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In his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Jonathan Rauch argues that Christianity is a “load-bearing wall” in American democracy. As Christianity has been increasingly co-opted by politics, Rauch believes it is straying from its core tenets and failing to serve its traditional role as a spiritual and civic ballast. He blames this shift for the decline of religiosity in the United States, as well as collapsing faith in democratic institutions.

The Rise of the Nones and Its Effects 

Rauch writes that his book is “penitence for the dumbest thing I ever wrote,” a 2003 essay for The Atlantic about the rise of what he called “apatheism”—a “disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.” The essay argued that the growing number of people who aren’t especially concerned about religion is a “major civilizational advance” and a “product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset.” Rauch cites John Locke’s case for religious tolerance and pluralism to argue that the emergence of apatheism represented the hard-fought taming of “divisive and volatile” religious forces. 

In Cross Purposes, Rauch explains why he now repudiates this view. First, he argues that the decline of religion has led Americans to import “religious zeal into secular politics.” Second, he believes Christianity is losing its traditional role in shaping culture—the faith now reflects American society and culture instead of the other way around—and argues that this has been corrosive to the civic health of the country. Third, Rauch claims that “there is no secular substitute for the meaning and moral grounding which religious life provides.” 

All of these arguments rely on shaky assumptions about modern religiosity and the influence of secularism in America. In 2003, Rauch rightly questioned the idea that “everyone brims with religious passions.” While he acknowledged that human beings appear “wired” to believe, he also recognized that secularization, in the aggregate, is a real phenomenon. He now rejects this observation in favor of the increasingly fashionable view that religiosity never really declines but can only be repurposed: “We see this in the soaring demand for pseudo-religions in American life,” he writes. These pseudo-religions, he observes, include everything from “wellness culture” to wokeness and political extremism. 

But Americans have held quasi-religious, supernatural beliefs throughout history—including during periods of much greater religiosity than today. The popularity of practices like astrology and tarot reading isn’t a recent development, and pagan religions like Wicca originated and spread in the God-fearing middle of the twentieth century. Belief in UFOs and extraterrestrial encounters surged in the 1940s and 1950s, an era when over 90 percent of Americans were Christians. In the early 1990s, 90 percent of Americans still identified as Christians compared to 63 percent today. But a 1991 Gallup poll of Americans found a wide array of paranormal and other supernatural beliefs—nearly half believed in extrasensory perception (ESP), 36 percent believed in telepathy, 29 percent believed houses could be haunted, 26 percent believed in clairvoyance, and 25 percent believed in astrology. Religious belief wasn’t much of a bulwark against these other beliefs. Even in cases when those beliefs contradicted traditional Christian teachings—such as reincarnation—significant proportions of Christians believed them. 

The secularism of Western liberal democracies is a historical aberration. For most of history, the separation of church and state didn’t exist.

Rauch argues that “it has become pretty evident that secularism has not been able to fill what has been called the ‘God-shaped hole’ in American life.” He continues: “In today’s America, we see evidence everywhere of the inadequacy of secular liberalism to provide meaning, exaltation, spirituality, transcendence, and morality anchored in more than the self.” But the evidence Rauch is referring to—aside from the latest spiritual fads, many of which have been adopted by religious and irreligious Americans alike—is thin. He cites a 2023 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NORC, which found that the percentage of Americans who say religion is “very important” to them fell from 62 percent in 1998 to 39 percent in 2023. The survey also found that the proportion of Americans who regard patriotism, community involvement, and having children as “very important” declined over the same period. Meanwhile, a growing proportion of Americans said money is very important. 

While it’s possible that secularization has played a role in making Americans more greedy and less community or family-oriented, it isn’t enough to merely assert that rising secularism is to blame for the decline of these values in the United States. Even if it’s true that secularism has some social costs, those costs would need to be weighed against its benefits. “As a homosexual American,” Rauch writes, I owe my marriage—and the astonishing liberation I have enjoyed during my lifetime—to the advance of enlightened secular values.” Rauch argues that the Founders believed the governance system they set up would only work if it remained on a firm foundation of Christian morality. He cites John Adams, who declared that the Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people.” But he also could have cited Thomas Jefferson’s trenchant criticisms of Christianity or Thomas Paine’s argument in The Age of Reason that many Christian doctrines are, in fact, deeply immoral, superstitious, and corrosive to human freedom. 

