Welcome to the Age of Gilded Science
Trump's Gold Standard Science policies threaten America's future.
For decades, America’s science policy has been a sleepy, bipartisan consensus. The reason is simple, it worked. America is home to the world’s best research universities, can claim more Nobel laureates in science than any other country, and dominates in patent discovery and the publishing of influential research papers. In short, America is the world’s scientific superpower and reaps the economic rewards.
President Trump lit that consensus on fire. His administration has assaulted our country’s scientific infrastructure, cancelled significant projects, and sent researchers packing. Officially, his policies seek to usher in a “Gold Standard of Science.” What this means is a little vague and seems to boil down to a belief that research has stalled because it has become politicized. To make the case, here is White House Director of Science and Technology Michael Kratsios at the National Academy of Sciences:
“At the heart of the practices that make up Gold Standard Science is a suspicion of blind consensus and a celebration of informed dissent. For the crisis of confidence in scientists stems from fear that political biases are displacing the vital search for truth. [Diversity Equality and Inclusion (DEI)] initiatives, in particular, degrade our scientific enterprise. DEI represents an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community. Diversity of thought is essential to scientific inquiry, empowering us to challenge entrenched assumptions and offer novel approaches to solving complex problems.”
You can read the entire speech here, but I don’t recommend it. There isn’t a lot of meat on the bone. He generally theorizes that America isn’t getting enough bang for its scientific buck and falling behind other countries. He places the blame on minorities and women.
I originally wrote that last sentence as follows: He concludes with the unsupported claim that women and minorities are to blame. While editing, I realized this could imply a valid argument exists and Mr. Kratsios simply failed to articulate it. What I wanted to convey was that he presented his opinion as fact without marshaling supporting evidence or addressing counterarguments.
Even if the White House’s top science man (who is not a scientist by trade, but a political/policy advisor), didn’t offer supporting evidence, let’s entertain his argument for a moment and help him out. First, the data. The 2024 Global Innovation Index ranks the United States as number three overall out of 133 countries surveyed. Of concern are an 8 percent reduction in scientific publications and a 5.3 percent reduction in patent filings, as compared to the previous decade.
Second, there is evidence of falling research standards. One study found an estimated 34 percent of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24 percent. There is also a long history of companies paying for their own, biased research, particularly in the food and drug industries. More amusingly are satirical papers submitted to expose low standards at academic journals. The original prankster was a physicist named Alex Sokal, who conducted an experiment to see if a respected journal would publish an article full of nonsense as long as it sounded good and aligned with the editors' ideological preconceptions.
Recent researchers have followed in Sokal’s path. James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian submitted 20 papers to high-profile journals in gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. They used keywords and fashionable academic terms in these fields to argue for deliberately absurd ideas. By the time they were discovered, four of their papers had been published by peer-reviewed journals and another three were accepted but not yet published (six had been rejected and seven were still under review). How ridiculous you ask? One of the published papers was titled Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon; another titled Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism As An Intersectional Reply To Neoliberal and Choice Feminism rewrote portions of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (my struggle in English) using feminist terminology in place of Hitler’s antisemitism. Academic pranksters aside, the existence of dubious research papers is largely attributed to the necessity for academics to “publish or perish” and the for-profit business models of the journals themselves.
There is no evidence linking low-quality papers to DEI initiatives at universities or other funding recipients. Still, I won’t reflexively defend DEI programs. There can be a gap between noble intent and practical application when it comes to identity conscious policies. Reasonable people can disagree. That said, in this administration, we aren’t engaging in well reasoned debate about the efficacy of specific approaches. In MAGA world, the term DEI is a slur meaning unqualified or unintelligent women and minorities.
Being told to trust science while trying to juggle working from home and getting kids through a school day on the computer, all without being able to visit family and friends, rubbed some people wrong.
While not mentioned in Mr. Kratsios’s remarks, no conversation about trust in scientific experts and their rigor can ignore the elephant in the room. America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic engendered deep anger in many pockets of our country.
