THE PRESSURES of being a researcher in the social sciences, which include applying for grants, teaching, mentoring, committee work, writing, and program management—alongside parenting, church work, and the ordinary inundations of modern living—make it hard for me to get to stillness. Here is one way I try: after I drop my daughter off at school in the morning, the first part of my prayer is my rendition of a phrase from Psalm 46:10 in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament): “Be still, and know that I am God.” I repeat the phrase “Let me be still and know that you are God” to myself as I walk to the university campus.
I walk quickly as I pray. “Let me be still . . .” Thoughts of what I need to get done in the work hours ahead and what I have left undone at home immediately assault me. “Let me be still . . .” As I get nearer to campus, I try to resist the urge to start listing the litany of things I need to do. “Let me be still . . .” As I wait for the light in front of campus to turn green, I stand on one foot and then the other, trying to get in a few balance exercises that my physical therapist told me to do every day after I had a joint in my toe replaced; I am easily distracted. “Let me be still . . .”
Once I am on campus and through the beautiful entrance with its ornate architecture, my walk takes me through a building-sized art installation, which has a square in the top that is open to the sky. When I remember, I stop there and look through the square. (Sky and clouds often make me feel closer to God.) It is here that I turn to the second part of my prayer: “Let me know that I am loved fully by God.” I pray this piece of the prayer because I often feel there are so many people to impress as part of my work—colleagues, students, funders, and reviewers, to name just a few—and the culture of academic science is pressure-filled, highly competitive, and at times cutthroat. I often feel too limited. “Let me know that I am fully loved,” that I have been created with everything I need in order to do what I need to do.
The last part of my walk takes me up several flights of stairs. With each step, I repeat the third part of my prayer: “Let me enter into what you are doing today.” When I arrive at my office at the earliest times, before the sun fully rises, I am excited to be there. I take joy in my work and see it as having a higher purpose. On the not so good days, I hustle into my office and the work ahead of me; I often consider skipping the walk to get to work faster in the car. But on the better days, I remind myself that I am participating in what God is doing in the world.
I do not solely work for myself, and my duty is beyond the self. I work for the academics I collaborate with and those who read my work. I work for the students I mentor and teach. I work for the public outside the university, for whom I try to explain my research in a way that helps them better understand the world and themselves. I work for my funders, who have their own goals and missions. I work from the place of community-based virtues like equality and justice. I feel a responsibility to use my scientific work to accomplish something meaningful, improve social problems, and help people flourish.
In my interviews with Christian scientists, I have found that many of them feel similarly about their work and their goals, sometimes drawing on the concepts of shalom and stewardship. Shalom is a Hebrew word that comes from a root that means “completeness” and “perfection,” and it refers to the peace, harmony, well-being, and prosperity that result from the flourishing of all creation.1 Shalom can mean to get involved in the messiness of the world, to try to change structures that are not just, to try to make them more just. Stewardship, or caring for the world (especially in the form of environmental protection), is often thought of as a scientific virtue, but it is a deeply Christian virtue as well, a practice that brings us closer to shalom. Christian stewardship encompasses the idea of unique humanness, that we were created by God and thus have a responsibility to care for and look after the rest of God’s creation.
As a sociologist, the twin virtues of shalom and stewardship and their related virtue of justice are ones that I have pondered a lot. They seem to be the ones best cultivated in my own discipline, which is deeply concerned with helping the other, not only on an individual basis but also in a way that may change whole structures of societies, like governments, social services, or even churches, so that they might better operate toward shalom. Theologian Walter Brueggemann writes in The Prophetic Imagination, “Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. . . . Thus the compassion of Jesus is not to be understood as a personal emotional reaction but as a public criticism in which he dares to act upon his concern against the entire numbness of the social context.”2
Christians are not original in our focus on stewardship. Christian stewardship is similar to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, which I heard about from members of different Jewish traditions when I asked about their understanding of science.3 “I think that it is absolutely fundamental to the Jewish faith to take care of the earth, to respect it, to not be wasteful, to be appreciative of the bounty, and to try to take care of it as much as possible,” a Jewish law professor told me during one of my studies. He continued, “You know, we believe very much in . . . issues of justice, and we have a belief called tikkun olam, which means heal the world.”4 Translated literally, tikkun olam means “world repair,” and it has evolved from a minor doctrine into a driving force for modern Jewish social justice and policy reform. For those of Jewish faith, working to make the world better and more harmonious is both a tenet of their religion and an important aspect of their daily lives. The hope is to bring about shalom.
