Francis Collins

Kate Bowler: Do you know the seasons when you ask yourself: what even happened there? Like what? I think I was there at the time, but it’s entirely a blur. Maybe it was that fuzzy, snuggly newborn stage or conversely, the screamy-ragey-you-didn’t-sleep-at-night-at-all newborn stage. Or maybe you blinked, and now your kids are in college. Maybe it was recovering from an operation or an endless season of chronic pain. Maybe you feel that way about a season of grief that has turned everything upside down. Or worrying about someone you love as they went through their terrible thing. We face down strange, surreal and impossible moments all the time. We keep our head down. We put one foot in front of the other because what other choice do we have? I’m Kate Bowler. And this is Everything Happens.

Kate: I’m always in awe of that magic that makes people endure. What we can survive and who it makes us in the middle of it. Or if we’re lucky, on the other side of it. We had a collective experience of what even happened there in 2020. And I know, I know it might make you twitch just to still think about it. The hard choices we had to make, how afraid we all were. All that we didn’t know. The whole world lived in a suspended uncertainty. And of course, there were some moments of real beauty and humanity at its best. But there were also moments of real despair. It made me wonder who are you now because of or in spite of all that we experienced in 2020? It was a hard time to be immunocompromised. It was a hard time to parent and know how to take care of our kids and worry about all of the implications of isolation, everything they were missing. It was a hard time to be single or live far from home. It was a hard time to lose someone you love. It was a hard time to be online. But has that gotten any easier? Today I’m speaking with someone who led a major institution during that season and he is still picking up the pieces of heartbreak from how people responded to one another and to science at the time. But my favorite part about him is that he hasn’t lost his faith in humanity. You are going to absolutely love him. Today, we’re going to talk about why faith and science seem at odds and why they shouldn’t be. What happens when institutions or their leaders let us down. And you’ll hear quite the case on practicing interdependence. And how we might all have enough ridiculous foolishness to imagine that we can be a part of bridging the great divides and the struggles that are to come. So yeah, this one is going to be a macro conversation with a lot of heart. My guest today is Francis Collins. He is a physician and geneticist. His impact on biomedical research and the health of the nation is difficult to overstate. Everyone on this podcast is smart, but like, this guy is a genius. His groundbreaking work has led to the discovery of the cause of cystic fibrosis, among other diseases. In 1993, he was appointed director of the International Human Genome Project, which successfully sequenced all 3 billion letters of our DNA. He went on to serve three presidents as the director of the National Institutes of Health, and he is the author of bestselling books like The Language of God and his latest, The Road to Wisdom. And what’s worse, all the people I know like him because he is kind and curious. I know, it’s too much. I’ve been so excited to talk to you for a million reasons, but there’s just there’s a joy and an awe in meeting someone who is as curious, and obviously as invested in how we think about the questions of faith and science and compassion right now. So thank you so much for sitting down with me. Tell me about the littlest you. There was a you a long time ago that wasn’t even sure that science was going to be your career. But you must have had a sense that the life of the white coat might be for you.

Francis Collins: It took quite a while, actually. Yeah. I grew up on a small farm. My father was a drama professor. My mother was a playwright. There was a lot of music. There was a lot of theater. There was no indoor plumbing. And science didn’t really get that much of a draw in me until high school chemistry class. And then I thought, this is a detective story. You have to use the tools of science to find out how things work. And sometimes you get clues and sometimes they’re misleading. But eventually there is truth to be discovered about nature. And science is the way to get that. How cool is that? That’s what I want to do.

Kate: In the early years, when you had a like your purely rationalist framework to say, I guess I thought it was very moving that it was a hospital patient. That was the first one that kind of piqued the, the like but then what meaning can we make of all this?

Francis: Yeah. Yeah. I had no religious upbringing. I did get sent to the local Trinity Episcopal Church to sing in the choir. I learned a lot about music. I learned nothing about theology because my parents kind of said, just ignore that stuff. Learn how to figure out how to sing harmony. And so I got to college and there are these debates about what do you believe? And I was like, I don’t think I believe any of this. And by the time I was a graduate student at Yale studying physical chemistry, I was an atheist. And then I had this change in my scientific leanings towards life science, which was sort of a surprise to me. I hadn’t really considered that until I got pretty far along and decided I’ll go to medical school and I would keep my options open. Why the University of North Carolina decided that was a good reason to admit me to their class is still a bit of a mystery. But there I was, I showed up. And by the time you get to the third year of medical school, you’re really out there on the wards taking care of patients. You’re assigned responsibilities. Yeah. And there was that one patient who was an elderly woman with really bad heart disease who had a lot of chest pains that I watched her go through with that. How would I handle that? And yet she would at the end of that say, you know, I was bad, but Jesus was here with me. And she shared her faith so openly and so completely without artifice. I was sort of stunned by all that and didn’t know what to say.  And that one particular moment, she asked the question, Doctor, what do you believe? And just that blinding moment of realization that I’ve just been asked the most important question of my entire life. And I have nothing to go on to provide an answer. Because I realized, yeah, I kind of slipped into atheism, but I hadn’t really thought about it. It was the default. It was the answer that meant I don’t have to be accountable and I don’t have to think about it. And probably all scientists would agree with this, and it’s not going to put me in a position of being in any discord with my colleagues. But that’s not a good answer. So I was determined, okay, if I’m going to be an atheist, I better have a better answer to why. And instead of like, I don’t know. And that began in a really two year journey to try to understand why do people believe in God? What is the possible way that somebody who is living the life of the mind and determined to be a rigorous scientist, how could you possibly buy into this kind of argument for something outside of nature? And that was a big leap for a very secular-minded, metaphysical naturalist, which I guess is what I would have been called at that point. Frankly, I was worshiping a particular religion called scientism.

