When Did Science Become A Religion and Why are Anthony Fauci and Ibram X. Kendi Co-Poping It?
by Daniel Nuccio
Growing up, I was raised Christmas and Easter Catholic. This meant my family would go to church every Christmas and Easter (and sometimes attend certain gimmick services where we’d get free palms or have our food blessed). It meant if someone asked me what religion I was, my natural answer was supposed to be Catholic. And it meant that my mother sent me to private schools that offered religious education – although this may also have been to protect me from the drug dealers, pregnant teenagers, gangbangers, punks, and otherwise uncategorized nogoodnicks that my mother was convinced were roaming the public school halls in our quiet middle-class town.
At the local parochial grade school, I received a pretty rudimentary Catholic education. I had the standard math, science, history, spelling, English, gym, etc. classes I would have had at any other grade school. I also had a religion class each year built somewhere into the curriculum. In those religion classes, the other students and I learned kid-friendly Bible stories (the ones without the attempted angel rape), prepared for communion and confession, and learned some trivia about the Catholic faith. But, in the interest of not upsetting anyone or angering someone’s parents, even the nuns tended to avoid taking a strong stance when asked tough questions like whether someone’s mom and dad were going to Hell because they were divorced or whether all dogs really did go to Heaven.
In stark contrast to the nominal, cafeteria Catholicism in which I had been raised for much of my childhood, however, the Opus Dei-affiliated prep school I attended from eighth through twelfth grade, never wavered or waffled on matters of faith. There the Catholic faith was the Catholic faith. There was a Bible. There was a catechism. There were papal encyclicals. If you had a moral or theological question, odds were there was an answer – and the answer was the answer even if it upset you personally.
In fairness to my high school alma mater, I probably received a better education there than many young people receive in college today – especially if they go the standard liberal arts route. We read a representative chunk of the Western canon. Most junior and senior classes were taught at a college level. Many of the teachers were very well-educated. Several had PhDs or master’s degrees in their fields and were incredibly well-read in multiple others. Most seemed to be genuinely decent people and appeared to care about their students.
Unfortunately though, the devotion of my former high school and its faculty to the Catholic faith could also place limitations on the boundaries of intellectual debate.
Despite the quality of the education I received and the erudition and dedication of the faculty, classroom discussion on any number of philosophical, social, or sometimes even scientific issues could ultimately come down to a matter of what does the Catholic Church have to say about it. What does the catechism tell us? Did a pope write an encyclical about it? If the answer was yes, any further discussion or debate would often entail going through additional evidence that supported the Church’s position on the matter and learning the counterarguments to any relevant challenges.
As a practical example, I remember in my junior year theology class we once had a discussion on birth control. What did the Church have to say about birth control? According to the Catholic Church, artificial forms of birth control are morally wrong, although natural family planning is permissible. Additionally, scientific research has shown married couples who use natural forms of birth control are less likely to get divorced than those who use artificial forms of birth control. Therefore, why would you even want to use artificial birth control (once you’re married, of course)? Oh, what’s that you ask? Did the couples in the study self-select their form of birth control? Why does that matter? This was a pretty solid study. And besides, the Church says artificial birth control is morally wrong.
Furthermore, going beyond what at times could be a restrictive intellectual environment, this atmosphere of dogmatism and orthodoxy, where all roads led to Rome, ultimately engendered a social environment where those who found themselves challenging the Catholic faith too openly were subjected to a degree of bullying and ostracism by their peers, which definitely sent a message to anyone questioning their faith, reluctant to stand for morning prayer, or expressing views contrary to those of the Church on any number of social issues.
In fairness to my alma mater though, they never condoned this kind of bullying and ostracism. I’m not even sure faculty and administration knew the extent to which it was going on. But it was going on. And students felt justified when engaging in it.
Since graduating high school, I’ve spent considerable time in academia, earning master’s degrees in both experimental psychology and biology. At present, I am in a PhD program where I do mostly computational research on the relationships between different microbes and their hosts. Although I would like to say these research-based fields are immune to the kinds of dogmatism, orthodoxy, and blind reverence for authority that I observed in high school, the reality is they’re not. However, dogmatism, orthodoxy, and blind reverence to authority generally tend to be eschewed in these areas, which I suppose is part of what has made them appealing to me for so many years.
