much faith in its own predictions might be falling into a trap. So don’t feel bad if you’re bad at it. It’s not your fault. It’s baseball’s fault.

Or, more accurately, it’s the fault of Whoever set things up so that markets arise to process widely distributed information.

That makes me feel a lot better.

The day I heard it I was visiting a new orthodontist. His face was alight, his eagerness to apply all his talents to my messed up teeth all too obvious.  I was going to give him things to talk about with his colleagues for years.

I went to a different orthodontist to get my care. I found someone who wasn’t so excited about the train wreck in my mouth.

So I will certainly understand if some of you are put off by what I am about to say, but here goes anyway:  2012 may be a political scientist’s dream come true.

I realized this today when I noticed how close we are to a 269-269 tie in the electoral vote for president.  I am running a prognostication contest here at George Fox where people have to predict which presidential candidate will win in each state.  We had to get all our predictions in before the first presidential debate, and then with each debate we get a chance to change our prediction in one state.

After I “fixed” my prediction in Wisconsin yesterday (switching it from Romney to Obama), my prognostications work out to a 275 – 263 win for Obama.  But if next week I switch my prediction in Nevada from Obama to Romney, my total comes out to 269-269.

The polls are close in Nevada, so close that most analysts rate the state a toss-up.   Nate Silver, the election-prediction guru for the New York Times who missed his prognostications in 2008 by only one state, has Nevada rated as the most likely state where one person’s vote could decide the election.  He rates the chances of an electoral vote tie at only about 1 in 100, but that is higher than some other possible outcomes.

And it’s high enough to get me a little bit excited.

Wouldn’t it be fun, from a political science point of view, to have a tie? In our own lifetime?  You’d probably have recounts, in an election that close, so we could have Florida in 2000 all over again, maybe in multiple places.

And then you’d have the intense pressure on the electors, as each campaign tried to cement their electors in place and probe the other side’s for potential “faithless electors” who might switch their vote. The temptation would be huge on the part of an elector to sell his vote to the highest bidder. I don’t mean this in the Rod Blagojevich sense of personal gain, although Illinois will send 20 electors to the Electoral College. I mean in the slightly more public-spirited sense of extracting some policy concession in exchange for a switch (or for not switching).

And if there were no faithless electors (which I think is a relatively low-probability outcome!) or if they balanced each other out, then you’d have the ultimate scenario of a presidential election decided in the House of Representatives.

And, as an added attraction, you’d have the Senate picking a vice president.  And there’d be a decent chance that the House would pick Romney for President and the Senate would pick Biden for Vice-President.  And if the House struggled with its process past Inauguration Day, and the Senate got its work done first, Biden could end up serving as President until the House got its work done.

The spectacle would be absolutely riveting!  It would be better than the tightest World Series, and could last for three or four months!

What a fascinating case to get to observe first hand.  I’d hate to miss it.

I am trying not to pray for a tie. I know lots of people would see it as a disaster.

I know God prefers me to love my neighbors and not to pray for things selfishly.  But, still…

I agree with most of what they say, but I think they, like many scholars who write on religion and the founding, err by focusing on the views of a few unrepresentative elites.

Consider for a moment the background and experiences of these founders.  Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were southern Anglican plantation owners.  Hamilton was born and raised in the British West Indies, and in an era when few people traveled internationally, Jefferson and John Adams spent significant time in Europe.  Franklin lived most of the last thirty-five years of his life in Britain and France.  As adults, Franklin and Hamilton were nominal Anglicans, which means five of these six founders (83%) were Episcopalians (compared to 16% of all Americans in that era).  Although 50 to 75 percent of Americans in the founding era may be reasonably classified as Calvinists, only one founder regularly referred to in these discussions worshiped at a Calvinist church—and John Adams is not a particularly good representative of this theological tradition.

True, Noll and Marsden call these folks “major” founders, but it is easy to slip from a focus on a few to the views of many (e.g. “The God of the founding fathers was a benevolent deity, not far removed from the God of eighteenth-century Deists…” Search for Christian America, 73).  They always note that “some” founders were orthodox, but I would suggest this is as misleading as noting that “some” African Americans are Democrats.

