The Battle Continues Between Science and Religion
By Andrew Wellner
Jean Bethke Elshtain
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The battle between science and religion dates back further than the Catholic Church persecuting Galileo for saying the Earth was round, but in the modern “culture war” talk radio serves as this generation’s version of burning at the stake.
John Evans, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego said Americans are not as polarized as many culture warriors would have us believe, adding the greatest polarization in is not among average Americas but at the elite level, among politicians, religious leaders, and leaders of social movements.
“If you go to the United Church of Christ, arguably the most liberal protestant denomination in the United States,” says Evans, “their leaders are to the left of all the people in the pews. If you go to the Southern Baptist Convention, their leaders are way to the right of everyone sitting in the pews.”
The elites are polarized, Evans says, because, “in American politics it doesn’t make sense to be a strong advocate for the middle.”
But even in America’s most conservative evangelical churches where leaders are most adamantly opposed to abortion, many in the congregation do not reject procedures like in-vitro fertilization and pre-implantation, which involve destroying embryos.
“There are more disagrees and more strongly disagrees,” says Evans. But compared to the responses of the general public, “it’s not a huge difference. And these are people who essentially believe in the sanctity of embryonic life.”
Laurie Zoloth, professor of medical ethics and humanities at Northwestern University, said she finds it odd that the debate about stem cells has become such a significant topic given all the other important issues this year.
Zoloth said she has been surprised that this small field of science, which is still described even by stem cell researchers as “a bit of a black art,” would take center stage “in a year that has seen wars in the Middle East, the terrors we’ve seen in Russia, the catastrophe of the Sudan [and] record rates of ... job-losses and uninsured and poor [in America].”
“I’m watching the political convention,” Zoloth says, “and stem cells are on the convention floor. What a bizarre sort of turn of events!”
Stem cells have become a surrogate for the much larger concerns that always accompany the emergence of a new science, Zoloth said. “Stem cells are the way we speak about the crisis of modernity.”
Jean Bethke Elshtain, professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School, identified a predominant theme in American political discourse whereby “religion is routinely discounted as irrationalism,” and the believer is therefore asked to remove all religious content from his or her arguments on a political topic.
“It is a draconian and prejudicial demand to say to a religious believer that they are obliged to excise the depths of their beliefs from the reasons that they offer publicly for why they are for or against a certain policy,” Bethke Elshtain said.
She then outlined three ways that religious believers have sought to resolved this quandary:
- Go “full-bore” and argue every political position from the standpoint of
religion; - Respond with religiosity only in extraordinary situations in the manner of Marin Luther King Jr.;
- Completely reject all political discourse and retreat into one’s own religious community, on the theory that it’s more or less pointless to engage the public square.
Bethke Elshtain rejected all three of these methods and suggested her own: that believers gauge what impact the issue will have, how deeply it impacts the believer’s faith, and insert religion depending on the extremity of the topic.
“Most of the time in a pluralistic society, our politics is a politics of modulation and negotiation and compromise, and most of the time the engagement of religious believers with politics does not involve some earth-shattering dilemma.”
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