Some of the best moments of my academic career were spent in heated debate with the chair of my former psych department. Could his taste of ice cream be reduced to some physiological process we at best can only half understand? Or was it based in some phenomenological one no one could ever understand? Some of the most intellectually stimulating moments of my academic career involved taking a series of neuroscience courses with a well-established dopamine researcher as he tried to reconcile what seemed to be his traditional views that meth was a demon drug and amphetamine was a beneficial medicine with emerging evidence that the two might not be that different in terms of their neurophysiological effects and potential for addictive behaviors, a process that was all the more fascinating given that some of the emerging research that conflicted with his traditional views was emerging from his own lab.
But then, at some point, after finishing my master’s in psych and moving on to a different institution for a second master’s in bio, I noticed something different. But what was it exactly? And was it unique to my new institution? Or was it wider spread?
When I was a master’s student in psych, academia, at its best, offered my romanticized vision of an Enlightenment-era salon...or at least an old episode of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. It was a place where an intellectually diverse group of people could freely exchange informed ideas and opinions without worrying about whether doing so ran afoul of established authorities or traditional views, as long as they could provide evidence to back up their stance. Now though academia was slowly coming to resemble an overly simplified description of la Terreur.
Of course I was familiar with the cautionary tales of Bret Weinstein and Debra Soh. Of course I knew if asked a tough question like how many sexes are there by a freshman in an intro biology lab for which I served as TA, the proper response was at minimum to waver and waffle. But, even casual conversations, especially those with younger professors, were becoming increasingly tense, even when those conversations were seemingly on trivial topics. Could showing too much appreciation for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill or Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs without acknowledging their problematic elements of cultural appropriation cost me a letter of recommendation? Could questioning whether an author’s race should be taken into account when distributing literary awards for genre fiction get me kicked out of a lab? I honestly didn’t always know.
And then 2020 happened – the year of COVID-19 and the death of George Floyd.
In response to COVID-19, many universities adopted policies of online learning, social distancing, masking, testing, and eventually compulsory vaccination for COVID. As I described in an article for The Brownstone Institute, early on, I remember a number of faculty and students in my own biology department expressing some level of skepticism towards these measures – but eventually many seemed to fall in line. Despite the scientific training of my peers and my professors, discussion on matters related to COVID ultimately started to come down to what does the CDC have to say about it or did Anthony Fauci previously comment on it. If the answer was yes, any further discussion or debate would often come down to can you believe there are actually people who don’t believe in science.
Following the death of George Floyd, many universities released self-flagellating DEI statements and promises to “do better”. As I briefly described in an article for The College Fix, the then chair of my department “sent out an unnecessary but seemingly heartfelt email condemning Floyd’s death” that ironically resulted in him getting “publicly scolded via mass email by a graduate student because he failed to use this opportunity to call for more race-based hiring and mandatory in-person anti-racism training” within our department. Despite what I thought was STEM’s commitment to objective reality based in quantifiable evidence (or more practically a commitment to strong publication records and successful grant proposals) discussions on matters related to DEI and just basic departmental operations started to come down to what did one of the folx from our last DEI seminar have to say about it or did Ibram X. Kendi comment on it in How to Be an Antiracist. If the answer was yes, any further discussion or debate would often come down to well of course I support DEI.
Furthermore, going beyond what is becoming an increasingly restrictive intellectual environment, this atmosphere of dogmatism and orthodoxy, where all roads lead to Atlanta or perhaps a $6 million SoCal mansion, ultimately seems to engender a social environment where those who find themselves challenging CDC guidelines or DEI slogans too openly are subjected to a degree of bullying and ostracism, which definitely sends a message to anyone questioning the CDC, reluctant to sign a DEI pledge, or expressing views contrary to those of the designated authorities on any number of pandemic or DEI-related topics.
The kind of dogmatism, orthodoxy, and blind reverence to authority that once seemed to be eschewed by those in STEM now unfortunately seems to be embraced as STEM departments and universities increasingly resemble the halls of my former, Opus Dei-affiliated high school where students felt justified in bullying and ostracizing intellectual dissidents.
In fairness to my former high school though, there it was only the students who engaged in bullying and ostracism, and, to their credit, the administration of my former high school never institutionalized those activities.
Daniel Nuccio holds master's degrees in both psychology and biology. He is currently pursuing his doctorate in biology at Northern Illinois University and is a regular contributor for The College Fix and The Brownstone Institute. His work has also been published by The American Conservative and The Federalist.