While Rauch doesn’t appear to regard his own secularism as an impediment to patriotism or any other civic virtue—and thus he doesn’t need religion—he appears to believe that other Americans do. He invokes an argument made by Friedrich Nietzsche nearly 150 years ago: “When religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation. Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today.” A central theme of Cross Purposes is a paternalistic view that, while it’s possible for some people to be good citizens and live lives of meaning without religion, it’s not possible for many others. 

Without religion, Rauch argues, most people will be adrift with no grounding for their moral values. He claims that “moral propositions … must have some external validity.” He observes that “scientific or naturalistic” foundations for morality fail because they “anchor morality in ourselves and our societies, not in something transcendent.” He asks: “If there is no transcendent moral order anchored in a purposive universe—something like God-given laws—why must we not be nihilistic and despairing sociopaths?” However, he qualifies his argument… 

Now, speaking as an atheist and a scientific materialist, I do not believe religions actually answer that question. Instead, they rely on a cheat, which they call God. They assume their conclusion by simply asserting the existence of a transcendent spiritual and moral order. They invent God and then claim he solves the problem. … The Christians who believe the Bible is the last word on morality—and, not coincidentally, that they are the last word on interpreting the Bible—are every bit as relativistic as I am; it’s just that I admit it and they don’t. 

After presenting this powerful rejoinder to the religious pretension to have a monopoly on objective morality, Rauch writes: 

That is neither here nor there. I am not important. What is important is that the religious framing of morality and mortality is plausible and acceptable to humans in a way nihilism and relativism are not and never will be. 

But this is a false dichotomy—the choice isn’t between religious morality and nihilistic relativism. The choice is between religious morality and an attempt to develop an ethical system that is far more epistemically honest and humble. Instead of relying on the God “cheat”—a philosophical sleight of hand Rauch feels he is equipped to identify, but one he evidently assumes most people are incapable of understanding—we can attempt to develop and ground ethical arguments in ways that don’t require the invention of a supernatural, supervising entity. As he writes: 

For most people, the idea that the universe is intended and ordered by God demonstrably provides transcendent meaning and moral grounding which scientific materialism demonstrably does not. … God may be (as I believe) a philosophical shortcut, but he gets you there—and I don’t. 

But Rauch just admitted that religion only “gets you there” in an illusory way. It may be comforting for believers to convince themselves that there’s a divine superintendent who ensures that the universe is morally intelligible, but the religious are no closer to apprehending fundamental moral truth than nonbelievers. 

Rauch also argues that “purely secular thinking about death will never satisfy the large majority of people.” While he personally doesn’t struggle with the idea of mortality, he once again assumes that a critical mass of people “rely on some version of faith to rescue them from the bleak nihilism of mortality.” While Rauch presents this view in a self-deprecating way—“I am weird!” he informs the reader—it’s difficult to shake the impression that he believes himself capable of accepting hard realities that others aren’t equipped to handle. 

While Rauch believes his scientific materialism and secular morality is some kind of exotic oddity, these views were at the heart of the Enlightenment and they have informed centuriesof Western philosophy. A fundamental aspect of Enlightenment thought was that religious authorities don’t have a monopoly on truth or morality. Secularists like David Hume resisted religious dogma and undermined the notion that morality must be grounded in God. Secularism was rare and dangerous hundreds of years ago, but it has gone mainstream. Pew reports that the number of Christians in the United States fell from around 90 percent in 1990 to 63 percent in 2024. Gallup found that other measures of religiosity have declined as well, such as church attendance and membership. Pew has also recorded substantial and sustained declines in religious belief across Europe. 

The idea that there’s a latent level of religiosity in human societies that remains static over the centuries is dubious.