When I interviewed religious scientists in India, they did not use the terms stewardship, shalom, or tikkun olam, but they explained the driving force behind their scientific work using similar concepts. One biologist, for example, spoke about feeling compelled to use his work for the benefit of others. “If you walk out of campus . . . you will see a bunch of kids with no clothes on their backs,” he said. “So you think immediately, I just spent a million dollars on [scientific technology for my experiments]. . . . I better get something out of it that hopefully is useful for somebody in the future.”5
For many religious scientists in India, being a “good scientist” means doing work that alleviates suffering and poverty. This was a theme that came up often in my interviews. “Our [science] institute is the temple. So all the time we pray here in our own lab so that God can bless us. Physically, we do not pray, but working here is like praying to God,” said one physics professor. “So we are always trying to find something new . . . that will be useful for our society.”6
My studies have found that many Christians in science also see their scientific work as a way to help create a more just and peaceful world, and they allow virtues and principles of their faith to affect how they use their science in the world.7 “Christian scientists are motivated to be justice-bringers,” one Christian biologist told me, explaining that “it’s kind of a feeling sometimes like we are the sirens, maybe more so than in some other fields and as much as that may make you feel like you have an important job in the world.”8
“He Has Made Me for Science”
One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1981 British film Chariots of Fire. There is one line in particular that many of us who have seen the movie remember. Eric Liddell’s sister is reprimanding him for neglecting his responsibilities before God as a missionary as he devotes his focus to competitive running. Liddell responds, “I believe that God made me for a purpose. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”9 Many of the Christian scientists I have surveyed and interviewed over the years view their scientific work as a calling and a way that they feel God’s pleasure and live out God’s purpose for them. This purpose is often seen as fulfilling their responsibilities as God’s stewards. Many also believe that viewing their scientific work through the lens of their Christian faith helps them see ways they can use their work toward shalom.
I have met Christian scientists who have selected certain research areas or projects because they believe they will benefit society, create positive relationships with colleagues, or foster virtues like patience, kindness, and humility in the scientific community and in the broader society. I have spoken with Christian scientists who have specifically chosen work that will help alleviate poverty or suffering or who have declined funding from a source that might use their research to contribute to nuclear proliferation or to harm the environment. Other Christian scientists draw on their faith and their sense of purpose to help them deal with the demands and competition that define a career in science, to help them keep going in the face of personal or family challenges, to infuse meaning into mundane work, or to instill that same purpose in their students. Some describe being divinely called to practice science.
“I see all of the different parts of the scientific career as a calling, with the idea that vocation is God’s calling for your life,” said Jaime, a Christian evolutionary biologist we met earlier. “Our standards—as Christians—of scholarship are always intertwined with our standards for teaching and engaging students to uncover their own calling as well as to train them to be excellent scientists.”10
“I definitely pray regularly. And I pray that the outcomes of my work would be meaningful and helpful to people,” said a Christian immunologist who works on very rare disorders that attack the disease-fighting systems in children’s bodies. “You know, I always ask for God’s best in my work. But . . . if I’m just focused on my own kind of academic achievements and outputs it might not be.” His prayer, he said, is that he would see science as a kind of mission field that allows him to live out a higher purpose. He told me, “I see science as an amazing tool to intervene on the human condition . . . where there is suffering, where there are children who did not choose to have this immune deficiency and be in and out of the hospital. You know, we seek to understand and learn more about the science and biology, and drive at the root of the biology. [We want to] tweak the biology or transplant, so that child can have a meaningful, healthy life. And I look at that as a calling and a mission.”11
One evangelical Christian biologist told me that he sees his work as “really much more of an integrated calling.” Echoing Chariots of Fire, he said, “God made me for this. To be a full Christian is to be fully what he has made me for, and he has made me for science.”12
Stewarding the Environment