Knowing what we know now, would we have responded in the same way? Probably not. We certainly wouldn’t have worn gloves in the beginning instead of masks, and no one would have wiped their groceries down with Clorox. I imagine we would have also returned kids to the classrooms sooner, but this is speculation.
I don’t think it’s fair to play hindsight quarterback on a Monday morning. Our country faced an unprecedented situation and responded using the playbook that had worked during past viral outbreaks. People seem to forget many of the restrictions were designed to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed and leading to even more deaths.
Regardless, the reality is the pandemic made many people skeptical of experts and the scientific consensus. Being told to trust science while trying to juggle working from home and getting kids through a school day on the computer, all without being able to visit family and friends, rubbed some people wrong. Plus, officials like Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. point out that despite all of our spending and technology, America is still overweight and sick compared to other developed countries.
This is a deep vein in America’s subconscious President Trump is trying to tap into. Maybe you aren’t persuaded by his DEI arguments, but you do remember how much lockdowns sucked, and there are a lot of overweight Americans (myself included).
So how much damage has President Trump unleashed so far? Last week, The Economist reported:
“Grant Watch, a website, calculates that at least $2.5bn worth [of grants] have been rescinded so far, leaving researchers without salaries and unable to pay expenses. Much more could be coming. The White House’s budget for 2026 aims to slash science spending. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research, faces a nearly 40% cut. The National Science Foundation (NSF), another big federal funder, may lose 52%…The Economist calculates that more than 80,000 researchers could lose their jobs.”
To contextualize these numbers, in 2022, total U.S. domestic research and development spending was $885.6 billion (2022 is the most recent accounting of this data that is publicly available). While the government’s science budget is eleven times larger in real terms than it was in 1956, it now accounts for only 20 percent of the total domestic spend. Today, the largest source of funds is the private sector, which surpassed the government back in the 1980s. Our government is, however, still the biggest funder of basic research (40 percent of the total). Thus, the Administration’s cuts represent about a ten percent reduction in total domestic investment, but with an outsized impact on basic research.1
To better understand America’s scientific establishment and why cuts in basic research should worry you, we must travel back to the aftermath of World War II. At the dawn of the Cold War, a consensus formed during the Truman Administration. The U.S. government would invest heavily in scientific research and development to compete with the Soviet Union in the fields of defense, space, biomedicine, culture, and energy.
The government hired smart people to conduct the research by awarding contracts and grants to universities, nonprofits, and businesses. The focus was basic research. Basic research improves our understanding of natural phenomena. It encompasses disciplines like physics, anatomy, and biochemistry. It’s often open-ended and differs from applied research in that its primary purpose is curiosity rather than discovery of immediate practical solutions to real-world problems.
It makes sense for the government to fund basic research because its value cannot be easily commercialized and, thus, is less likely to attract private sector investment. Yet, the potential societal benefits can be enormous. This approach sent Americans into outer space and brought about therapies for malaria, manufacturing of penicillin at scale, and revolutionary developments in radar and communications. Still, more could be done.
By 1980, the U.S. government had accumulated 28,000 patents, but fewer than 5% of those patents were commercially licensed. The reason was intellectual property laws assigned ownership of inventions funded by the U.S. government to the government itself. As a result, valuable patents were left sitting on the shelf, collecting dust.
The Bayhe-Dole Act changed that. It transferred ownership of patents and inventions from the government to the individual researchers, universities, nonprofits, and businesses who made the discoveries. In short, the public would continue to shoulder the cost of basic research, but the private sector was given a financial incentive to undertake the risky process of turning that research into commercially viable solutions (i.e., applied research). It was the final ingredient that supercharged America’s scientific prowess.
If I haven’t made it clear by now, the government occupies a unique place in the research and development ecosystem. It has a long-term outlook even the deepest pocketed corporations cannot match.