Rauch was right in 2003—plenty of people are capable of leading ethical and meaningful lives without religious faith. There are more of these people today than there used to be, and this doesn’t mean they have all been taken in by some God-shaped superstition or cult. The idea that there’s a latent level of religiosity in human societies that remains static over the centuries is dubious—in pre-Enlightenment Europe, religious belief was ubiquitous and mandated by law. Heretics were publicly executed. So were witches. Scientific discoveries were suppressed and punished if they were seen as conflicting with religious teachings. Regular people had extremely limited access to information that wasn’t audited by religious authorities. Science often blended seamlessly with pseudoscience (even Newton was fascinated by alchemy and other aspects of the occult, along with his commitment to biblical interpretation). Incessant religious conflict culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which caused millions of deaths—with some estimates ranging as high as around a third of central Europe’s population. 

The last execution for blasphemy in Europe was the hanging of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1697, whose crimes included criticizing scripture and questioning the divinity of Jesus Christ. Aikenhead was a student at the University of Edinburgh, where Hume would attend just a couple of decades later. It wouldn’t be long before several of the most prominent philosophers in Europe were publicly making arguments that would have once sent them to the gallows. Drawing upon the work of these philosophers, less than a century after Aikenhead’s execution the United States would be founded on the principle of religious liberty. The world has secularized, and this is exactly what Rauch once believed it to be: a major civilizational advance. 

When the Load-Bearing Wall Buckles 

Rauch believes the decline of religion is to blame for many of the most destructive political pathologies in the United States today. He argues that the “collapse of the ecumenical churches has displaced religious zeal into politics, which is not designed to provide purpose in life and breaks when it tries.” According to Rauch, when the “load-bearing wall” of Christianity “buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.” Much of Cross Purposes is an explanation for why this buckling has occurred. 

Rauch fails to demonstrate why Christianity is a necessary foundation for morality.

Rauch organizes the book around what he describes as Thin, Sharp, and Thick Christianity. Thin Christianity describes a process whereby the faith is “no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends.” One of these functions is the export of Christian values to the rest of society. “My claim,” he writes, “is not just that secular liberalism and religious faith are instrumentally interdependent but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world.” This is the claim we discussed in the first section—Rauch fails to demonstrate why Christianity is a necessary foundation for morality. He explains that people may find it easier to ground their values in God and why religion makes mortality easier to handle, but these are hardly arguments for the necessity of faith in the public square. 

Rauch is particularly concerned about what he describes as Sharp Christianity—a version of the faith that is “not only secularized but politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive.” Instead of focusing on the teachings of Jesus, Rauch writes, these Christians “bring to church the divisive cultural issues they hear about on Fox News” and believe “Christianity is under attack and we have to do something about it.” Sharp Christianity is best captured by the overwhelming evangelical support for Donald Trump, who received roughly 80 percent of the evangelical vote in 2020 and 2024. An April Pew survey found that Trump’s support among evangelicals remains strong after his first 100 days in office—while 40 percent of Americans approve of his performance, this proportion jumps to 72 percent among evangelicals. 

Rauch challenges the view held by many Sharp Christians that their faith is constantly under assault from Godless liberals. He critiques what he regards as an increasingly powerful “post-liberal” movement on the right, which argues that the liberal emphasis on individualism and autonomy has led to the atomization of society and the rejection of faith, family, and patriotism. Rauch acknowledges that liberalism on its own doesn’t inspire the same level of commitment as religion, and he rightly notes that this is by design: “the whole point of liberalism was to put an end to centuries of bloody coercion and war arising from religious and factional attempts to impose one group’s moral vision on everyone else.” 

While Rauch does an excellent job critiquing the post-liberal right, he grants one of its central claims: that Christianity is the necessary glue that holds liberal society together. As he notes: “liberals understood they could not create and sustain virtue by themselves, and they warned against trying.” It’s true that liberalism is capacious enough to encompass many competing values and ideologies, but there are certain values that are in the marrow of liberal societies—such as individual rights, pluralism, and democracy. Mutual respect for these values can cultivate virtues like openness, tolerance, and forbearance. 

