I sat by myself at one end of the boardroom, twiddling with just a few notes on the table in front of me. At the opposite end were about ten older men in suits and ties peering over their tables, arms crossed. It wouldn’t have been difficult for somebody just walking in to find out which end of the room held the facility.
After my transient opening statement, the remainder of our time was put aside for “discussion.” The two-hour meeting felt more like an inquisition. The first questioner hardly let the silence settle after I spoke: “Jim, I went to high school together with your father. We even went on a mission trip to Mexico together. I’ve known you because you were a child. What happened to you?”
I’ve replayed this scene in my head 100 times, various what I say in an try to get my accusers to get up, shake my hand, and say, “Oh, now we see. That is smart. Sorry for the difficulty.” But each time it ends the identical way: I actually have to offer up my position as a tenured professor of philosophy and leave the faculty I’ve served for 17 years.
My crime? Believing what 99 percent of those that have a PhD in biology or medicine imagine: that human beings evolved over time and share common ancestors with every other life form on the planet. But this was a small Christian college, considered one of the places where evolutionary theory is deemed incompatible with Christian beliefs. And not only incompatible—evolution is taken into account dangerous. These men believed that hearing anything positive about evolution would make students doubt the Bible. If you possibly can’t imagine the creation account within the very first chapter of the Bible, their pondering goes, then why imagine any of it?
I don’t imagine faith is so fragile. I’d already shared with the panel examples of the ways faith and science cannot only coexist but actually strengthen one another. But the rhetoric of distinguished young-earth creationist groups so unsettled the faculty leadership that, after questioning me, they modified the official statement of beliefs that faculty must sign every year.
To be fair, I wasn’t technically fired. I could have stayed if I agreed to the brand new rules. There are still just a few other faculty members there who would admit behind closed doors that they accept evolution. But they’ll’t teach it as true, like they do photosynthesis or germ theory. They can’t publish scholarly work that defends it. And they definitely can’t have leadership positions in organizations that advocate for evolution—even when that advocacy comes from a Christian viewpoint.
That gatekeeping not only worries but saddens me, because my engagement with science has led me to a deeper, more authentic faith. It troubles me too, because repeatedly I’ve seen that this sort of hostility toward science leads Christians—especially students asking questions on the religion they inherited—away from Christianity by drawing a line that needn’t exist.
I do understand why some Christians draw that line, though. I feel their logic works something like this: We wish to persuade folks that the Bible will be trusted. When people today pick up a Bible and browse a story from Genesis, they could be skeptical that it really could have happened similar to the text says. That sort of doubt will eat away on the foundations of scriptural truth and make people doubt other features of what the Bible claims. To really counter these doubts, we must show that these stories could have happened just as described. That will persuade folks that the Bible is telling the reality.
But in practice, I find, it often works the opposite way around. When we shut down sincere questions on the Bible, we don’t persuade people it’s telling the reality. We make them skeptical of our entire faith.
“My church lied to me.” That’s how writer Philip Yancey answered on my podcast after I asked whether he was frustrated with how his church conditioned him to take into consideration science. Yancey has written lots of books critiquing the simple answers given by the Christian community to difficult questions.
He grew up in a fundamentalist church in Atlanta that denied there have been ever dinosaurs, and so they preached that Black people were cursed and will never be leaders. Yet when Yancey won a summer fellowship on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he discovered his mentor could be a Black man with a PhD in chemistry. That’s when he realized his church had lied about race. “Lied” is a reasonably strong charge, but they were obviously improper. He went on:
And in the event that they’re improper about race, possibly they’re improper about evolution, possibly they’re improper in regards to the Bible, possibly they’re improper about Jesus. And it was an enormous crisis of religion. And the one way I handled it was simply to back off from faith for a time frame. It took me—and is taking me—an extended time frame to sort out. That’s what I do as a author, to sort out what’s price keeping and what must be shed, since the church doesn’t all the time get it right. And if you happen to get it improper on science, if you happen to get it improper on considered one of these topics, you’re opening the door to people just shelling out with the whole lot that the church taught.
That’s a reasonably good description of the best way religious organizations push people away when they provide scarcely credible answers to sincere questions. There is barely a slight difference between answering an issue with a far-fetched answer that must definitely be accepted as unquestionably true and never answering the query in any respect.
Toward the tip of my time as a professor, a student got here into my office in tears. She had just come from a Bible class where she asked an issue in regards to the way our faith tradition typically interpreted some passage. I don’t even remember now which passage, but I do remember the reply she said the professor gave: “You shouldn’t be asking questions like that.”
I wish what that student experienced from a Bible professor and what Yancey experienced from his church were isolated experiences. But I’m afraid they should not, and this habit of putting a swift and definitive end to questions is contributing to the well-documented dechurching of the American people.
One of the massive reasons young people walk away from their faith is that their questions should not taken seriously. They have questions specifically about science, but church leaders don’t seem to understand this—or else they provide answers that appear bizarre and outlandish in comparison with mainstream and well-confirmed scientific views.
The result’s that individuals grow up in religious communities with a specific view of science that’s so tightly wedded to a specific view of the Bible that it is basically a package deal. Then, after they get out into the true world (and even just watch a nature documentary) and realize that their view of science is clearly improper, they throw out the entire package. They dispense “with the whole lot that the church taught,” within the words of Yancey.
Hearing from a number of former students who went down that path made me want to begin addressing these topics with my current students, giving them a spot to ask questions and showing that science doesn’t must lead them away from faith. I wanted my students to see that they didn’t have to offer up their faith due to science. Proclaiming that message is what led to my departure from the faculty, but I’m still working to indicate there may be a greater way.
Jim Stump is vice chairman for programs at BioLogos, host of the podcast Language of God, and writer of The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith.
From the newly released book THE SACRED CHAIN: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith by James Stump. Copyright © 2024 by James Stump. Published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
