Presbyterians in Adventures From Prison

I learned a new meaning for the word Presbyterian today. Sitting in my cube reading, I was interrupted by a friend who wanted to know what the word monolithic meant. So I defined it for him and, as usual, he lauds my vocabulary and leaves. The guy next door to me, a friend, pokes his head into the cube. “So smart guy,” he said with a smirk. “I’ve got a word for you to define.” “Shoot”
What’s a Presbyterian?”
I look at him skeptically. This is not a dumb guy. He attended the Military Language Institute and worked in intelligence for years. He knows what Presbyterian’s are, so this has to be one of his jokes. I decided to play it straight. “It’s a branch of Christianity. I think it’s related to the Church of Christ but I’m not sure.” “Ha Ha. Wrong,” he said. “According to the guys in the TV room who watch CNN all of the time, it’s someone running for president.” “What?” “Yup. On the TV crawl it said: Trump is a Presbyterian. One guy asked the others what that meant and was told by that it was a fancy word for someone running for president.” “Were they just screwing with him?” “Oh no. They meant every word.” “This is why there should be a test to get voting rights,” I groaned.
Stuff like this just baffles me. I understand that a great many of the men around me are high school drop outs, but to me that seems terribly ignorant. How do you go through life and not run into a Presbyterian church? I don’t expect them to be able to name the specific beliefs to Presbyterianism. I certainly can’t. But to not know it’s part of the Christian community seems odd. Maybe it’s just because there were a lot of Presbyterian churches in the Chicago area, but I’m fairly certain it’s a very popular denomination. I don’t know everything about the world, but I can name off most of the major religions without straining myself, including many sub-branches. Thing is I never had to sit down and learn them, it just came from 38 years of walking around with my eyes open. I don’t even read the newspaper or watch the news, yet still this info got processed. So why isn’t this – and many other things like it – assimilated by the people around me? The guys saying this sort of thing aren’t dump or incapable of learning, so how do two 50 year olds end up so ignorant? People blame the U.S. school system, but from what I’ve witnessed in here, it actually takes an effort to be as uneducated as some of these guys. What I haven’t figured out yet is why. Is it some sort of a survival mechanism that allows them to rationalize the life of crime most live? I’ve actually had someone defend themselves to me for shooting a guy who looked at him wrong. In his world a disrespectful glance being met by a murder attempt was reasonable. I don’t see how any one with half a brain could make those justifications to themselves and truly believe it, but he did and so do many, many others about a large variety of violent and heinous crimes. The educated men I’ve met in here have all felt remorse and will truly try to never reoffend, but these guys…it’s like they’ve ignored all of the consequences of their actions on purpose.
Maybe they do.