Six findings, and one idea that organized the rest.
The project changed what it was asking. It began with the question that dominates the field, why religious communities mistrust science, and ended somewhere more useful. The six findings below drove that change, and a seventh idea, critical trust, emerged from every discipline at once and now organizes the program. Each finding gives the plain version first, then the substance, then its sources. None says religious people are foolish. They say the problem has been misdescribed, and a better description points to a better response.
Finding 01
The conflict narrative is partly an artifact of who is looking.
The mistrust the standard story sets out to explain is partly produced by the people doing the looking.
The standard framing treats religious mistrust of science as the baseline phenomenon to be explained. The evidence does not support a single baseline. Across sixty countries, religiosity relates to science attitudes positively, negatively, and not at all, with no steady worldwide pattern (McPhetres, Jong, and Zuckerman, 2021). In Western samples, nonreligious individuals often perceive more religion-science conflict than religious individuals do (Leicht et al., 2021). Part of the conflict attributed to believers is supplied by observers who expect to find it.
The finding does not deny that some communities reject some science. It denies that a general religious hostility to science exists as a fact to be explained. Once the presumed conflict stops being the starting point, the useful question becomes narrower and answerable: under what conditions does trust in science form, and under what conditions does it fail?
McPhetres, Jong, and Zuckerman (2021); Leicht et al. (2021).
Finding 02
"Science skepticism" is several phenomena, not one.
Skepticism about science is not a single attitude with a single cause. It breaks apart by domain, and the parts behave differently.
Vaccine skepticism tracks spiritual and religious belief. Climate skepticism tracks political ideology more than religion. Religious orthodoxy specifically predicts skepticism about evolution, and not much beyond it (Rutjens et al., 2022). A single construct misleads both research and intervention. If the drivers differ by domain, no general remedy can exist, and a program aimed at one domain will miss the others.
That fragmentation is why the research agenda asks domain-specific questions rather than chasing one theory of the religious science skeptic. It also complicates measurement. A survey that scores a person on a general skepticism scale can hide the fact that the same score means different things across evolution, vaccines, and climate. Whether the domains are truly separate or share a general disposition is itself an open question the project could not settle.
Rutjens et al. (2022). See Open Questions P2 and unresolved tension U5.
Finding 03
The mistrust is social before it is epistemic.
For many who distrust science, the objection is about who scientists are, not chiefly about what they claim.
American evangelicals who mistrust science tend to perceive scientists as a social and cultural threat rather than as people who happen to be wrong about facts (Chinn et al., 2024). Christians' estimates of how many scientists are atheists predict how far they distrust science (Simpson and Rios, 2019). The concern is about the people and the institution, their perceived values and loyalties, before it is about any single finding.
That reorders the intervention problem. If the barrier is a judgment about who scientists are, then supplying more facts addresses the wrong thing. The reachable question is one of authority and belonging: whom a person is willing to believe, and why. The research agenda takes this up in how competing religious and scientific authority structures shape trust decisions.
Chinn et al. (2024); Simpson and Rios (2019). See Open Questions P5, P8, and I4.
Finding 04
The mistrust is moral as well as social.
Science is doubted where scientists appear to violate what a community holds sacred.
Mistrust tracks perceived moral violation. Communities that hold binding commitments to loyalty, authority, and purity trust science less when scientists seem indifferent to the community's welfare (Joyner, 2026). A documented naturalness bias, with its explicit "playing God" concerns, correlates with religiosity, yet it has never been tested in religious populations (Meier et al., 2026). Conspiracy beliefs, for their part, fail to satisfy the existential needs that generate them, which means debunking alone cannot work while alternative meaning-making might (Douglas, 2026).
These mechanisms are theological as much as psychological, and no single discipline studies them well. A psychologist can measure the naturalness bias. A theologian can ask whether a doctrine of creation reframes the "playing God" worry rather than confirming it. The agenda's question P9 puts those two moves together and asks whether theological reframing can address moral intuitions that facts leave untouched.
Joyner (2026); Meier et al. (2026); Douglas (2026), in Current Opinion in Psychology (2026). See Open Questions P9.
Finding 05
Doctrine and religious leadership cut both ways.
The same doctrines and the same church structures that can sustain skepticism can also sustain trust.
The original framing asked how doctrines sow mistrust. Volume chapters did find specific doctrinal commitments doing distinct epistemic work in climate and vaccine skepticism, with van den Brink tracing the role of eschatology and providence. They also found theological resources running the other direction. Church of England leaders translated COVID-19 vaccination into the idiom of divine gift and neighborly love, lending science their own legitimacy (Kamwendo). The community structures that carry skepticism can carry trust.
That finding is the basis of the project's account of how change actually happens. What moves a congregation is less the argument than the person trusted to make it. The finding also marks a limit the agenda takes seriously, because some communities have authority structures that route around clergy entirely, and there the trusted-messenger approach may not reach.
van den Brink and Kamwendo, Routledge volume (forthcoming). See Open Questions T5, T6, RS1, and tension U3.
Finding 06
Organized counter-knowledge is infrastructure, not ignorance.
Science-skeptical communities are not simply uninformed. They have built a rival knowledge system with its own sources and authorities.
A volume chapter analyzing 10,697 articles from religious disinformation websites identified five recurring traits that bind science skepticism to identity threat. Another traced how apocalyptic conspiracism has become a parallel epistemic community with its own media ecosystem (Sturm). The problem is not a knowledge deficit. There is a competing knowledge system to understand, with its own infrastructure, gatekeepers, and incentives.
That reframes the task. A vacuum can be filled with better information. A full and self-sustaining system cannot, at least not the same way, because it already supplies its members with explanations, community, and a story about who is lying to them. The research agenda targets how these networks form, how apocalyptic thinking spreads, and how digital media sustain science-skeptical counter-knowledge inside Christian communities.
Sturm and a content analysis of religious disinformation, Routledge volume (forthcoming). See Open Questions RS4, RS5, and RS6.
The signature concept
Critical trust
Across all four disciplines, the network converged on a position between blind deference and wholesale rejection, and called it critical trust.
The organizing idea of the project.
Workshop participants and volume contributors, independently and across psychology, theology, religious studies, and philosophy, arrived at the need for a position between scientism and the wholesale rejection of scientific authority. The theological development runs through Gijsbert van den Brink and Rope Kojonen. Katherine Dormandy carried the philosophical side. The concept appears nowhere in the project's original plan. It became the idea that organizes everything else.
Critical trust is neither the demand that laypeople accept whatever experts say, nor the posture that treats every expert claim as suspect. It is warranted and watchful trust, a disposition that keeps watching its sources rather than refusing them. The hard part is accountability. Critical trust asks how nonexperts, who cannot evaluate the technical work themselves, can still hold experts answerable for it. The network named the position without yet settling what it asks of a believer in the pew or a pastor advising a congregation.
Three dimensions remain open. Theologically, what model of authority lets lay believers hold experts accountable without either blind deference or refusal (T2, T4). Epistemically, when trust in scientific institutions is warranted and when skepticism is rational (PH1, PH2). Practically, what forms of teaching, preaching, and congregational life cultivate it (T4, T6).