One survey I conducted found that 28 percent of evangelicals and 31 percent of mainline Protestants say they are “very interested” in caring for the environment.13 But climate and environmental scientists have also told me they sometimes meet Christians who are hesitant to discuss caring for the environment as a piece of Christian stewardship, as a piece of bringing God’s shalom to the world. Some Christians are quite vocal against environmental efforts, worrying that placing so much emphasis on caring for the environment will lead us to neglect caring for humans. I have experienced these attitudes firsthand in my studies. One church youth minister, for example, explained to me his view: “If we have the opportunity, we should help take care of this planet that we’ve been given. Having said that, I also believe that the value of human life is higher than the value of a whale or a species of monkey.”14
Many Christian scientists, however, see environmental care, or climate change research, as tied to caring for people and as one way we fulfill our responsibility as stewards of the earth. For these Christians, repairing and caring for the environment and addressing climate change is a way to show appreciation, respect, and reverence for God and for all of God’s creation. “For Christians, doing something about climate change is about living our faith—caring for those who need our help, our neighbors here at home or on the other side of the world, and taking responsibility for this planet that God created and entrusted to us,” says Katharine Hayhoe, a scientist and evangelical Christian who is vocal about the intersection of stewardship and caring for the climate.15
The National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 local churches from forty different denominations, has explained its motivation to care for the environment this way: “To provide scientific expertise toward specific altruistic goals, to offer excellent medical practices on behalf of the sick, to produce healthy food for those who are hungry, to offer assistance in the preservation of the environment and to strive for the stewardship of natural resources—all of these things demonstrate a high calling, extending common grace around the globe.”16
One evangelical biology professor told me, “We’re talking here about the biblical basis for environmental stewardship . . . the responsibility that we have to take care of the world around us.” He continued, “I remember a theologian a few years ago that said the pollution of [our] lake was blasphemous. In other words, . . . God made all this and then what we were doing was just like taking a beautiful painting and throwing paint at it or something.”17 It reminded me of the words in Jeremiah 2:7:
I brought you into a fertile land
to enjoy its fruits and rich produce.
But you came and defiled my land
and made my inheritance detestable.
A Christian physicist I interviewed told me,
I always kind of start from the basis of human beings as being created in the image of God with the specific purpose of being the stewards of God’s creation and, in light of that, we understand that the world is good and it’s beautiful and it’s understandable and acceptable to us. And we should try to understand it as best as we can and that we should not just try to understand it but also preserve it and protect it. I think this is our job. So that would affect the way that I look at environmental policy.18
A Christian physician I spoke with said, “Throughout the world, the poor are often victims of environmental degradation. And so one of the most important things that the Bible teaches us is that what God most cares about is the poor. . . . And so to the extent that degradation of the environment is harming the poor and making them even worse off, then it is an essential issue for Christians to get engaged in.”19
In one study I conducted, I met a pastor who told me he sees “science as a tool from God that humans can use to help each other and improve the quality of life.” His congregation, he said, cares for the environment by recycling, buying natural products, and hosting events aimed at exploring the relationship between faith and creation. “In the book of Genesis . . . God gave the garden to humankind. . . . Some theologians think that the garden is the representation of the entire earth. God gave earth to humankind to care for. . . . We’re supposed to take care of the earth,” he said. “What does that include? It includes animals. It includes air. . . . Let me say this: We receive a great deal of inspiration from Scripture about how to be good stewards. We want to be good stewards.”20
Other churches should follow this lead, introducing environmental care to their congregants through practice as well as preaching. Environmental care is not often a topic addressed in churches, which could be part of the reason some Christians do not feel comfortable discussing environmental issues or climate change. Even small-scale actions, such as cleaning up a local area or working to reduce waste in the church or community, can help Christians see environmental care as a way of caring for people.
