A Confederacy of Pious Bores

I once heard a story (which I have not been able to verify) that Martin Luther, because he was understood to have made the reading and interpretation of scripture everyone’s right (whether that was his intention or not), told someone, “I have turned every barmaid in Germany into a scripture scholar.” It was not meant as a compliment. And he wasn’t even on Facebook. About a hundred years after Luther, the English playwright Ben Jonson essentially made his living by lampooning the pretensions a...