This system has been an economic boon. According to a study published earlier this year, every dollar the U.S. government invests in medical research generates $2.56 in economic activity. That’s a solid return on investment. The Bayhe-Dole Act’s system of public-private partnership has also yielded several important products and technologies. This includes the internet, GPS, touchscreens, the flu shot, MRI machines, microchips, lactose-free milk, autonomous robots, the Human Genome Project, smartphones, self-driving cars, Apple’s Siri, Tesla cars, the Duolingo language learning app, and Google, to name a few.
If I haven’t made it clear by now, the government occupies a unique place in the research and development ecosystem. It has a long-term outlook even the deepest pocketed corporations cannot match. Consider artificial intelligence (AI). If you haven’t paid close attention to the field, it appears some smart coders recently whipped AI up in Silicon Valley. The reality is, the National Science Foundation has funded pioneering research since the 1960s; research that played a role in neural networks and large language models, which are at the heart of today’s generative AI tools.
In addition to a long time horizon, corners of the government have unique missions that push technological boundaries. The most famous are the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the mad scientists over at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Take for example the internet. It was born in the 1960s out of DARPA’s need to securely connect geographically distributed computers. DARPA is also a major funder of advanced robotics and machine intelligence because, well, Terminators. If it wasn’t for their desire to create killer robots, you wouldn’t have a Roomba, Siri or Alexa, and self-driving cars. Aerial drones owe their existence to spies wanting to watch from a distance. For context, back in 1995, the CIA was flying airplanes by satellite and viewing video feeds from across the world, while us regular folk were marveling at such technological wonders as dial-up internet and pagers.
The President’s attack on science isn’t confined to funding. We are losing the war for talent as well. The role immigrants have played is not insignificant. According to the same article in The Economist:
“Since 1901, researchers based in America have won 55% of academic Nobel Prizes, and more than a third of these scientists were foreign-born. Immigrant inventors produce an outsize share of patents, too. The Paulson Institute, a think-tank, reckons that in 2022, almost two-thirds of top-tier AI researchers working in America hailed from overseas. Losing even some of those would be a blow to American innovation.”
The President’s immigration policies are directly targeting foreign students at American universities. Last week, for example, the Administration revoked Harvard University’s participation in the foreign student visa program. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the aggressive targeting of Chinese students. It’s reasonable to assume talent will now look to China or Europe to fund their education and research projects. Who knows how many Albert Einsteins, Nikola Teslas, and Sergei Brins America will lose by turning openly hostile towards immigrants.
You might have read everything I just wrote and asked yourself: why would President Trump do this? “DEI bad” doesn’t seem to warrant a destruction of America’s competitive advantage in science. Why attack the acquisition of knowledge which has a clear connection to economic dynamism, defense, and the population’s health and welfare? It’s a self-inflicted wound.
Unlike some of his other disruptive acts, he hasn’t bothered to articulate a vision for what comes next. I can only speculate, which I happen to thoroughly enjoy doing. In my opinion, any Trump Administration decision can be explained by some combination of the following:
Trump himself is a thin-skinned narcissist with authoritarian ambitions;
Trump eschews grand strategy in favor of transactional deal making, he simultaneously dreams big and prioritizes the present moment;
The MAGA foot soldiers he relies on are culture warriors driven by Christian fundamentalist and Christian nationalist ideologies;
Ol’ fashioned racism or sexism;
Russia, Russia, Russia (did you do the Trump voice in your head?); and/or
Someone bought and paid for it.
In short, I don’t believe President Trump has a firm political ideology. He is driven by a desire to win and accumulate power and wealth, and stay out of jail. As a result, he entertains a wide range of policies and belief systems, even ones that are incompatible, to advance his personal interests. That’s my way of saying I don’t think he has ever given two seconds of thought to science policy.
We are talking about the guy who sat in a Tesla, looked at the dashboard, and exclaimed “everything’s computer.” The same man who went on this wonderful, scientifically unsound rant:
“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question, and [a person who makes boats] said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question,’ and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT —very smart. He goes, I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight? And you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’”
(Brief interlude about shark attacks)
“So I said, so there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here, do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking? Water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question.’ I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water. But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end [a non-existent policy mandating electric boat motors].”