I am not prepared to argue that many founders should be called “evangelical,” but how about Calvinists?  If we expand range of founders to include folks like  Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, Eliphalet Dyer, Oliver Ellsworth, Matthew Griswold, John Hancock, Benjamin Huntington, Samuel Huntington, Thomas McKean, William Paterson, Tapping Reeve, Jesse Root, Roger Sherman, John Treadwell, Jonathan Trumbull, William Williams, John Witherspoon, Oliver Wolcott, and Robert Yates, we get a very different impression of the founding generation (including folks like Roger Sherman who were key players in crafting America’s founding documents (unlike many, but not all, of the more famous founders).

And of course non-Calvinists can be good Christians too (e.g. John Jay, Patrick Henry, Henry Laurens).

Again, I agree with most of the video clip.  I just want to make sure we don’t limit discussion of America’s founders to a few unrepresentative elites.

Mark David Hall

“In an interview with the Des Moines Register, Romney seemed to back away from his antiabortion position, suggesting that he would not actively pursue legislation that would outlaw abortions, a key objective among social conservatives.

“There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” Romney told the paper’s editorial board.”

Social conservatives have always been a bit suspicious of Romney on this point, and they may have reason to be concerned.  But not by this recent admission.

In light of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, there is little hope that any legislation can make a serious dent in the number of abortions performed in America every year.

As far as this pro-life (but not single issue) voter is concerned, as long as Romney appoints another Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, or Alito to the United States Supreme Court, I will be satisfied.

MH

So I empathize totally with Barack Obama.

Yesterday when I was supposed to be grading (actually, I was grading! Just taking a break…) I ran across this article on the London Daily Mail’s MailOnline site.  Toby Harnden describes Obama has having trouble focusing on his debate preparation homework in the days leading up to last week’s fateful encounter with Mitt Romney. His staff had taken him off to Henderson, Nevada, away from the media and the demands of office, so he could put in a couple of days’ serious preparation undistracted.

But Obama still got distracted. (Oh, yes, I know how easy it is.) Harnden quotes an unnamed Democrat “close to the campaign”:

President Obama made it clear he wanted to be doing anything else – anything – but debate prep,’ the Democrat said. ‘He kept breaking off whenever he got the opportunity and never really focused on the event.

What could POSSIBLY be distracting in Henderson, Nevada?  Among other things, Hoover Dam, sitting there only 20 miles away!

According to Harndon, on the day before the debate a staff member mentioned that Hoover Dam was nearby.  Obama decided he’d take another break from debate prep and visit the Dam. He’d never seen it, and this was his chance.

After all, his schedule that day only had one thing on it.

Here I am again. I have grading to do. The same grading I had to do yesterday when I was reading about Obama’s Hoover Dam road trip.  Now I am writing about it.  So I am definitely not saying I am any better than Obama when it comes to buckling down and getting the hard work done.

But is it possible that the story of Obama’s indiscipline on the day before the debate is more damaging to him than his lackluster performance in the debate?

I watched the debate with about 50 other people at George Fox, preparing to be on a faculty panel afterwards.  I wasn’t sure I could believe my eyes. At several points Obama seemed to be caught entirely off guard when Romney said perfectly predictable things — like Romney’s promise not to permit a tax cut to add to the deficit; his explanation that his tax cuts would actually reduce the deficit because  a) he would set them off against eliminated deductions, and b) the economy would resume growing; or his promise to make sure the rich did not pay a lesser share of the tax burden than they do now.  These are obvious comments, anyone who had listened to Romney could see them coming. But Obama clearly could not believe his ears. And he had no response.

But anyone could be caught flat-footed if they just made some poor assumptions in preparing for the debate.  Did Obama believe his own campaign ads a little too much? Well, at least he was being consistent!  It was embarrassing for him, I thought, and a bit of a black eye for his debate coaches, but not really a big deal. So while I mentioned Obama’s seeming surprise in my remarks to the GF students after the debate, I did not dwell on the topic.

But now it turns out that it wasn’t just poor work by Obama’s debate coaches. It was also Obama goofing off when he was supposed to be doing his homework.

A day or two ago Obama urged his supporters to be obsessive about campaigning right up through election day. Harnden has a photo of Obama sightseeing at Hoover Dam, playing hooky from debate prep — is that what he means by “obsessing” over the campaign?

People can forgive having a bad day at the debate podium. Can they forgive it as readily when the bad day was the result of lack of discipline the day before? Will Obama buckle down to the task now that he’s had a taste of the costs of distraction? And even if he does, will he be able to erase the image of a man with important work to do who can’t always get serious about getting it done?

Which reminds me: I have some grading to do. Somewhere around here.

