Paranoid Science: The Christian Right’s War on Reality

190 Pages·2017·1.41 MB·English

by  Antony Alumkal

Paranoid Science
Paranoid Science
The Christian Right’s War on Reality
Antony Alumkal
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2017 by New York University
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-2713-8
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For Elizabeth and Isabel
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Fear of a Darwinist Culture: The Intelligent Design Movement
2. Sex, Sin, and Science: The Persistence of the Ex-Gay Movement
3. “Our Way or a Brave New World”: Christian Right Bioethics
4. Seeing Red over Green Evangelicals: The Crusade against Environmentalism
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
About the Author
Preface
My book’s basic premise is that science is under attack by the Christian Right, whose leaders
appeal to paranoid conspiracy theories by claiming that many scientists peddle misinformation
and conceal their actions from the public. Supposedly these scientists threaten to undermine the
moral foundation of American society. The four most significant offensives in this attack come
from proponents of intelligent design, the ex-gay movement, conservative bioethics, and
climate change denial. The combined effect of these four “paranoid science” movements is to
create an alternative reality where Christian Right leaders’ religious beliefs are safe from
disconfirmation.
I write as a sociologist trained in the study of religion. Science is the terrain on which these
four movements fight, but ultimately they’re driven by religious and political dynamics. These
dynamics are what I analyze in the pages ahead.1 I also write as a “critical” sociologist. I
believe that sociology is called to a careful study of the facts about human societies, but there’s
room in the discipline for discussing what kind of society we should be.
My writing is clearly influenced by my social location. I’ve spent a decade and a half as a
faculty member at the Iliff School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary with historic ties
to the liberal or progressive wing of American Christianity, which holds that Christians should
constantly revise their beliefs in light of new knowledge.2 I want to analyze and critique the
Christian Right because I believe that Christianity should have a much different expression in
American society; it should support the scientific enterprise and counter social oppression
rather than reinforce it. That being said, I’m also writing for a broad audience, including
people of all religious persuasions as well as those who don’t consider themselves religious
(or even “spiritual”) at all. I’m writing for anyone who wants to understand more about how
the Christian Right attacks science.3
I’m sure that someone, somewhere who identifies with the Christian Right will say that in
writing this book, I’m being paranoid. So let’s set the record straight. In order for this book to
fit Richard Hofstadter’s definition of the paranoid style, I would have to put forth a grand
conspiracy theory—claiming that the secret actions of the Christian Right’s evil leaders
threaten to destroy American society. I argue no such thing. First of all, the Christian Right’s
anti-science agenda is very public, as it needs to be if it wants to mobilize grassroots support. I
found all of the data for this book in publicly accessible documents. If these leaders have any
secrets, I failed to uncover them. Second, I don’t personally know any of the Christian Right
leaders whom I write about, and I can’t judge their motives. I assume that, however misguided
they may be, most of them believe that they’re doing the right thing. What about cases in which
they blatantly distort the truth, which are numerous? It’s likely that they’re engaging in self-
deception, believing what they want to believe. Essentially, they’re inviting others to join the
alternative reality that they inhabit.4 Finally, I don’t claim that the Christian Right is the only
group (or even the worst group) that negatively impacts society. There’s a lot of blame to go
around for this country’s shortcomings.5
I’ve been working on this book for a long time, so I have many people to thank. First
mention goes to the fine research assistants with whom I had the pleasure of working: Kevin
Hall, Kyle Talley, Andy Boesenecker, Amy Hanson, Tucker Plumlee, and Dan Lillie. A number
of scholars gave me valuable feedback on early drafts of this material, especially Laurel
Kearns, Dawne Moon, Jerry Park, and Nancy Wadsworth, along with my faculty colleagues at
Iliff. Iliff and University of Denver students too numerous to name have also helped me to think
through this material. Members and clergy in several Denver churches were willing to respond
to presentations about this material, including Messiah Lutheran Church, Christ Church United
Methodist, Park Hill Congregational United Church of Christ, and my own congregation, St.
Thomas Episcopal Church. Special thanks to my editor at New York University Press, Jennifer
Hammer, for sage guidance along the way.
The biggest thanks goes to the two lovely ladies with whom I share a home, Elizabeth and
Isabel, for putting up with the many hours when I was hard at work and unavailable to them.
Introduction
In 2002 I was reading the Christian Century, the flagship magazine of the mainline Protestant
world, when an article caught my eye. A biblical scholar named Robert A. J. Gagnon was
responding to a previous issue, where his book The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts
and Hermeneutics was negatively reviewed by the liberal biblical scholar Walter Wink.
Gagnon offered the expected assertions about the Bible and church tradition condemning
homosexuality, but he also appealed to social science data in his attempt to prove that “the
negative effects attending homosexual behavior are disproportionately high, often grossly so.”1