Rauch emphasizes the achievements of liberalism: “constitutional democracy, mass prosperity, the scientific revolution, outlawing slavery, empowering women, and—not least from my point of view—tolerating atheistic homosexual Jews instead of burning us alive.” That he should have added that many of these advancements were made in the teeth of furious religious opposition brings us to a central problem with Cross Purposes—Rauch would argue that all the Christian bloodletting, intolerance, and authoritarianism throughout history is based on a series of misconceptions about what Christianity really is. His central demand is that American Christians rediscover the true meaning of their faith, which he regards as an anodyne and narrow reading of Jesus Christ’s essential teachings. He reduces millennia of Christian thought and the whole of the Bible to a simple formula (which he first heard from the Catholic theologian and priest James Alison): “Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other.” But Rauch then admits: “I am in no position to judge whether those are the essential elements of Christianity, but they certainly command broad and deep reverence in America’s Christian traditions.” 

While this tidy formula does capture some central elements of Jesus’ teachings, it intentionally leaves out other less agreeable (but no less essential) aspects of Christianity. Jesus urged his followers not to be afraid because he would return and they would be granted eternal life in the presence of God. He told his Apostles that their “generation will not pass away” before his return, so they could expect their reward in short order. For those who did not accept his gospel, Jesus had another message: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Rauch may be correct that “Don’t be afraid” captures one of Jesus’ core messages, but this is a message that only applies to believers—all others should be very afraid. As for the idea of forgiveness, Jesus clearly believed there were some limits—once the “cursed” are consigned to “eternal fire,” redemption appears to be unlikely. 

Even at its best, Christianity is inherently divisive.

While Rauch admits that he is in “no position to judge … the essential elements of Christianity” (nor am I), but any summary of the faith that leaves out Jesus’ most fundamental teaching of all—that his followers must accept the truth of Christianity or face eternal destruction—isn’t in touch with reality. It’s also untenable to present an essentialized version of Christianity that leaves out the entire Old Testament, which is crammed with scriptural warrants for slavery, genocide, misogyny, and persecution on a horrifying scale. There’s a reason Christianity has been such a repressive force throughout history—despite the moderating influence of Jesus, the Bible is chockablock full of justifications for the punishment of nonbelievers and religious warfare. Even at its best, Christianity is inherently divisive—the “wages of sin is death,” and there’s no greater sin than the rejection of the Christian God. Because Christianity is a universalist, missionary faith, believers have a responsibility to deliver the gospel to their neighbors. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that millions of souls are at stake, the stripped-down, liberal version of Christianity offered by Rauch may seem like a deep abrogation of responsibility. 

“If we wanted to summarize the direction of change in American Christianity over the past century or so,” Rauch writes, “we might do well to use the term secularization.” While Rauch argues that some secularization has been good for Christianity by helping it integrate with the broader culture, he also argues that the “mainline church cast its lot with center-left progressivism and let itself drift, or at least seem to drift, from its scriptural moorings.” He cites the historian Randall Balmer, who observed in 1996 that many Protestants “stand for nothing at all, aside from some vague (albeit noble) pieties like peace, justice, and inclusiveness.” But this is just what Rauch is calling for—the elevation of vague pieties about forgiveness and courage to a central role in how Christianity interacts with the wider culture. 

Rauch argues that American evangelicals have become “secularized.” The thrust of this argument is that evangelicals thought they would reshape the GOP in their image when they became more political in the 1980s, but the opposite occurred. For decades, white evangelicals have been one of the largest and most loyal Republican voting blocs, and Rauch observes that this has been a self-reinforcing process: “Republicans self-selected into evangelical religious identities and those identities in turn reinforced the church’s partisanship.” Rauch points out that church attendance and other indicators of religiosity have declined among evangelicals in recent decades. He even argues that evangelical Christianity has become “primarily a political rather than religious identity.” 

While there are some signs that evangelicals aren’t quite as committed to their religious practices as they were at the turn of the century, the idea that politics has displaced their faith is a bold overstatement. According to the latest data from Pew, evangelicals remain disproportionately fervent in their beliefs and religious behaviors: 97 percent believe in a soul or spirit beyond the physical body; 72 percent say they pray daily; 82 percent consider the Bible very or extremely important; 84 percent believe in heaven; and 82 percent believe in hell. American history demonstrates that piety and politics don’t cancel each other out. Rauch explains why Christians are tempted to enter the political arena by summarizing several of the arguments political evangelicals often make: 

…some might expect conservative Christians to meekly accept the industrial-scale murder of unborn children, the aggressive promotion of LGBT ideology, the left’s intolerance of traditional social mores, and the relentless advance of wokeness in universities, corporations, and the media; but enough is enough. It is both natural and biblical for Christians to stand up for their values. 

