Fear Me Not: The Power of Curiosity to Heal a World Addicted to Certainty

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Let me start with a definition, because “Christian nationalism” gets used in ways that make this conversation harder than it needs to be. Amanda Tyler, of the Baptist Joint Committee, offers the cleanest one: the belief that America is defined by Christianity and that the government should keep it that way. That is a claim about power. It is dressed in the language of faith, but its content is political—who gets to define the nation, and who gets excluded from full membership in it.

This episode is careful about the distinction, because what I’m writing against is not the faith of my neighbors. The affirming congregations, the Black churches that have been the spine of every freedom struggle, the synagogues organizing for immigrants—those are partners, not targets. Drawing on Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne and Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers, I show how a warrior Christ was constructed, and how a well-funded network has worked for decades to place its people in power.

I make the case that Donald Trump is not an aberration in this movement but a perfect fit—a man whose product is emotional certainty, sold to people genuinely frightened by a complex, changing world. The real problem isn’t Trump. It’s the gap between the world as it is and the world as we wish it were. He found that gap and built a career inside it.

I walk through Project 2025, the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, a 2024 sermon that recycles the exact argument J. Edgar Hoover used against Dr. King, and the institutional abuse scandals that show what happens when no one can tell an institution it is wrong. I close on strategy—deep canvassing, and what Adam Grant calls confident humility. Their certainty gap is their strength. Confident humility is ours.

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In the summer of 2016, I went to testify before the Michigan State Board of Education about my son. What I didn’t expect were the buses—hundreds of protesters bused in from churches across the state, ready to testify that what they were witnessing was satanic abuse and the grooming of children. The conflict in that room was not really about transgender students. It was about epistemology: who gets to decide what counts as evidence, and whose evidence counts.

This episode is about the war on knowledge—a coordinated, well-funded, sustained assault on the institutions and practices through which a society honestly figures out what is true. The attack on public education is not incidental to Christian nationalism. It is central to it. I trace the line from the segregation academies that followed Brown v. Board, through the record-breaking surge in book bans documented by PEN America, to my own hometown of Dexter, Michigan, where a planned reading of I Am Jazz became a flashpoint.

And here’s the thing I most want you to see: manufactured doubt and manufactured certainty are the same weapon wearing different costumes. One says the answer is clear and it’s God. The other says the answer is unclear and the experts can’t agree. Same goal—to keep honest critical thinking from ever reaching the evidence. Oreskes and Conway documented the playbook in Merchants of Doubt; the attacks on the evidence base for gender-affirming care follow it exactly.

From an engineering perspective, the long-term consequences are terrifying. Societies that suppress the honest production of knowledge don’t become more orderly—they become less capable of managing the problems they face. When manufactured certainty overrides knowledge, people die. That’s not a metaphor. But people are also fighting back, and a lot of the bravest resistance is coming from the students themselves.

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This episode is about coalition—and I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach with generosity. I am not writing this from a sense of serene magnanimity. I’m writing it with the practical awareness that we won’t find a solution unless we find common ground.

A faith coalition is essential to finding that common ground. I’m not asking religious people to leave their convictions at the door. I’m asking them to do what the best thinkers in every tradition have understood is required: to offer their neighbors public reasons their neighbors can actually assess. I draw on John Courtney Murray and Reinhold Niebuhr, and on the prophetic tradition—the Black churches, the affirming congregations, the synagogues—that manufactured certainty tends to erase.

I tell the story of difficult community conversations in Saline, Michigan, and of what worked and what didn’t. Leading with the argument doesn’t work—it triggers a threat response. Leading with the relationship does, because when someone already cares about you, the evidence of your humanity doesn’t have to argue its way past the amygdala. It’s already in.

And I get concrete. In 2017, my hometown’s school district found language that could hold more of the community than the language of culture war could—two principles almost no parent could reject: the safety of every child, and the dignity of every student. That is what common ground looks like. Not agreement—coexistence under shared principles.

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What does it actually mean to rebel scientifically? I’ve been circling that question through the course of this series. This one answers it directly—at three levels: the individual, the community, and democratic governance.

For one person, Scientific Rebellion is the discipline of holding your beliefs only as tightly as the evidence supports them, and not one bit tighter. That sounds obvious. It is profoundly out of step with a culture that rewards confidence and treats “I don’t know yet” as weakness. I describe the engineer’s version of the commitment, and Karl Popper’s falsifiability test—ask what evidence would change your mind, and if the answer is nothing, you’re no longer dealing with a knowledge claim. At the community level it’s coalition work and the defense of libraries, local newspapers, and independent teachers. At the level of governance it’s accountability: the demand that those who make policy show their work.

Then I give the concrete program—what to do in education, in government, in public discourse, in coalition, and, above all, in voting. I place it inside a larger frame: the Enlightenment is not a period that ended in the eighteenth century. It’s an ongoing, always-contested project. Kant’s answer still holds—“Sapere aude. Dare to know. Have the courage to use your own understanding.” What we’re facing now is not a new attack on that project. It’s the latest in a three-century series. What’s new is the scale.

History does not guarantee progress. But manufactured certainty eventually fails, because it is built on a lie, and lies require increasing energy to maintain. I close with the people I’ve watched do this work without fanfare—the doctors, teachers, parents, researchers, and congregations who chose honest uncertainty over false certainty. They are the bravest people I know.

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On April 14, 2026, the Vice President of the United States stood on a Turning Point USA stage and lectured the Vatican on just-war theology. In the country I grew up in, that would have been a constitutional crisis. In the country I’ve been describing across this series, it was a Tuesday. This is where the argument reaches its destination—because the manufacturing of certainty is no longer happening at the edges of our politics. It has moved into the core.