Toobin has a First Amendment right to define judicial activism however he wants, but he is being disingenuous.  “Judicial activism” generally has a negative connotation.  When is the last time you heard a Supreme Court Justice proudly proclaim “I am a judicial activist!”?

Courts, including the Supreme Court, play an important role in our constitutional system that includes checks and balances.  When democratically elected branches of government violate the Constitution, Justices have an obligation to declare their actions void.  This should not be called “activism,” it should be called “doing their job.”

I was saddened to learn that former federal tax court judge, Nixon administration official and president and CEO of the World Wildlife Federation Russell Train died last week at the age of 92.

No, none of those job titles are typos.  And yes, he was a member of Nixon’s party as well as his administration.

In this era of fractious political disagreements—disagreements that threaten to create an ever-widening chasm in place of the historically fertile grounds of compromise—it is easy to forget that men like Russell Train once existed.  Train’s interest in environmentalism stemmed from his experiences on African safari in the 1950s and grew to encompass a strong conservationist ethic.  Channeling the gospels of efficiency and expertise that characterized his Progressive Republican forebears, Train began by helping to create the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, charged with training postcolonial Africans to professionally manage their wildlife resources; by 1965 he felt sufficiently committed to the conservationist cause to resign his position as a judge and become head of the Conservation Foundation.  As his biographer Brooks Flippen put it, “He did not share the attire—or the youth—of many of the new environmentalists but, like them, questioned traditional assumptions.  He may not have recognized it at the time but he stood at the fore of a revolution in American attitudes.”[1]

Train believed in conservation; he was also profoundly pragmatic.  Placed in charge of a transition team researching environmental policy, Train discovered he’d been seated next to the incoming president at a dinner a few days before Nixon’s inauguration.  He seized his opportunity to make a case for the environment in terms he knew Nixon would find compelling.  “I knew I couldn’t talk him into becoming an instant environmentalist,” Train recollected, “but it seemed entirely possible that he could become an effective proponent of environmental programs if it seemed to him good politics to do so.  I have never for a moment doubted the wisdom of that decision.”  Train spoke of how environmental issues touched a broad spectrum of the electorate, about how they could serve as a unifying issue in their era’s fractious political climate.  “Quality of life” issues, he convinced the new president, were important—and politically advantageous.[2]

The years of the Nixon administration, then, were also the years of the Clean Air and Water Acts, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and governmental cooperation in observation of the first Earth Day.  Train worked in the administration as Under Secretary of the Interior, in the executive office and then as head of the Environmental Policy Agency, a role in which he continued under Gerald Ford.  Train did not always find administrations hospitable to his plans; following the 1972 election, in particular, Nixon soured somewhat on environmentalism’s political possibilities and the energy crisis began to overshadow other efforts.  Still, Train described himself as a “moderate conservative,” committed to working within his party and his ideological framework for environmental protection.  His commitment displays the potential that existed in the 1970s for Republican—even conservative Republican—political philosophy to follow an environmental track.  “To my mind,” he explained, “to oppose environmental protection is not to be truly conservative.  To put short-term financial gain ahead of the long-term health of the environment is a fundamentally radical policy, as well as being unethical.  Conservation, which is essentially no more and no less than protection of the natural capital with which we have been endowed, should be seen as truly conservative.”[3]

Today, the lines between left and right have become more firmly drawn—and environmentalism appears squarely on the left.  This was an outcome with which Train was profoundly unhappy.  Torn between loyalty and irritation during the Reagan years, he preferred to remain aloof from politics, prompting criticism from other environmental leaders.  Train found his longtime friendship with George H. W. Bush strained when, already concerned by the “mystifying and frustrating” ascendancy of neoconservative positions during Bush senior’s time in office, he felt compelled to speak out in opposition to George W. Bush’s environmental policy in the early 2000s.[4]

Train was as proud of his religious legacy as he was of his Republican heritage.  Train was a leader in St. John’s Episcopal Church on Washington’s Lafayette Square, following in the footsteps of his father.  His worldview was shaped by his faith, leading him to articulate a profoundly humane conception of environmental protection’s importance.  “We don’t really have the option of not paying pollution costs at all,” he reflected.  “The only question is in what form we pay them—in higher electricity bills or in higher doctor bills and higher rates of mortality and morbidity.”[5]

Thoughtful Christians can reach very different conclusions regarding how we should serve as stewards of God’s creation.  Train’s life prompts careful reflection, however, upon the dichotomies we so often construct.  “Conservation” does, after all, share a root with “conservative.”  “Republican” need not sit in opposition with “environmentalist” (and “Democrat” is not necessarily an equivalent term).  Train thought deeply and acted intentionally across boundaries.  Our own careful consideration might illuminate new opportunities for enlightened stewardship.

