The Problem

How trust in science forms and fails.

Religious communities sometimes reject well-established scientific claims, and the costs can be severe, but the rejection is concentrated in particular subjects and communities where social identity and moral judgments about authority often carry more weight than the evidence itself.

Some religious communities are especially likely to reject established claims about evolution, vaccines, and climate change, with results that can be seen in vaccine refusal, disregard of climate risk, and growing suspicion of institutions whose work people depend on every day. During the COVID-19 pandemic, churches divided over vaccines and over the authority of public health itself. Clergy had to mediate between scientific institutions and skeptical congregants. Scholars had written almost nothing to help them.

These conflicts led the project to a different question: How does trust in science form in some religious communities, and why does it fail in others?

The standard story

The standard account begins with religious mistrust of science and then looks to doctrine for the cause. But evidence across countries and scientific subjects does not support that starting point.

Across sixty countries, McPhetres, Jong, and Zuckerman (2021) found that more religious people held more positive views of science in some places and more negative views in others; in many countries, religiosity had no clear relationship with views of science. No single pattern of religious hostility appears across the world. In Western samples, Leicht and colleagues (2021) found that nonreligious respondents often perceived a sharper conflict than religious respondents did. Some of the conflict attributed to believers comes from observers who expect religious commitment to produce it.

Religious skepticism also changes with the subject. Rutjens and colleagues (2022) found that vaccine skepticism tracks spiritual and religious belief, while climate skepticism follows political ideology more closely. Religious orthodoxy predicts skepticism about evolution, with little effect beyond that subject. Calling all of these responses science skepticism hides their different causes. An argument that changes someone's mind about evolution may do nothing to address doubts about vaccination, because the two doubts may have little in common.

Researchers find the social sources of mistrust most clearly when they ask what religious people think about scientists. Chinn and colleagues (2024) found that American evangelicals who distrust science tend to view scientists as a cultural threat. Simpson and Rios (2019) found that Christians' estimates of how many scientists are atheists predict their level of distrust. Joyner (2026) adds a moral dimension: communities committed to loyalty, authority, and purity trust science less when scientists appear indifferent to their welfare. People may distrust a claim because they already distrust the people and institutions that produced it.

The project therefore asks how people decide that scientific institutions deserve trust and why the answer changes from one subject or community to another; in each case, the authorities recognized by the community help form that judgment. Evidence still matters, but evidence alone cannot repair alienation from the scientific institutions that produce it.

The project's theology review calls this a disorder of trust, a problem to which every community is vulnerable. People with similar capacities for reasoning can respond quite differently to climate research or vaccination because they inhabit different institutions and recognize different people as authorities. Doctrine explains part of that difference, but it does not explain the pattern on its own.

What the project did

A question about trust requires more than one discipline. Psychologists can measure how trust works, but their methods cannot determine when skepticism is reasonable or what a church should teach about scientific authority. Philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion can take up those questions, though they had rarely pursued them together or with sustained attention to science. Trusting God and Trusting Science brought scholars from all four fields together for six workshops over three years.

The project's findings appear in What We Learned. The questions that remain unanswered appear in Open Questions.