Science and religion are never far from the public square, but the ways they interact are not always evident. Some say religion and science need not be entirely separate affairs, pointing to scientists who are ardent religious believers such as Newton and Galileo, whereas others affirm that religious believers don’t appreciate science’s insights.
But Gita Johar, the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, says the relationship between religious belief and science is more nuanced than that.
With her colleagues, including Michael Morris, the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at CBS, Johar decided to investigate what aspects of religious belief might contribute to a distrust of science and why. As she explains, “We wanted to go beyond ‘it’s just that religion and science don’t mix.’”
Morris believes that combatting science denial is vital to both academia and to society at large: “Not only is that dangerous socially, we also thought that science denial is an existential threat to the research university, because the research university is premised on innovation, science, and discovery.”
Johar and Morris, along with then-PhD student Yu Ding, examined religious belief and trust of science in US counties during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent investigations examined the effects of religious intensity, diversity, and tolerance on science belief or denial in countries around the world.
The research team’s findings paint a complicated, but ultimately encouraging, picture.
How the research was done: The authors analyzed several sources of data. For the study of COVID-19 social distancing in the United States, the authors used aggregated cell phone location data to determine to what extent social distancing protocols were followed. They correlated this with county-level data from the US Religion Census and a computed diversity index to determine what correlation, if any, existed between relative religious homogeneity and science denial.
For the second study, which looked across the world’s countries, the researchers used country scores from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test and an innovation index based on patents. They analyzed these metrics against Pew Research data on country-level religious diversity.
A third study used World Values Survey data to further examine country-level beliefs. For a fourth study, the authors examined the degree of adherence by US Christians to science-based social distancing recommendations during Easter of 2020.
One particularly notable study tested causation between religious intolerance and science denial. The team recruited 400 Evangelical Protestants and randomly exposed half of them to a New Testament verse that discounts the validity of other religions. They then surveyed the participants on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with various science-denying statements.
What the researchers found: Ding, Johar, and Morris discovered that people who live in religiously homogeneous areas, regardless of what faith they practiced, were more likely both to deem their own faith more valid than others (i.e., to be intolerant of other religions) and to disregard scientific findings and ignore science-based advice.
The researchers theorize that much religious intolerance stems from lack of exposure to and experience coexisting with believers of other faiths. These insular religious communities are also more likely to find science — another rival belief system — to be implicitly untrustworthy. Significantly, the research team was able to show causation, not just correlation: In the study involving Protestant Evangelicals, those adherents who were “primed” with scripture dismissive of other faiths agreed more strongly with anti-science sentiments than the control group.
On the other hand, people who are religiously tolerant, whether or not they personally practice any faith, are more likely to “follow the science” when it comes to issues like vaccines. As Johar notes, Singapore’s government works to ensure that people in government housing live side-by-side with others of different beliefs. This policy likely leads to “tolerance of each other and hence tolerance of science, as seen in the country’s high PISA scores.”
Why the research matters: The study demonstrates that religious belief and trust in science are not mutually exclusive. “There isn’t any one religion by itself that causes science denial. We think what causes science denial is the lack of diversity,” Morris says.
The findings have implications for public policy and for managing compliance with scientific guidance such as public health recommendations. They also highlight the importance of dialogue across faiths and cultures, which can foster greater understanding and trust in one another and in science. According to Ding, “it may be unrealistic to ask for less intense beliefs, but we can still seek greater tolerance toward others.”
Morris's new book, Tribal, expands on these findings and broadens the conversation surrounding low religious diversity and the rise of extremist beliefs and actions.
Adapted from “When the one true faith trumps all: Low religious diversity, religious intolerance, and science denial” in PNAS Nexus, by Yu Ding of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Gita Venkataramani Johar of Columbia Business School, and Michael W. Morris of Columbia Business School.
