How Politics Hijacked Science and Religion

By Cameron Hilditch

Sunday, June 06, 2021

 

In a well-functioning social order, science and religion would both be regarded as entirely apolitical cultural institutions. But in the United States today, both have taken on the character of political identity markers. It seems that Americans’ professed attitudes toward science and religion increasingly tell us more about their politics than about their actual attitudes toward science and religion, which is itself stark evidence of how politically obsessed we’ve become.

 

A recent piece by Carol Kuruvilla published by the Religion News Service highlights the fascinating trends that have been observed over time pertaining to the public’s perception of science and religion as spheres of authority. She points to the work of the sociologists Timothy O’Brien and Shiri Noy, who examined the last 50 years’ worth of data collected by the General Social Survey, along with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, on Americans’ confidence in cultural institutions. “The researchers found that in the 1970s, Republicans were more likely to place their confidence in science than religion, while the opposite was true of Democrats. By 2018, these attitudes had completely reversed.”

 

Interestingly, the data suggest that this reversal cannot be explained solely by the migration of white Evangelicals out of the Democratic Party and into the GOP. As Kuruvilla notes, “even after excluding white conservatives from the dataset and controlling for beliefs about the Bible, O’Brien and Noy found that the same patterns still held. Compared with Democrats, even secular, religiously unaffiliated Republicans have become more closely aligned with religion over time.” In other words, even nonreligious Republicans profess a greater reverence and respect for, and fealty to, religious authorities than Democrats do.

 

The recent politicization of religion in American public life is also true of science considered as a cultural institution, which, as Kuruvilla notes, the researchers found is “no longer seen as neutral, but as progressive.” Readers won’t be shocked to learn that findings from the Pew Research Center from over the last year show a widening of this partisan fissure concerning trust in medical scientists.

 

What has caused this alignment of mankind’s ultimate and penultimate curiosities with Republican and Democratic politics respectively? Why, for instance, would an agnostic Republican who has rarely, if ever, set foot in a church or synagogue profess greater respect for religious leaders than for scientists?

 

The answer to this question has to do with the hyper-ideological character of our age. Reality is impossibly complex: Every event, trend, action, or phenomenon is the product of an innumerable number of consequential factors, most of which lie beyond the comprehension of any one individual. Given our severely limited knowledge, our ability to renovate the world — to corral the outcome of events toward a desired end — is likewise limited.

 

Ideology offers an escape from this complexity and multiplicity. Its Faustian temptation lies in the offer it makes to each of us of comprehensive and certain knowledge of why the world is the way it is and how it can be bent exhaustively to our will. To those who swallow an ideology whole, it gives the intoxicating and almost irresistible sense that all of reality can now be fully accounted for and carried around in one’s head. Humility, doubt, and ignorance are all made obsolete.

 

This sense comes across powerfully in communist conversion stories, wherein Marxists describe the moment of epiphany when the scales fall from their eyes and they see the world as it “really” is. In his memoir Witness, Whittaker Chambers, the ex-communist who often wrote for National Review, described his Leninist awakening:

 

One day, by sheer chance, there came into my hands a little pamphlet of Lenin’s. It was called A Soviet at Work. In a simple, strong prose, it described a day in the life of a local soviet. The reek of life was on it. This was not theory or statistics. This was socialism in practice. This was the thing itself. This was how it worked.

 

Another ex-communist, the libertarian economist Thomas Sowell, tells a similar story: Marx offered an elegant, unified explanation of the squalor the young Sowell saw around him in Harlem in the 1940s and ’50s.

 

Ideologies replace the baffling, polycausal complexity of human life with a single idea that, once grasped, explains everything. For Marxists, this idea is that evil stems from the existence of private property. Conversely, anarcho-capitalists are possessed by the idea that evil stems from the existence of state violence. Whatever the single idea is that seizes the mind of the ideologue, it always has the effect of encompassing the whole of human relations. For the Marxist, there is no stray event, action, or happenstance in social (or even private) life that cannot be exhaustively explained by Marxist theory. All the particulars of life, however chaotic, unrelated, and inscrutable they might appear to most of us, are held together by the theory as examples of a single abstract idea. Only grasp the idea and the doors of perception are cleansed: The particulars of life arrange themselves into a legible whole, which functions simultaneously as a roadmap to utopia. Churchill defined a fanatic as “one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” It’s a definition that applies equally well to ideologues. They are, as Chesterton observed, stuck in “the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.”

 

The portrait of an ideologue that I’ve sketched out above is important because it’s come to represent more and more Americans and explains the transformation of science and religion into partisan totems, as the research cited by Kuruvilla has uncovered.

 

When political passions are at bay, people generally do not hunger after the kind of monocausal explanations of social discontent that fuel ideological thinking. Ideologies usually emerge and gather steam in eras of unrest, when certain segments of the population are looking to pin all the evils besetting society on another segment of the population and by so doing make those evils killable — for the good of the collective. The Bolsheviks made the capitalists the font of all evil, for the Nazis it was Jews, and for the more excitable anarchists it’s any and all kinds of civil magistrate. The monomania of ideology usually plays on this impulse toward scapegoating. Samuel Taylor Coleridge described the impulse toward political generalization in The Statesman’s Manual:

 

In tranquil moods and peaceable times we are quite practical. Facts only and cool common sense are then in fashion. But let the winds of passion swell, and straitway men begin to generalize; to connect by remotest analogies; to express the most universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy; in short, to feel particular truths and mere facts, as poor, cold, narrow, and incommensurate with their feelings.

 

This is precisely what is happening across American society. As Americans self-segregate into red and blue neighborhoods, workplaces, friend groups, and media silos, conservatives and progressives are both succumbing at an increasing rate to the ideological temptation of laying everything wrong with the country at the door of a single group of people — in this case, one another. Partisans on each side see everything they don’t like as something laced with the poison of their opponents’ politics: “The problem with this country is that Democrats/Republicans [pick one] are in it.” Things as important as religion and science, with all their particularities, have to be subsumed under the regnant idea of each ideological faction, from which political ideologues derive the meaning and moral categories governing their lives. And so, the agnostic Republican sides with religion, believing religion to be conservative, and the Democrat with not a modicum of scientific knowledge preens about “the scientific consensus,” believing the scientific method itself to be inherently progressive.

 

As politically engaged Americans have settled on the idea that our political opponents are the source of all our ills, every square inch of American life, including science and religion, has been claimed as either red or blue. But this was not inevitable. The “tranquil moods and peaceable times” Coleridge wrote of are always available to us if we want to pursue them. To regain them, we have only to make peace with the fact that we are limited creatures abroad in a world of boundless multiplicity that cannot be corralled either by ourselves or by our enemies into the claustrophobic confines of a single idea.