Modern right-wing evangelical thinking is not about belief. It's all about disbelief. Belief implies the possibility of doubt, and evangelicals do not worry themselves with whether or not God exists; in fact, God is the truest thing in their universe, surer than the breath you've just taken and the breath you'll next take. To an American conservative Christian, God is real and everything else needs to be proven. And since the American conservative evangelical God represents nothing so much as the will of American conservative evangelicals—as near as I can determine, they believe in their heart of hearts that God and Jesus are white, straight, rural Republicans—right-wing Christianity is really a form of solipsism. Conservative evangelicals are made in God's image, therefore God is a conservative evangelical. It's a closed circuit, a locked, oxygen-free room.

The problem with this philosophy (or lack thereof) is that it casts everything else in the universe in the darkness of doubt, especially if reality is at odds with American conservative evangelical thinking. This is how you wind up in situations where, say, likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal refuses to say publicly whether or not he believes evolution is real. Jindal is a recovering super-nerd who peaked early, graduating from Brown and becoming a Rhodes Scholar before most people his age entered their junior years of college. He's an intelligent man. But he's also socially tone-deaf, as most real-life Doogie Howsers are, and so he lacks the political skill to simultaneously woo evangelical Republicans and the mainstream vote. Rather than answering that most basic of questions—did life evolve over the course of millions of years, or were we slapped together from mud and spit by a bearded storm giant a couple thousand years ago?—in a politically expedient way, he instead prevaricated, and so he came across as a dolt. Jindal didn't make it any better when he tried to back-flip the accusations that he was an anti-science jackass into an argument that President Obama was the anti-science politician. Nobody believed him, because Jindal is not a convincing man. (There's some slight chance that he might turn it around, but it's really looking as though Jindal's political life peaked as early as his academic life; he's more and more looking like a has-been.) But inside the Jindal camp, this probably doesn't look like as terrible a situation as it does to everyone outside the bubble. The important thing to Jindal is that he didn't alienate his evangelical base. He denied a basic, obvious truth about the universe, and that's what matters most to religious conservatives. Jindal will live to blow hot air at the media another day.

This evangelical denial of reality isn't just a matter of politics. It could have very real effects all over the nation. The news broke today that Texas's board of education is pushing to include climate-change denial in their school textbooks. Rather than addressing the obviousness of climate change, Texas prefers a model that represents climate change as a debate, with the three percent of scientists who dissent from the popular opinion given equal weight with the 97 percent who can successfully synthesize an overwhelming torrent of data into an obvious trend. This is a big deal because Texas has the power to dictate which textbooks America uses; because one of our most populous states is home to a disproportionate number of evangelical conservatives, America's future will suffer.

And now that we've already suffered through multiple generations of politicians who prey on the evangelical reality delusion, we're starting to see a whole culture of undisciplined thought erupt on the right wing. If you can deny that the sky is blue, every other color is cast into doubt, and so every fact is essentially meaningless. This means that unless a conservative politician were to commit the unthinkable and deny God, nothing else they say really matters as long as they stay aligned with the pro-God forces. The best example of this brave new fleet of dashing young politicians who will say anything at any given moment is, of course, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

I've called Rand Paul Schrödinger's candidate before, because he has the tendency to say two opposing things on the same day and then deny that he's taken any position at all—especially when he's discussing foreign policy. This makes him an attractive candidate for the Republican Party in the wake of 2008's neocon collapse, because the Republican Party cannot decide if it wants America to be a proud global supercop or a timid isolationist.

How bad has Paul's aimless stand-taking gotten? It's gotten so bad that the New Republic seems to think it has discerned a pattern from all the chaos of Paul's quantum positioning, and now it's branding him as a kind of bumbling foreign-policy genius, a Columbo of international affairs. The New Republic is of course forgetting the fact that Paul has the freedom to take as many positions as he wants for two basic reasons: First, the fact-free evangelical Republican Party doesn't give a shit how many positions he takes, so Paul doesn't have to suffer the political consequences of his dilettantish vacations into the complex world of foreign policy. Second, his opinion doesn't matter to anyone in the international community when it comes to foreign affairs—Senator Paul isn't a commander-in-chief, nor is he in a position of power when it comes to foreign affairs. Globally, he's a nobody. But if the time comes that other nations are forced to pay attention to Paul's flighty opinions, they'll see his uniquely American brand of evangelical fact-blindness and they'll recoil in terror and disgust. Our proud ignorance is nearing the point of no return, and the children Americans have raised to accept reality as a conversation with no right answers are about to gain power. At some point, it simply doesn't matter if you deny the existence of gravity; when you bumble off a cliff and fall four stories into an abandoned rock quarry, gravity is going to believe in you.