Wholeness through Diversity
Several Christian scientists I interviewed explicitly discussed increasing representation and equality in science as one of their goals and one of the ways they enter into shalom through their work as scientists. Some of these scientists specifically connect their faith to their efforts to increase opportunities for those who are underrepresented in science. Studying and increasing diversity in science is an area about which I am particularly passionate as a sociologist who is a Christian. Some of those I have interviewed for my studies join me in this. Jaime, the evolutionary biologist, for example, spoke about being on the committee within her guild that works to promote and represent diversity in her scientific field and about how fighting for diversity in science can be very much a piece of one’s faith: “I find that the other people who are on that committee also tend to be people who have some sort of faith tradition—whether or not they talk about it a lot, they see their way of living out their faith as working very hard to increase opportunities for people who . . . otherwise wouldn’t have opportunities in science.”21
When we look at the US scientific community, we see that nonwhites, especially African Americans and Latinos/as, are vastly underrepresented in science. For example, black Americans, who comprise 12 to 14 percent of the US population, make up just over 1 percent of all those who have careers in science, medicine, or technology. Women of all ethnic and racial groups are also underrepresented in the basic sciences and some forms of medicine. While women represent more than 50 percent of the overall US population, they represent less than 10 percent of many science fields. Yet, African Americans, Latinos/as, and white women are all overrepresented in churches. Nearly 80 percent of black Americans see themselves as committed Christians, and nearly 77 percent of Latinos/as see themselves as Catholics, Protestants, or evangelical Christians.22 One reason African Americans and Latinos/as are underrepresented in science is that they are more likely to attend lower-resourced schools with poorer science education. A related problem is that Christians of color don’t often hear about scientists who believe like them or see scientists who look like them. One Christian geneticist I met, one of the few black women in her field at an elite university, was the first woman and the first African American to become head of a genetics program. During the five years she spent as a student, she said, there was only one black speaker brought in for her department’s weekly seminar.23 For many African Americans, science is “a no-trespassing zone,” one black pastor said.24 A Latino pastor told me, “I do think . . . it is helpful to have somebody of your own skin color [in science], because . . . to see one of your own would give an inspiration.”25
Representation matters, and the lack of representation of women, people of color, and Christians in science is an issue that ought to concern the church. If Christians don’t see themselves in the scientific enterprise, it becomes unlikely that they will follow that career path—and with fewer Christians in science, it becomes more difficult to show that science can be compatible with our faith.
Those who have been and are most marginalized in our society often are deeply compelled to fight against structures that marginalize others. One of the best ways to encourage Christians to enter science might be to frame science as a calling that provides an avenue for stewardship. Science can offer Christians many different opportunities to work toward repairing, healing, and protecting God’s creation. The science career can be used not only to care for the environment but also to care for people in the interest of justice, equality, and human flourishing. Christians should understand how a scientific career can allow them to contribute to shalom. Church leaders can help by inviting scientists to talk with congregants about how they use their scientific work to bring positive change to the world. “Every four years or so, we do have a science and Christian faith kind of all-day seminar, and . . . we try to have some scientists come and talk about how amazing the natural world is, and just to kind of get students marinating in the joy of discovery,” one scientist shared. He continued, “We need to do a lot better job of that [on a week-to-week basis], like providing opportunities . . . during worship services [for people in churches to talk about their scientific work]. . . . I think we could do a better job in our youth curriculum. We don’t really do much right now in the sciences, and I think having students hang out with scientists who are faithful followers of Christ and just allowing those students to pick the brains of these scientists could be really good.”26
Churches also need to ensure that underrepresented students of color have access to science resources and that voices long ignored are included in their dialogues on science and faith. “If you look at the faith-science conversation in particular, it’s mainly white people,” an evangelical biologist said. He argued, “We need to engage the entire church in the United States on faith and science issues. [How we engage on faith and science] really does include black churches and Latino/a churches and Asian churches too. And their experience is different and so they might have different questions and so we should at least ask them, and I think it’s really striking that there may be resistance to that.”27
This evangelical biologist also told me that his focus on the virtues underlying stewardship and shalom have helped him connect with nonreligious colleagues and earn their respect and support. They stand on common ground in what they hope their work will accomplish. “They can see that I’m working to really serve the common good, to build bridges, and to work for peace,” he said, “and that counts for so much for them, even if they disagree on particulars.”28
Further Discussion