Research and destroy: how the religious right promotes its own "experts" to combat mainstream science.

• Author: Mooney, Chris

Ever since he was a kid, Joel Brind found himself drawn to science. In 1961, when he was 10, Brind got his hands on a Life magazine story about the electron microscope and the flesh window it had opened onto the cell and its curiously shaped organelles. "Then and there I decided to become a biochemist," Brind recalled in a 2000 essay in Physician magazine, a publication of Focus on the Family, a leading religious right group. You see, Brind may have received his biochemistry Ph.D. from New York University in 1981, but he passed a far more important personal milestone four years later when he found Jesus. Soon Brind recognized the "noble task" God had chosen for him. He would prove the biological connection between having an abortion and contracting breast cancer later in life, thereby dissuading countless women from killing their unborn children. "With a new belief in a meaningful universe, I felt compelled to use science for its noblest, life-saving purpose," Brind wrote.

Brind, now a professor of biology and endocrinology at Baruch College of the City University of New York, had an uphill battle ahead of him. Studies dating back to 1957 had found varying results on whether abortion raises the risk of breast cancer, but scientists frequently cited methodological flaws in the positive studies. Then in 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine published a massive study of 1.5 million women in Denmark that found no connection, more or less closing the door on the so-called "ABC link." "The scientific community felt this was by far the best study that had been done to date, and really settled the issue," says Lynn Rosenberg, an epidemiologist at Boston University who has participated in the ABC debate.

But that didn't stop Brind, who continued to insist that the ABC link was alive and well. Though he does not appear to have published any original research on the question, Brind--who did not return calls for this article--became a prolific writer of letters to academic journals and of articles in pro-life newsletters. In 1999, he even co-founded a think tank, the innocuously named Breast Cancer Prevention Institute, to promote his theory. Even as mainstream scientists were discarding the earlier pro-ABC studies, Brind's PR initiative started to drive policy. Pushed by pro-lifers, several states--including Texas, Kansas, and Minnesota--now require health-care providers to inform women about breast cancer risks before performing an abortion. In Washington, conservative politicians also embraced Brind's "science." His biggest coup came in 2002 when, following a letter from Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and other pro-life members of Congress, the National Cancer Institute altered an online fact sheet that hat discounted abortion breast cancer risks, updating it to suggest that studies were inconclusive.

Brind's story provides a case study in how religious conservatives have shifted gears in their battles over science and policy. Instead of simply lecturing about the moral evils of abortion, they've increasingly depicted the procedure as damaging to women's health. And on a range of other issues, Christian conservatives have similarly adopted the veneer of scientific and technical expertise instead of merely asserting their heartfelt beliefs. Their claims--that abortion causes mental problems in women, that condoms aren't very effective in preventing HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, that adult stem cells have more research promise than embryonic ones, and so on--now frequently comprise the right's chief arguments on these issues. Granted, the Christian right's new "science" generally remains on the fringe of the scientific community. But since conservative funders have managed to underwrite a variety of think tanks and advocacy groups that push these arguments, it has nevertheless influenced policy at the state and federal level.

Developing an arsenal of scientific arguments may represent a strategic innovation for the religious right. But Brind's attempts to prove a link between abortion and breast cancer also show how this new tactic can backfire. When NCI changed its breast cancer Fact sheet in response to conservative advocacy, the institute met With howls of outrage from breast cancer advocates. Under public pressure, NCI then assembled a workshop of over 100 experts to reinvestigate the alleged link between abortion and breast cancer. Blind was the sole dissenter. Soon afterward, the group reaffirmed that abortion "is not associated With an increase in breast cancer risk."

So while Brind may carry on his crusade through non-scientific channels, he's clearly lost the scientific debate. Moreover, the NCI incident has contributed to an unprecedented mobilization among scientists eager to flex some policy clout. Already, scores of Nobel laureates have endorsed John Kerry for president, and the politicization of science, especially with regard to embryonic stem-cell research, may turn our to be among the more potent issues Democrats use against George W. Bush. Pursuing analogies to mainstream science was supposed to lend newfound legitimacy and strength to religious conservatism. But in the long run, it might just doom those who invoke inch techniques to defeat.

The id of ID

To understand how the religious right got science, it helps to examine the long-running battle over evolution. Though evolutionary theory has been controversial ever since the 1859 publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, what we now call creationism--America's religiously inspired anti-evolution movement--had its origins in the early decades of the...