Rauch challenges these claims and argues the “war on Christianity” frequently invoked by evangelicals is imaginary. The current U.S. Supreme Court is extremely pro-religious freedom, American evangelicals are protected by the First Amendment, most members of Congress are Christians, and surveys show that the vast majority of Americans approve of Christianity. But evangelicals’ perception is what matters—they have felt like their faith is under attack for decades, which has pushed them toward political action. Rauch cited a 1979 conversation between Ronald Reagan and the evangelical Jim Bakker in which the GOP presidential candidate asked: “Do you ever get the feeling sometimes that if we don’t do it now, if we let this be another Sodom and Gomorrah, that maybe we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?” 

It’s an inconvenient fact for Rauch’s argument that Christianity can coexist so comfortably with hyper-partisanship and authoritarianism.

While it’s fine to call for a gentler and more civically responsible Christianity, Rauch appears to believe that any version of the faith that inflames partisan hatreds or focuses on the culture war is, by definition, un-Christian. But this isn’t the case. When Reagan worried about the United States becoming Sodom and Gomorrah and ushering in Armageddon, he wasn’t “secularizing” Christianity by blending it with worldly politics. He was allowing his religious beliefs to inform his political views, which many Christians regard as morally and spiritually obligatory. 

The secularism of Western liberal democracies is a historical aberration. For most of history, the separation of church and state didn’t exist—everyone in society was forced to submit to the same religious strictures, and the punishment for failing to do so was often torture and death. One reason for this history of state-sanctioned dogma and repression is that eschatology is central to Christianity. The idea that certain actions on earth will lead to either eternal reward or punishment is a powerful force multiplier in human affairs, which is one of the reasons the European wars of religion were so bloody and why the role of religion in many other conflicts around the world has been to increase the level of tribal hatred on both sides. Modern religion-infused politics is just a return to the historical norm.

Photo by Julian GentileTrump: God’s Wrecking Ball 

Then there is President Donald Trump. “Absolutely nothing about secular liberalism,” Rauch writes, “required white evangelicals to embrace the likes of Donald Trump.” If there’s one argument in favor of the idea that evangelicals have allowed politics to distort their faith, it’s the overwhelming support President Trump still commands within their ranks. Rauch cites a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which reported that evangelicals were suddenly much less concerned about the personal character of elected officials after they threw their weight behind Trump. In 2011, just 30 percent of evangelicals said an “elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life”—a proportion that jumped to 72 percent in October 2016. 

There are many reasons evangelicals cite for supporting Trump, from his nomination of pro-life Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade to the conviction that he’s an enthusiastic culture warrior who will crush wokeness. Because evangelicals are consumed by the paranoid belief that they’re an embattled group clinging to the margins of the dominant culture, they decided that they could dispense with concerns over character if it meant mobilizing a larger flock and gaining political and cultural influence. Over three-quarters of evangelicals believe the United States is losing its identity and culture, so the idea of making America great again appeals to them. Rauch cites Os Guinness, who described Trump as “God’s wrecking ball stopping America in its tracks [from] the direction it’s going and giving the country a chance to rethink.” But Rauch is right that arguments like this don’t explain the depth of evangelical support for the 45-47 President or the fact that “they did not merely support Trump, they adored him.” 

“Whatever the predicates,” Rauch writes, “embracing Trump and MAGA was fundamentally a choice and a change.” It’s true that it would have once been difficult to imagine evangelicals supporting a president like Donald Trump. It’s also true, as Rauch contends, that evangelicals now appear to follow “two incommensurable moralities, an absolute one in the personal realm and an instrumental one in the political realm.” But Cross Purposes isn’t just about the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of American evangelicals or the post-liberal justifications for Trumpism. Rauch is calling for a revival of public Christianity in America, and the evangelical capitulation to Trump raises questions about the viability of that project. 