Thus, regarding science, I’m skeptical his convictions are heartfelt. My opinion is these policies stem more from his Christian nationalist/fundamentalist supporters and their cultural views, which the President eagerly courts in service of his authoritarian ambitions.
I will start with the authoritarian aspects because it’s where I usually conclude and I want to keep it fresh for you. In the past, authoritarians would construct alternative realities with coherent ideological narratives to insulate their regimes from criticism. This demanded wholesale control over every aspect of society. Here’s the eminent Anne Applebaum stating it far better than I ever could in her book Twilight of Democracy:
“The European writers of the twentieth century were obsessed with the idea of the Big Lie, the vast ideological constructs that were communism and fascism. The posters demanding fealty to the Party or the Leader, the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts marching in formation, the torch-lit parades, the terror police—these forced demonstrations of support for the Big Lies were so absurd and inhuman that they required prolonged violence to impose and the threat of violence to maintain. They required forced education, total control of all culture, the politicization of journalism, sports, literature, and the arts.”
She left academia off her list of politicized institutions, but you get the point. Controlling information and being the arbiter of truth was hard work back in the day and technology has only made it more difficult.
It’s why modern authoritarians in Russia, Hungary, Venezuela, America, and elsewhere don’t bother. They don’t attempt to control information like their twentieth century predecessors (China is an exception to this rule). Instead, they undermine the very idea of a fact-based reality. They aim to muddy the waters, to lie brazenly, embrace hypocrisy, rhapsodize alternative facts, and proclaim bizarre conspiracy theories while keeping a straight face. It’s not because they are ignorant or simple-minded, it’s because they want citizens to become so overwhelmed with conflicting information they tune out.
To successfully execute such an attack, the authoritarian needs a recipe for apathy. It starts with undermining sources of truth. This means respected institutions and experts. This means elite universities, investigative journalists, courts of law, statistical organizations, and scientific research.
The process can be organic, but is often the result of sophisticated systems. Russian intelligence services, for example, have funded several websites throughout South America and Africa that provide a mix of real news and disinformation. They also operate fake news outlets with legitimate sounding names. Once they release disinformation through one of these platforms, paid social media influencers and bots then amplify its spread. Pretty soon, you have average people repeating the information, and politicians demanding accountability for things that never happened.2
In the place of a consensus opinion about what constitutes objective facts, the modern authoritarian offers noise. Why listen to some poindexter in a lab coat from Johns Hopkins University and his peer reviewed research about vaccines when Becky on TikTok with the glowing skin says you can snort turmeric instead? Plus, your uncle on Facebook warns vaccines are the Mark of the Beast and Bill Gates put microchips in them. A doctor on Joe Rogan’s podcast said it causes autism, and some vitamins he happens to sell will do the trick instead. Did you hear that the expert from Johns Hopkins was hired because they are transgender? Your aunt now has a Facebook account and she heard Johns Hopkins is harvesting adrenochrome from children in the basement and selling it to Hillary Clinton. Don’t try and fact check me, nerd. I have been red pilled. We need to let diseases spread to build herd immunity. Did you see the Congressman from Texas’s post on X about how mRNA vaccines turn you gay? No, but I heard it gives young men heart attacks, so we should take these pills made to deworm livestock instead. Good idea, pass the bleach.
It’s too much. The average person is busy trying to raise a family, work a job, and be happy. They don’t have enough hours in the day to study the news and debunk every word of nonsense. In this situation, the tendency is to give up and disengage from politics, and find shelter in your family and friends. Once this happens, a small group of elites can go about consolidating power and enriching themselves with less scrutiny.
It’s why experts are useful. They focus on complicated technical minutia so the rest of us don’t have to. The simple truth is us humans favor straightforward explanations and seek to limit complexity in our lives. We are susceptible, as a species, to information overload. It’s why most people prefer to read a story over reams of data. When we stop trusting the people who read and interpret the data for us, alternative narratives can take hold.
