Not So Smart

Apparently I'm not as smart as I thought I was.
The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State by Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. Sounds like light reading, right? After all, it's only half an inch thick. And paperback. How hard could it be?
On the third page: "A shift in rhetorical strategy to widen political appeal does not affect the substantive issues at stake." Okay... I know rhetorical, strategy, political appeal makes sense, and substantive I kind of know...
Page 15 (looking at the page number now instead of pages into the chapter): "Suffice it to say that our intention is not to marginalize religion. If anything, it is to warn against the ways that some aggressive proponents of religious correctness are doing exactly that in their political battles, even as they try to lay the blame elsewhere."
String lots of sentences like that together, and even if each sentence is clear enough, what you soon get is pages and pages of huh? I still haven't figured out exactly what these people are trying to say. I kind of know, but I don't like kind of knowing, I want to know for sure.
So- suffice it to say- I'm starting this book over. With a dictionary. And a notebook. The power of the notebook will quash all uncertainty.
In theory.