His primary evidence was the alleged lack of long-term monogamous relationships among gay
men and lesbians; biology rather than social stigma was presumably the cause. “These
problems persist,” Gagnon wrote, “even in homosexual-supportive areas such as San
Francisco. The main culprit is probably sexual noncomplementarity, not societal
‘homophobia.’”2
Since I’m a sociologist, my first reaction was to chuckle at his clumsy attempt at social
science reasoning. This Gagnon fellow, clearly, was in over his head. But then I felt puzzled.
Why on earth would a biblical scholar use social science data to support his interpretation of
the Bible? As a faculty member at a school of theology, I knew that this wasn’t how biblical
scholarship worked, at least among academically reputable scholars. I was intrigued enough to
pick up a copy of Gagnon’s controversial book.
It turned out that Gagnon was a leader of a movement claiming that homosexuality was a
curable illness and that the psychiatric establishment was covering up this fact because it had
been taken over by gay activists motivated by “politics” rather than “science.” His book
recycled arguments that went back nearly two decades. I’ve done significant research on
American evangelicalism, and I was certainly aware that evangelical leaders condemned
homosexual behavior and offered “healing” to those who wished to become straight. What I
hadn’t known was that these practices were supported by a movement, called the ex-gay
movement, with an extensive organizational infrastructure, and that for members of this
movement, science was contested territory, a terrain on which to wage battle. This reminded
me of another emerging movement of evangelicals battling over scientific truth—intelligent
design. A foray into the intelligent design literature revealed some striking parallels with the
ex-gay movement. Further research uncovered two other evangelical movements challenging
the work of scientists, one promoting conservative stances on bioethical issues and a second
denying the existence of anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change.
No one had yet written a comparison of these four movements, and I knew I had the subject
matter for a book. After finishing up some other research projects, I dove into the materials
(books, websites, and DVDs) that each movement had produced. I found lots of fascinating and
disturbing details about each. However, I still struggled to articulate the underlying theme that
linked the four movements. Then, while reading through the scholarly literature on
evangelicalism, I came across a reference to the work of the historian Richard Hofstadter.
Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” had attracted renewed
attention in the media when critics of the Bush/Cheney administration charged that its policies
were rooted in paranoid thought rather than reality. Something told me I needed to read that
essay for myself.
Did I ever. I was stunned by how much Hofstadter’s description of paranoid political
movements matched the behavior of the four evangelical movements I had been studying. I soon
realized that they weren’t simply advancing pseudoscience, they were advancing paranoid
science.
Paranoid-Style Politics
To understand the four paranoid science movements that I focus on in this book, we need to
look at Hofstadter’s classic essay. Hofstadter first presented “The Paranoid Style in American
Politics” as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University in November 1963. He included
an expanded and revised version in his 1965 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics
and Other Essays, which is the version I’ll discuss here. The essay described a recurring style
in American political life that Hofstadter referred to as paranoid “because no other word
adequately evokes the heated exaggerations, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I
have in mind.”3 Hofstadter made clear that he wasn’t referring to people who were clinically
paranoid; movements led by such people would have a limited impact. Rather, “it is the use of
paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon
significant.”4 His examples of paranoid-style political movements in American history
included the panic over the Bavarian Illuminati at the end of the eighteenth century, the anti-
Mason movement of the 1820s and 1830s, the anti-Catholic movement, the anti-Mormon
movement, McCarthyism, and the Goldwater movement.
Hofstadter identified several features common to paranoid-style movements. At the center is
the image of “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence
set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.”5 He recognized that there have been
conspiratorial acts in history, and there’s nothing paranoid about noting them. However, the
paranoid style goes beyond seeing conspiracies here and there in history. Instead, history itself
is supposedly the product of a “vast” or “gigantic” conspiracy with enormous stakes: “The
paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the
birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human value.”6 This
is a Manichean (dualistic) mentality—that is, it sees the world in terms of black and white,
absolute good versus absolute evil. This kind of mentality doesn’t tolerate compromise with
political opponents. Only complete victory will do. Furthermore, those operating in the
paranoid style believe that their enemy is not only evil but immensely powerful. Different
paranoid movements imagine this power in different ways: “[The enemy] controls the press; he
directs the public mind through ‘managed news’; he has unlimited funds; he has a secret for
influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic
confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.”7
In the foreword to the 2008 edition of The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other