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Millions of Americans are extraordinarily uninformed. This problem is often blamed on the poor quality of public schools, yet it largely stems from a peculiar conception of education rooted in America’s exceptional history. The birth of modern democracy in America fostered a populist mindset equating education with elitism. Although the Founding Fathers were learned men of the American Enlightenment, many 18^th and 19^th century Americans became convinced that common sense and folk wisdom were sufficient to succeed. Anti-intellectualism became particularly influential in the South, the nation’s poorest region. Conversely, education has been less associated with elitism in France and other European countries. This helps explain why modern America is sharply polarized, as the U.S. political debate reached astonishing levels of demagogy, propaganda, and disinformation well before Trump’s rise. Spurred by the Tea Party, Republicans routinely made ludicrous claims about Obama’s fake birth certificate and Islamism, “socialized medicine,” “death panels,” the “hoax” of climate change, the federal government’s “tyranny,” and other conspiracy theories. Such political extremism thrives on the ignorance, irrationality, and gullibility promoted by anti-intellectualism. Extremism in contemporary Europe is far less mainstream and more focused on immigration, the main concern of nativist far-right European parties.

Millions of white working-class and middle-class Americans vote against their own economic interest by defending policies that hurt them while profiting the rich, including the 1% wealthiest Americans. Several factors help explain this peculiar dimension of U.S. politics: myopia fostered by anti-intellectualism; the relationship between religious fundamentalism and free-market fundamentalism; blind faith in the American Dream; and how racism hinders economic solidarity.

In dialogue with Eric Bennett and Mark McGurl’s work on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as Tara Powell’s work on archetypes, Jordan Cofer uses new information from the Emory Archive and The Prayer Journal to contextualize one of O’Connor’s most famous comedic devices: the antagonistic intellectual. Cofer argues that although this device may have roots in southern fiction, O’Connor’s anti-intellectual trope derives from her time in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This chapter examines some of O’Connor’s juvenilia, the drafts of Wise Blood she was writing in Iowa (while simultaneously writing in her journal), and some of the short stories she wrote while enrolled at the Workshop. Finally, Cofer reconsiders the origins of O’Connor’s anti-intellectual as a potential outgrowth of her own anxieties during this time.

Mormon intellectual life suffered acutely in the wake of turmoil at Brigham Young University in 1911, but less than a decade later, major changes in church leadership and educational policy would help stimulate renewal. At the same time, Mormon scholars began gravitating to new disciplines like history, sociology, and the academic study of religion. A number of these students would become scholarly authorities on the Mormon community and the Mormon past. The students' epistemology, which placed supreme value on documentary and statistical evidence, was bound eventually to clash with that of theologically conservative church authorities, who exalted the private tutorings of the spirit. J. Reuben Clark Jr., a member of the LDS First Presidency, was the most forceful critic of Mormon scholars who, in his mind, threatened to lead Mormon youth astray. His 1938 "Charted Course of the Church in Education" remains a profoundly influential statement, and warning, about the "fundamentals" of church teaching and education.

This chapter explores three different attempts to write a fitting obituary for Protestant fundamentalism. The first, Stanley Kramer's 1960 film Inherit the Wind, portrays fundamentalism as a reactionary movement whose intellectual bankruptcy was dramatically revealed in a famous trial about the teaching of evolution. The other two obituaries—Norman F. Furniss' The Fundamentalist Controversy, (1954) and Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)—were both written by professional historians. Both books present fundamentalism as a form of Christianity that in the past blocked Americans' search for knowledge; both assert that religious fundamentalism's influence peaked in the 1920s and then went into steep decline.