Let’s talk about one of those narratives and how it intersects with the President’s science policies. In the world of America’s Christian fundamentalists, science has a bad reputation. The reason is rooted in their interpretation of scripture. Specifically, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, which says the Bible is without error because it’s the word of God.
Inerrancy is practiced to some degree throughout most Christian denominations. Catholics, for example, believe that the Bible, in its original form, is inerrant regarding matters of salvation, but not other aspects of the text. Mainline Protestants believe that while God inspired scripture and the Bible is authoritative, it was nonetheless written by humans and, therefore, is subject to human error. These limited approaches to inerrancy allow for historical and scientific oddities in the Bible, as well as internal contradictions. It’s worth noting that Eastern Orthodox Christians do not recognize inerrancy as a core doctrine and instead prioritize church traditions.
The problem lies with conservative evangelical churches, specifically American ones, where the doctrine of inerrancy is taken to its extreme. Their reasoning is as follows: if God is infallible and all knowing, and the Bible is the word of God, then the Bible has to be without error or contradiction in all that it affirms, whether in matters of faith, practice, history, or science. Humans may have written the words, but it was the Holy Spirit who directed their pens. Conversely, if the Bible is wrong about history, why would we trust what it says about salvation? This approach is termed strict inerrancy and is best articulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
You can see how strict inerrancy and the scientific method do not mix. From the very start, Genesis Chapter 1, these world views collide. Whereas the Catholic version of inerrancy can sit alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution and play nicely, the fundamentalist evangelical version cannot. Catholics can faithfully read Genesis as theological storytelling. A practitioner of strict inerrancy, however, believes God created the earth and all its plants and animals over six 24-hour periods and rested on the seventh. The theory of evolution requires a much longer time horizon.
It’s why there are several museums across the United States, such as the Creation Museum, that teach the universe is 6,000 years old and dinosaurs and humans coexisted. These museums are under the purview of a group called Answers in Genesis, and their theory is called Young Earth Creationism. They have plenty of interesting things to say about dinos, which I link to here for your enjoyment. For context, scientists date the appearance of Homo sapiens to around 350,000 years ago and theorize an large asteroid snuffed the dinosaurs out 66 million years ago.
If your truth is grounded in the strict inerrancy of scripture and science contradicts that truth by carbon dating dinosaur fossils, then science is blaspheming your religion. If this is how you believe, the destruction of America’s scientific establishment makes perfect sense, and may very well be a divine mandate because science is spreading wickedness and leading society away from salvation.
By now, I assume most readers will accept my assertion of the Trump Administration’s authoritarianism with little trepidation. But you might be asking, what’s with the dinosaurs, Blake? Sadly, I have evidence to present.
Before I get to the good stuff, I’m fairly certain Donald Trump isn’t a particularly religious person, despite selling his very own God Bless the U.S.A. Bible. He probably doesn’t care when or how dinosaurs became extinct, either. What Trump knows is that fundamentalist Christians love him.
Notwithstanding Trump’s three divorces, dalliances with porn stars, love of money, and general unneighborly behavior, some evangelical Church leaders have proclaimed, for all to hear, that the Don is anointed by God to lead the faithful. They dismiss his moral failings and compare him to the Persian Emperor Cyrus. Cyrus was a non-believer who the Bible says God worked through to free the Jewish people from Babylonian rule, allowing them to end their exile and return to Jerusalem.
As is only natural, President Trump loves his fundamentalist Christian supporters right back. It’s why the President has surrounded himself with the kind of Christians who think Noah had a velociraptor stowed below deck on the Ark. Here’s a quick sampling:
Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff, is 100 percent involved with the dinosaurs lived alongside humans museum.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s church, and his children’s school, are part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Generally speaking, these churches follow strict inerrancy and uphold anti-scientific beliefs such as the earth being 6,000 years old.