Dr. Gill has posted the interview at the Research on Religion site. You can access it here.  The podcast lasts 72 minutes.  I hope you enjoy it.

In Mormonism, we have a set of beliefs based on revelations given to a 19^th century American in upstate New York that has given birth to a religion with millions of adherents. The LDS (Latter Day Saints) Church has, at its core, a very strong sense of American exceptionalism as part of God’s holy plan. As Malise Ruthven assessed recently in the “New York Review of Books,” Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith had views very similar to Christian fundamentalists raised on literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation, i.e. that the Savior’s return was imminent, presaged by a Great Tribulation and the restoration of Israel. The difference was that Mormons believed then that they were the lost Israelites, and that the Book of Mormon would be a vehicle by which to convert Jews into the Kingdom of God.

Moreover, America (and the Americas) was argued to be not only a land of promise but, according to the Book of Mormon and church leaders since, the world’s most exceptional land that was actually visited by Jesus Himself. The head of the LDS in 1987 said that:

“Our Father in Heaven planned the coming forth of the Founding Fathers and their form of government as the necessary great prologue leading to the restoration of the gospel. Recall what our Savior Jesus Christ said nearly two thousand years ago when He visited this promised land: ‘For it is wisdom in the Father that they should be established in this land, and be set up as a free people by the power of the Father, that these things might come forth’ (3 Ne. 21:4, the Book of Mormon). America, the land of liberty, was to be the Lord’s latter-day base of operations for His restored church … For behold, this is a land which is choice above all other lands; wherefore he that doth possess it shall serve God or shall be swept off; for it is the everlasting decree of God.”

Thus, Mormonism is the perfect form (or offshoot, depending on your views) of Christianity for extreme nationalism. It believes Jesus visited America, that the Garden of Eden was somewhere in Missouri, and that sees the US Constitution as an integral part of the divine order (which Jesus apparently personally foresaw in his appearances in America two millennia ago, and blessed).

Does this have implications for American foreign policy today? It’s hard to say, especially given that there are Mormons on both the left and right (Harry Reid is a Mormon and leader of the Senate Democrats, for example). But what if the possible leader of the free world emerges from a church sect – and personally believes himself – that asserts America alone has divine permission to do what it wants in the wider world, that America is subject to different standards than everyone else, and that geopolitics is about the global supremacy of the modern world’s first divinely ordained nation? At the very least, these views are very symmetrical with those neoconservatives (in the Republican party) who helped push the United States into war with Iraq from 2003-2011.

Might a Romney administration go down the same road? Perhaps a clue comes from Mitt Romney’s views of Iran and his relationship with Israel’s current leader. In June, Romney suggested that an attack on Iran was a question of the very survival for the United States: “we cannot survive a course of action [that] would include a nuclear Iran. We must be willing to take any and all actions.” More critically, he is known to have a close relationship with the current leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who the retiring director of Israel’s internal security service Shin Beit criticized earlier this year for making decisions – such as potentially attacking Iran – based on “messianic feelings.” Will a President Romney undertake to attack Iran and forcibly prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons?

In fact, we don’t know much about Romney’s foreign policy at this point because the 2012 presidential election has been framed by his campaign as almost entirely one focused on domestic policy. Notwithstanding the recent crisis in the Middle East, foreign policy statements by his campaign have been largely platitudes and not very specific about how Romney would conduct his own foreign policy. And because Romney has been exceedingly private about his faith, we don’t really know the extent to which Mormonism and its dogma might specifically impact a potential Romney presidency. But we do know this: nominating a candidate for President – and potentially electing him – who emerges from a religion that explicitly, at its core founding and in its core beliefs, posits that America is not only divinely blessed but indeed an exceptional place with the most important mission to play before the Second Coming, is a revealing turn in American history. While we’ve elected Presidents before accused of being inspired by Christian fundamentalist beliefs of the “end times” – George W Bush was often attacked for this, especially after the invasion of Iraq – having one in office from a sect that was founded specifically on the principle of a divinely-ordained American exceptionalism is, simply, remarkable.