I lay out the pattern plainly: a Secretary of Defense opening a Pentagon briefing with a prayer on his knees; a Supreme Court opinion citing a seventeenth-century judge who sent women to die in witch trials; the Ten Commandments ordered into Louisiana classrooms. None of it sold as religious imposition—all of it sold as the restoration of a tradition. But the mechanism, every time, is the same: theology, installed as the operating system of the government. It is the oldest pattern we have, and the founders wrote the First Amendment specifically to keep it from being imported here.

In May 2026, the Vatican released a forty-two-thousand-word encyclical on artificial intelligence—Magnifica Humanitas—in which the Pope called, among other things, for students to be taught to think critically about the technology. I take that instruction seriously and apply it where it matters most: to the institution doing the asking. 

The Catholic Church teaches its own foundational claims as beyond critical inquiry. It is the same closed framework that produced every prior decision the Church has made against a category of human beings—from the African slave trade to the doctrine that still calls LGBTQ relationships “intrinsically disordered.” And it is the framework behind Dignitas Infinita, the 2024 Vatican Declaration that places gender theory and sex change on a formal list of grave violations of human dignity alongside abortion, euthanasia, and human trafficking. Pope Leo has not retracted it. Perhaps someday he or his successor will write the apology. I am not willing to sacrifice another generation of trans lives—including my own son’s—hoping for that to happen.

I explain why this is the closing argument of a series about my son. It is the same mechanism. The false certainty that the state knows better than a transgender teenager and his doctors about what to do with his own body is the same certainty that has women hemorrhaging in hospital parking lots while doctors call lawyers. There is real resistance, too—a bishop asking a president for mercy, judges still striking these laws down—and what those institutions need now is us.

So I end where the book ends: with a bridge. A stone skew arch near my home in Dexter, Michigan, designed by Frederick Pelham, the first African American to earn a civil engineering degree from the University of Michigan—whose name was left off the commemorative plaque. My son studied that bridge in the fourth grade, and his class decided the erasure was a wrong that needed righting. They got the approvals, raised the money, and in 2018 put Pelham’s name at his bridge at last. That is the entire argument of this series, performed by children. 

Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid. And I’m done waiting. 

Are you?

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I have seen up close what happens when a society looks away. When it allows manufactured certainty to govern the lives of the vulnerable. I have seen it in the faces of young people forced to testify and defend their own humanity.

But I have also seen what happens when a few people decide, at whatever personal cost, that they will not be silent and will not capitulate. I have seen the pediatrician who kept prescribing. The librarian who kept lending. The parent who kept showing up. The student who kept testifying. The neighbor who kept showing up at school board meetings even when the votes were going the wrong way.

These people do not have the comfort of manufactured certainty. They have something harder and more durable. The honest conviction, grounded in evidence, that they are right. And the willingness to act on that conviction in conditions that do not make it easy.

That is the standard this moment demands. It is the standard I am trying to meet. It is what I am asking of you.

My choice is unequivocal. I stand for scientific rebellion against the weaponization of false certainty — against every system that uses manufactured truth as a license to tell some human beings that their existence is a problem to be solved. I stand for evidence-based governance, for the separation of faith and fact, for the inclusion of every community whose dignity has been placed outside the circle by people who claimed to speak for God. I choose curiosity, in a world addicted to certainty.

I stand for my son. And I stand for every parent, every child, every teacher, every physician, every congregation that has chosen love over doctrine and paid for it.

And I do not stand alone. I stand with those who refuse to be governed by false certainty — who insist, at whatever personal cost, that the evidence matters, that every human being counts, and that a democracy built on manufactured lies will not hold.

So where do we go from here? Are we willing to do the work that evidence-based governance requires — the work of honest uncertainty, of committing ourselves to making a new path guided by critical thinking? Or will we take the comfortable, but misguided path of manufactured certainty.

I hope you agree, it's time we blaze a new path, with curiosity and critical thinking as our guides.

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 "Four Words to Start a Rebellion" is a multi-episode series available on the Scientific Rebel podcast and on the Scientific Rebel.com website.

TEASER: Four Words to Start a Rebellion

Do you feel powerless, and have you given up hope in a political process that continually seems to fail you?

Are you exasperated that so many people seem to be sleepwalking, as our country is being dragged back into the Dark-ages?

Are you facing persecution because of the color of your skin? Desire for bodily autonomy, gender identity, or sexual orientation? Or perhaps for a general nonconformance to a white patriarchal Christian ethos?

Have you watched in growing alarm as our Constitution, rule of law and individual liberties are methodically subverted and interpreted through the lens of medieval, tyrannical Christian dogma?

Do you consider yourself religious or spiritual, but are ashamed to be associated with the unhinged actions of others making that claim?

If so, the "Four Words to Start a Rebellion" podcast series, is definitely for you.

BUCKLE IN. Because you are about to embark on a journey to confront the greatest weapon ever unleashed by man. That weapon is.

 Religion. 

 You heard me right. We are going to take on organized religion, and all those who weaponize it, and hold them accountable. Accountable, because faith is not fact.

Scientific rebellion is not a campaign against religious beliefs or believers. To the contrary, those who identify as religious or spiritual are as essential to this rebellion as those who see themselves as agnostic, atheist, or humanist. Inclusive churches that embrace social justice and inclusivity should be the vanguard of this rebellion.

The tie that binds us together as rebels is critical thinking. And it's time we take action to ensure that our country is governed by logic and reason and not religious dogma.

 Are you ready? 

 This is Peter Tchoryk. 

 Welcome, to the rebellion!