Paula White, the Director of the White House Faith Office, is associated with an evangelical movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders claim that God speaks directly to them. On her website, she professes her belief in the inerrancy of scripture and proclaims, “spiritual warfare is real, and every believer is called to stand in victory through the authority of Jesus Christ… Spiritual warfare is how we silence the enemy and enforce the will of God on earth as it is in heaven.” This is the person President Trump tasked with eradicating anti-Christian bias in America. Never mind most Christian denominations would consider several of her views heretical.
Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, is a member of the Pentecostal Four Square church, which follows a fairly strict inerrancy, but has never taken a position on evolution. There official position is no position, which should tell you all you need to know.
While not a member of Trump’s administration, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson rejects modern science as evidenced by his ties to the Creation Museum. He is friends with its founder, has provided it legal services, and written op-eds and blog posts in support of its mission. He very much believes the Bible is without historical or scientific error and has said, “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious. What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it – that’s my worldview. That’s what I believe and so I make no apologies for it.”
There are several minor characters throughout the Trump Administration espousing similar views. Others, like Russell Vought, the influential Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget and leading architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, are unabashed Christian nationalists who are nonetheless tight lipped about their views on particular theological issues.
On a practical level, science and fundamentalism rarely coexist. Science, by its very nature, is exploratory and inquisitive. When practiced correctly, it seeks knowledge, not confirmation of preconceived ideas. For a society to excel at science, it must not only have the right policy mixture, it must be open to new and diverse ideas.
In college, I took a course in Islamic law (aka Sharia). I retained very little because I was wasting my parent’s money playing video games back in the dorm. But one thing from this class did stick with me. There was a time when the Islamic world dominated mathematics, medicine, law, and astronomy. For 800 years, Islamic societies outpaced Europe, which was mired in the dark ages. The Islamic world was at the cross roads of commerce and learning, liberally incorporating Greek, Persian, and Indian philosophy. As a result, Islam spread rapidly. History refers to this period as the Islamic Golden Age. Everything was going well, until religious authorities turned their backs on learning.
The assigned reading called this period ‘the end of reason.’ A period when theologians like Al-Ghazali and ibn Taymiyyah popularized Islamic mysticism and Koranic literalism, effectively turning the tide against open inquiry. Over time, a wide variety of Islamic thought gave way to religious fundamentalism. This fundamentalism infiltrated theology and law, and dogmatic adherence to specific interpretations of the Koran took hold. As a result, Islamic society became less adaptable and eventually succumbed to European colonialism followed by despotic regimes.
Blake
PS — I researched Donald Trump’s thoughts on dinosaurs. Sadly, I didn’t unearth any public pronouncements, but the internet did provide me with this gem:
PPS — I struggled to think of a catchy science themed title for this post. The first idea I mined for inspiration was President Trump’s insistence the U.S. government spent $8 million to “turn mice transgender.” He trumpeted this figure during an address to Congress as proof Elon Musk’s DOGE team was delivering the goods. To arrive at $8 million, DOGE’s super geniuses added up the cost of several studies that used mice as test subjects to determine risks associated with hormone therapies. While these therapies are used in gender-affirming care, you can sleep soundly tonight knowing your government wasn’t trying to create transgender mice. Because, let’s face it, even Deep State operatives know transgender mice aren’t good at high school sports. Ultimately, I couldn’t think of a title that was both clever and inoffensive, so I abandoned the notion. Before I gave up, I did, out of curiosity, type the prompt “transgender mice” into an AI image generator. It produced a lovable cartoon mouse with an extra set of forelegs jutting out of its back. This brightened my spirits because it’s more proof that AI won’t (or shouldn’t) be taking over the world any time soon.
PPPS (is that a thing?) — If you are interested in learning about how modern authoritarians hijack countries, I highly recommend Anne Applebaum’s books, particularly ‘Twilight of Democracy’ and ‘Kleptocracy Inc’. If you are eager to explore a critical view of America’s fundamentalist evangelical churches and Christian nationalism, take a look at ‘The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory’ by Tim Alberta. If you want to delve into how seemingly wasteful, easy to ridicule scientific inquiry can be beneficial, I suggest A Defense of Weird Research.