It’s an inconvenient fact for Rauch’s argument that Christianity can coexist so comfortably with hyper-partisanship and authoritarianism. Rauch insists that evangelical Christianity is the product of a warping process of secularization—the “Church of Fear is more pagan than Christian,” he insists. But as Pew reports, evangelicals are disproportionately likely to attend church, pray daily, believe in the importance of the Bible, and so on. Rauch is in no position to adjudicate who is a true believer and who isn’t (nor is anyone else, me included), and if it’s true that the only real Christianity is the reassuring liberal version he endorses, the vast majority of Christians throughout history were just as “secularized” as today’s evangelicals. 

“Mr. Jefferson, Build Up that Wall” 

Because Rauch has such an innocuous view of “essential” Christian theology, he believes Christianity doesn’t need to “be anything other than itself” to ensure that Christians keep their commitments to “God and liberal democracy.” If only it were so easy. Despite the steady decline of Christianity in the United States, 63 percent of the adult population still self-reports as Christian—a proportion that has actually stabilized since 2019. In any religious population so large, there will always be significant variation in what people believe and how they express those beliefs in the public square. Christianity doesn’t necessarily lead to certain political positions—the faith has been invoked to support slavery and to oppose it; to justify imperialism and to condemn it; to damn nonbelievers as heretics bound for hell or to embrace everyone as part of a universalist message of redemption. Of course, it would be nice if all Christians adopted Jonathan Rauch’s version of civic theology, but there will always be scriptural warrants for other forms of theology that Rauch believes are corrosive to our civic culture. 

Americans who believe that Christianity is untrue and unnecessary for morality should continue to make their case in the public square.

According to Pew, Trump’s net favorability rating among American agnostics is just 17 percent, and it falls to 12 percent among atheists. On average, nearly half of American Protestants view Trump favorably—a proportion that falls to 25 percent among the “religiously unaffiliated,” which includes atheists, agnostics, and those who define their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular.” Rauch presents the rise of post-liberal Christianity and the politicization of American evangelicals as examples of secular intrusions of one kind or another. He doesn’t entertain the possibility that hisconception of Christianity as conveniently aligned with liberal democracy is a modern, secularized vision that isn’t consistent with how Christianity has historically functioned politically—or with the Bible itself. 

It’s a shame that Rauch regards his 2003 essay about the value of secularization as the “dumbest thing I ever wrote.” While there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing the aspects of Christian theology that support liberal democracy, there’s a more effective way to resist post-liberal Christianity, MAGA evangelicalism, and all the other intersections between faith and politics today. Americans who believe that Christianity is untrue and unnecessary for morality should continue to make their case in the public square. Rauch is wrong to argue that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in American democracy. The real load-bearing wall in the United States is the one constructed by Jefferson at the nation’s founding, and which has sustained our liberal democratic culture ever since: the wall of separation between church and state.

The pace of ageing accelerates as you get older, and it is linked to an individual's sex, ethnicity and level of education, according to studies of US and UK populations

Astronomers have spotted a pulsar in a binary system, taking about 3.6 hours for the stars to orbit one another. Their orbit is so close that, from our vantage point, the pulsar’s radio signals vanish for roughly one-sixth of each cycle—blocked by the companion’s interference. Researchers think that the more massive star died first, exploding as a supernova and collapsing into a neutron star, passing within the atmosphere of the other. It took about 1,000 years to blow away the envelope of material.

Over the past 90 years, astronomers have successfully matched several Chinese historical records of "guest stars" with known supernovae. However, identifying historical novae (smaller stellar explosions) has proven to be far more challenging, with many proposed candidates later turning out to be comets or meteors instead. One particularly debated case involves a guest star recorded in 1408 CE by Chinese astronomers. A team of astronomers now think they may have finally been able to identify the event, a rare nova that could potentially solve this centuries old astronomical mystery.

