No Christians need apply (Erin)

Marty Peretz at his TNR blog has noticed something strange about the reaction to President Obama's choice to lead the NIH:

I don't know who's behind President Obama's appointment of Dr. Francis S. Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health. Maybe it was the influence on the president of Nobel Laureate in Medicine and former director himself of the N.I.H. Harold Varmus, who runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and is the co-chairman of the Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. And maybe it was the counsel of Ezekiel Emanuel who had been chairman of the Department of Bioethics at N.I.H. until he came to the White House as Obama's prime intermediary on health care. (By the way, Zeke was an intern at TNR many years ago. An article about him appeared in the magazine several weeks ago.) Of course, the sage advice that the president has taken might have come from both of these men.

In any case, as you could tell from the news dispatch by Gardiner Harris in Thursday's New York Times, not everybody is pleased by Collins' designation. And some praise grudgingly given is faint praise, indeed. Now, I'm in no position to judge the brilliance of a medical scientist... or any scientist, for that matter. But I know with whom I can check, and there are many. So here is the consensus:

Collins is a magnificent scientist, methodical, to be sure, but uncannily insightful, even intuitive in experimental mapping. His brilliance dazzles other brilliant scientists. [...]

So what's wrong with Collins?

He is a practicing and believing Christian. It's odd--isn't it?--that this fact should make a scientific designee unfit or unsuited for a job. Soon we will hear the same about judicial nominees. The establishment mounted a sustained campaign in the Senate (and outside) against President Wilson's nomination of Louis D. Brandies to the Supreme Court on the grounds that the candidate was Jewish, although some of his critics tended to be euphemistic rather than direct about their objections. Not so those who are against Collins.

Peretz, of course, as Rod reminded me when he shared the link, is a secular Jew, so he doesn't have a dog in the "Christians are about to be excluded from public office" fight.

It's hard to argue with Peretz's point here, especially when you read the original New York Times article Peretz refers to:

"Francis Collins is an extraordinary scientist and one of the nicest guys you could ever meet," said Dr. Otis W. Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

But praise for Dr. Collins, 59, was not universal or entirely enthusiastic. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called Dr. Collins's selection a "reasonable choice." Others privately expressed unease.

There are two basic objections to Dr. Collins. The first is his very public embrace of religion. He wrote a book called "The Language of God," and he has given many talks and interviews in which he described his conversion to Christianity as a 27-year-old medical student. Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field complain about what they see as Dr. Collins's evangelism.

Please note: the Times article reports that the fact of Dr. Collins' Christianity is an "objection" to his filling the NIH post. Dr. Collins is not a creationist, and he has never experienced a conflict between his scientific research and his religious beliefs. In fact, Dr. Collins has been criticized by some for statements about abortion and embryonic stem cell research that would seem to conflict, generally speaking, with traditional Christianity.

So when Peretz wonders about the increasing sense that left-leaning liberals would prefer to exclude Christian believers from government jobs, the objections raised to Dr. Collins' appointment are an excellent illustration of that idea. We've already reached the point where, say, a Catholic, Orthodox, or other Christian in the sciences would be de facto excluded from many government positions simply for following all the teachings of his church, particularly on issues involving the sanctity of human life; but in Dr. Collins' case, it is not his practice of Christianity, but the very fact that he is a Christian, that the New York Times article reports as being one of two main objections to the Collins appointment.

We're not at the point in our cultural history where a serious Christian of any type will be told that no Christians need apply to positions within the government, of course. But the fact that Dr. Collins' profession of a faith that millions of Americans share raises concerns and objections to his appointment is, itself, a troubling sign of that possible future.