Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy across the Political Divide

It is a truism that Americans are deeply divided and that that division incorporates multiple fault lines: political, of course, but also cultural, economic, social, religious, spatial, and more. There are lots of names and shorthand for the division: bubbles, epistemic closure, sorting, and the like. But the cultural processes that drive these divisions are less clear. In Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy across the Political Divide, Ruth Braunstein gives readers an in-depth look at two groups, physically proximate, that embody the polarization. Yet, paradoxically, the two groups scaffold their opposing ideas atop a common vocabulary of American patriotism and religious commitment. Using a careful, comparative ethnographic approach, the book at once plumbs the depths of disagreement among Americans and reveals important values and ideas that are widely shared. The core of the book is a pair of extended ethnographic portraits of citizens’ groups. One, referred to as the Patriots, is a Tea Party chapter, while the other (‘‘Interfaith’’) is a community organizing coalition. The observations were done between 2010 and 2012, at the height of the Tea Party Movement’s electoral and cultural success. The Patriots, as a local chapter of the Tea Party Movement, participated in that success and its effects. Spurred into action by the Obama presidency, and in particular the Obamacare health-care legislation, members of the Patriots see themselves as recovering a lost vision of America. Their vision is at once epistemic, religious, and Constitutional. They produce a newspaper, The Informed Citizen, which they distribute widely; the implication of that work is that a populace armed sufficiently with the facts will agree with the Patriots. Meanwhile, they endorse a religious arm to their work as well, emphasizing the positive value of religion while also embracing religious differences among members. And they incorporate a nostalgic view of the Constitution (one leader opines that the solution to all public problems is ‘‘Uphold the Constitution. Do what the Constitution allows you to do. Nothing more, nothing less’’ [p. 110]). Meanwhile, Interfaith, too, mixes epistemic, religious, and Constitutional threads into a political community. Interfaith, too, places great value on creating more informed citizens—implying, too, that citizens with better information would be more likely to agree with them. Religious inclusion is central to Interfaith’s work as well; indeed, Interfaith appears to be more religious than the Patriots. And like the Patriots, Interfaith professes a strong devotion to the Constitution and implies that their opponents misread it. The overarching message of Prophets and Patriots is the impressive similarity between these two opposing groups. The bitter opposition that drives the widely decried ‘‘bubble effect,’’ Braunstein shows, rests upon remarkably common beliefs and practices. Readers expecting a(nother) demonstration of just how far apart liberal and conservative Americans are from one another will therefore be surprised—and pleasantly so. Braunstein’s account is one in which a common American cultural foundation provides the necessary scaffolding for these two very different political movements (and, presumably, could do so for others beyond the sample). Why, then, do the differences seem so vast if they are built on this common scaffolding? Why should policy disagreements among culturally similar groups emerge as a deep chasm? One explanation might be the epistemic communities fostered by the two groups. As Braunstein shows, each puts great faith in its version of the facts and intensely dismisses other information. This faith in 354 Reviews