On May 10th, while striking a selfie to mark its 1,500th day on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover got an unexpected guest star—a towering dust devil swirling in the distance photobombed the shot. The rover was on Witch Hazel Hill, an area on the rim of Jezero Crater that it has been exploring for the last 5 months. The dust devil on the other hand was sneaking into the background from a distance of 5 km away. The selfie image was made up of 59 separate photos taken by the rover using its WATSON camera.

How one special moment redefined how a science teacher does her job.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A not so expert "expert"

The post A Checkered History in Vaccine Court: Mark Geier at the VICP 1988-2003 first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

For our final video of the day, we have a two-minute clip of a very gutsy man rescuing a big male kangaroo who was caught in a metal cable. All’s well that ends well.

Kangaroos are reputed to be dangerous, for they can kick you hard. But I found only two reported human deaths due to kangaroos. The animal most likely to kill you in Australia, according to Wikipedia’s “animal attacks in Australia” article, is snakes, with between 3 and 10 deaths per year.

Of the roughly 6,000 exoplanets we've discovered, a significant number are in the apparent habitable zones of their stars. Most are giant planets; either gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, or ice giants like Uranus and Neptune. Could some of those have habitable exomoons?

More video today!  This one, of course, was suggested to me by YouTube, since I watch a lot of food videos as well as history videos. And it’s exactly the kind of video that I would have to click on, as it lists the favorite foods of every American President.

Here are the Presidents who, in my view, had the best taste (you’ll have to watch to see their favorites):

Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Tyler
James K. Polk
Abraham Lincoln
Ulysses S. Grant
Teddy Roosevelt
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Lyndon Johnson***
Jimmy Carter

LBJ gets the kudos for liking the best dish, and, looking over the list, I see that it’s weighted with Presidents who liked Southern food. No surprise, as it’s America’s best regional cuisine.  They do mention a McDonald’s Filet O’ Fish as Trump’s favorite, but I thought he liked Big Macs better. Either way, he doesn’t make the list.

Banking a baby’s umbilical cord blood was once seen as a reasonable way to protect their future health, but much of that potential has turned out to be mere hype

A friend who is laid up with covid, and watching New Atheist videos (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc.) for the first time, sent me a new (six-day-old) [rp=atheist video made by someone I didn’t know. That would be Darante’ LaMar Martin, a former pastor who deconverted. In this 17.3-minute video, he makes two assertions: that there is no tangible evidence supporting the miracles of the Bible and thus the foundational claims of Christianity; and the spread of Christianity was based on “imperial enforcement” by king rather than on its truth. (Later adherents would have no way on checking the truth, anyway, and we know that the sole evidence underlying the world’s most popular religion, with 2.6 billion adherents, is solely the Bible. There is no extra-Biblical evidence for a person, much less his acts, on whom the New Testament is based.

You probably have heard some of the arguments against Jesus’s miracles before (e.g., the lack of contemporaneous evidence for a Jesus Man, as well as the absence of evidence that, upon the Crucifixion, the sky darkened and dead saints emerged from their graves. But the stuff about the subsequent spread of the faith, like the story of Constantine’s conversion (or rather, cooption), was new to me. (I can’t vouch for this other stuff; perhaps readers can judge it.)

It’s not clear whether Darante‘ believes that there was a Jesus figure on whom the faith was based. He implies that there was a “spiritual figure”  named Christus, a man who didn’t have a lot of followers but was executed by the Romans because he posed a “fringe threat.”  As he says, “The Romans didn’t kill a king; they killed a failed prophet.”

About the spread of Christianity he adds this: “The story of Christianity’s rise is not a story of truth triumphing over doubt. It’s a story of power rewriting the rules of belief. Christianity didn’t spread because Jesus walked out of a tomb. It spread because Christianity coopted its rivals, aligned with empire, absorbed its enemies, and forged its own legitimacy with law, violence, and theological branding.”

You know of prominent Christians who expound their beliefs in the mainstream media.  Some, like Andrew Sullivan, irk me because while I admire their political views, I see their religious belief as a form of irrationality or even hypocrisy: they accept things without the evidence they’d demand for political assertions.  Others include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I’m not too hard on because she found religion to be the only palliative for her severe, suicidal depression.

