For top U.S. experts, faith and science work together

NEW YORK » The relationship between faith and science has faced its share of strain during the coronavirus pandemic — but for some scientists leading the nation’s response, the two have worked in concert.

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins founded a nonprofit focused on “the harmony between science and biblical faith.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH’s senior infectious disease specialist, has said he isn’t active in organized religion but credited his Jesuit schooling with burnishing the values that drive his public service.

And Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describes his faith and his public health work as mutually reinforcing.

“One of the great things about faith is, you can approach life with a sense of hope — no matter what the challenges you’re dealing with, that there’s a path forward,” Redfield told The Associated Press.

The influence of faith on some of the government’s top coronavirus fighters illustrates its complicated connection to science. While tensions over public worship’s effect on public health amid the pandemic — with President Donald Trump declaring religious services “essential” — personal spirituality, in all of its forms, remains an unquestioned guidepost for some scientists guiding the U.S. response. as Fauci, his fellow Catholic. But Redfield’s modesty is itself a facet of how his faith plays out in his public persona, as his longtime friend William Blattner put it.

Redfield sees people of faith as “not holier than anybody — we’re just who we are,” said Blattner, who co-founded University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology alongside Redfield and a third prominent AIDS researcher, Robert Gallo, in the mid-1990s.

“You don’t see him jumping up to the microphone. You see him speaking as he’s required,” Blattner said of his friend. Faith helps Redfield “filter out the noise and distraction” of the push to contain the virus, Blattner added, affording “him, and us, the ability to see more clearly.”

Redfield was tapped by Trump, while Collins’ and Fauci’s stints as government scientists predate 2016. Collins, for his part, was already a vocal advocate for communicating what he sees as the consistency between religious belief and evidence-based science before he was named to lead the NIH.

After writing a 2006 book about his journey from youthful atheism to belief in God, the 70-year-old Collins founded the BioLogos Foundation to help further a dialogue about religion’s relationship to science. Since the pandemic began, he has received a major religion prize for his work.

of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told C-SPAN in 2015 that “I’m less enamored of organized religion than I am with the principles of humanity and goodness to mankind and doing the best that you can.”

While Fauci distanced himself from organized religion in that 2015 interview, he has described himself as Catholic and told C-SPAN his Jesuit education had helped develop the “principles that I run my life by.” Those principles came into sharper view this month when Fauci recorded a video for graduates of high schools affiliated with the Jesuits, a Catholic order that focuses on service.

After citing “precision of thought and economy of expression” as two watchwords, he invoked “social justice” as another value instilled by his Jesuit education. Fauci graduated in 1958 from New York’s Regis High School, a Jesuit institution.

“And now is the time, if ever there was one, for us to care selflessly about one another,” Fauci said.