The most irksome is Ross Douthat, whose new book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. Douthat is flogging it everywhere (the NYT gives him a big platform), and making no bones about believing in not only Jesus and the Crucifixion, but also the afterlife, Satan, assorted demons, purgatory, and angels.  While Sullivan and more liberal believers are clearly reluctant to describe the contents of their beliefs, Douthat has purchased the whole hog and proffers slices of ham to everyone.

Martin’s YouTube page, with more atheist videos, is here. (try “The ten top lies I told as a pastor.“) He has a charismatic style of speaking, and I can imagine that he was a good preacher before he saw the light.

 

Captured carbon dioxide could be injected deep in the Earth to dissolve rocks, freeing up nickel and other key metals vital for batteries

We have 2-3 more groups of photos, so please send in any good ones you have.

Today’s photos are of plants, and were taken by Aussie Julia Monaghan. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Australian Native Plants (mostly)

These photos were taken in my and my neighbour’s garden, in the Lake Macquarie area of New South Wales, one of Australia’s largest coastal salt water lakes. As Australia often has a very hot, dry climate (thought we do have flooding at the moment), plants have many different adaptations to cope with the generally harsh climate, often growing in poor soils with full sun and low water supply. I took my photos using my Samsung phone.

Hairpin Banksia flower (Banksia spinulosa). A species of small woody shrub in the Proteaceae family, native to eastern Australia. The spikes are gold or sometimes yellowish. Specimens of Banksia were first collected by naturalists Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, on the Endeavour during Lieutenant James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific Ocean:

Hairpin Banksia bush (Banksia spinulosa). Banksia are adapted to fire, which plays an important role in seed release and germination. The plant’s reproductive structures, the woody follicles, store its seeds and only release them when exposed to the heat of a bushfire:

Hairpin Banksia (Banksia spinulosa) post pollination. As the flowers die they will develop into woody, fruiting cones:

Grevillea Mason’s Hybrid (Grevillea banksii × Grevillea bipinnatifidajubata) are a small spreading shrub that attract and feed native birds throughout sping and summer. A cultivar from a genus of over 350 flowering plants in the family Proteaceae, they are also known as  spider flowers.  This Grevillea is also named the Ned Kelly after one of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers:

Grevillea ‘Peaches and Cream’ (Grevillea bankssi × Grevillea bipinnatifida). Another Grevillea cultivar, their nectar is a reliable food source from winter to spring that feeds honeyeaters such as lorikeets and parrots. Grevilleas are generally very heat and drought tolerant:

Stiff Bottlebrush (Calistemon rigidus) attracts a variety of birds, from nectar-feeding species such as honeyeaters, to seed-eating birds such as cockatoos. Its dense foliage acts as a habitat for many different birds, as it provides thick cover and many nesting opportunities:

Purple Morning Glory (Ipomoea indica) is a climbing vine that grows quickly and smothers other plants. Considered a reportable weed, it was introduced from  Mexico or Central America as a garden plant but has become established in different ecosystems:

Coastal or Cairo Morning Glory (Ipomoea cairica) is another climbing vine introduced from Africa or Asia, that grows rapidly, smothering other plants. It has also been classified as an environmental weed:

Kangaroo Paw Bush – Pink (Anigozanthus) are a smaller cultivar of the Kangaroo Paw. They are very tolerant of drought and coastal conditions once they are established. They come in a variety of vibrant colours, including brilliant red, bright pink and bright yellows:

Kangaroo Paw Flower – Pink ( Anigozanthus). Their tufted flowers covered with velvety hairs resemble the paw of a kangaroo, hence their name:

Kangaroo Paw Flower – Yellow (Anigozanthus):

Grasstree (Xanthorrhoea australis). These are ancient trees consisting of a thick trunk made up of a dense layer of old leaves forming a protective layer around a softer core, with a tuft of newer leaves forming a crown at the top of the tree. These trees are extremely slow growing and may take many years to flower. While bushfires may burn the leaves and blacken the trunk, the plant’s living core is protected as it sits underground. In this species, fire stimulates flowering:

Results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggest that dark energy, a mysterious force in the universe, is changing over time. This would completely re-write our understanding of the cosmos - but now other physicists are challenging this view