Kate: Yeah. Tell me about that.

Francis: Which takes as the prior, that the ultimate, basis of all thought is that there’s nothing outside of the natural world and that science can teach us how that works. If that’s your prior assumption, you’re never going to get on to consideration of God and the supernatural because you’ve ruled it out from the beginning. And that’s where I was. But that’s scientistism and that, I began to realize, also really limits you as I had the chance to think a bit more broadly. It was a lot of help from reading C.S. Lewis and a Methodist pastor down the road who was willing to listen to my blasphemous questions.

Kate: Those are the best kind. Say, let’s dig in here. Virgin birth? Yeah.

Francis: Really?

Kate: Yeah.

Francis: But I also realized this pastor and this amazing C.S. Lewis, who had kind of traveled this field, they opened up to me questions that I had considered just off the table. Like, why is there something instead of nothing? If the universe had a beginning, how do you explain that? What came before the Big Bang, it couldn’t very well be natural, or you haven’t answered the question. You have to have something outside of space and time in order for the universe to come into being. It seemed that way to me. And even from science, then I began to wonder. I’d spent most of my time as a Ph.D. student working in quantum mechanics with these equations, second-order differential equations. I learned to love them and they’re beautiful. And yet somehow they work. They describe how matter and energy behave. Why should that be? You know, why should the universe follow mathematical equations? That seems like there’s a mind behind this. And then even more compellingly, the one that really blew me away and said, okay, I’m not going to be able to be an atheist anymore, is the fine-tuning of the universe the fact that these constants that determine how matter and energy behave, the gravitational constant or the speed of light, or the weak or strong nuclear forces, they have to have exactly, exactly the value that they do within like one part in a billion or nothing works anymore. You won’t have a universe that has any interest. It’ll just be some particles flying apart and nothing more than that. We are on this incredible knife edge of improbability. About that time, I really got fixated on morality and on the moral law. And of course, Lewis helps a lot with that. And I could see that in my own heart, I was also very much attached to the idea that there is something called good and something called the evil. And I’m supposed to do what’s good. And I could kind of see down through all that we know about human history, all cultures have had that same sense. Even though they have a different idea about what goes in a good column and what goes in the bad column, they won’t say there’s no such thing. Where is that coming from? Evolutionary psychology doesn’t quite do it for me when it comes to things like radical altruism. So this was kind of calling for a realization about written in my own heart what might be a signpost towards a good and holy God who wants me to be the same. And that was interesting. But it was also increasingly disturbing because I knew I was failing. This really is a signpost to God. I am failing to live up to that calling that God has put on my heart. And just as I began to imagine a God who cares about me, it felt like that God is probably angry at me or maybe getting more and more distant. And then I met Jesus. Because I’ve never understood that part. I thought Jesus was a myth. I didn’t realize there was all this historical evidence, compelling evidence. And then it all fell together. Okay. I am a sinner. I am somebody who does things that I know are wrong, although I try to give myself excuses when I do that. But Jesus is there to make it possible for me to still have a relationship with God. Now I can see how this all makes sense as a rationalist, but it allows me to step into a place I never could have without traveling that path. So I was 27 and I decided, I can’t prove this, but I sure can’t turn back. I’m going to make that leap into becoming a person of faith, a follower of Jesus.

Kate: I remember that in college we sometimes give ourselves seasons where we let ourselves have questions that we don’t entirely know the answers to. And especially the smarter we get in one area, I find professionalization in any capacity has often taught me to feel embarrassed about things that I know enough to know that I don’t know enough about it. And so, you know, even as a religious historian, I’ve gotten very comfortable with the arguments that I know I’m quite good on. I’m good on sorces, like historians, I’m good on sources. But I find that sometimes it’s really embarrassing and wonderful to go back to these sort of primary, terrifying questions of how would we even decide that that things have met the criteria of of belief. And so it’s it’s kind of a wonderful thing to when I hear how much your scientific mind, you allowed it to be fully interrupted by the implications of the spiritual questions you were asking. That takes work.

Francis: It does, but the work often pays off. I mean, I hope I didn’t present this as okay. I got it all resolved at age 27 and I never had another doubt.

Kate: But it was done in a way that the doubt led to another question and was the question led to another set of kind of we kind of try to get to the doubts we want to live with. I think.

Francis: Right. Why does a loving God allow terrible diagnoses like the ones that you have had? And I have a recent diagnosis of cancer as well. And why does this make sense?

Kate: Yeah.

Francis: That is a hard one for me as a physician, especially having had the chance as a privilege to walk alongside people who’ve been stricken with terrible diagnoses and that they did nothing to bring on themselves and try to figure out how does one make sense of that? Well, everything happens, as you say. And I don’t know that you totally can. There are things you can derive from that, but it’s not going to all fall into a neat little package. And I guess it isn’t supposed to.

Kate: There’s a, I love collecting descriptions of the kind of wisdom of only partial knowledge. And I just find the right language around it, kind of really beautiful and one I read the other day that was describing the way that Abraham Lincoln had tried to make sense of the death of his son and, and live with courage in light of what he knew. And his biographer described it as the delicate fruit of a lifetime of pain. I thought delicate fruit is a beautiful way of those little bits of wisdom we get where we do know a couple really true things. And then the rest is just like garbage and uncertainty. I find that the way we sift has been such a, you’ve been sifting your whole life.

Francis: As have you. I like the delicate fruit because it doesn’t overstate that this is all, you know, champagne and roses. Learning from suffering, you know, is a hard thing. But there’s somewhere in there that delicate fruit.

Kate: I’m going to take a quick break to talk about the sponsors of the show. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back. One of the most frustrating things I think about trying to be a person who appreciates both faith and science in an American context is that there’s been at least 100 years now of culture wars that pit them against each other. And it seems like a lot of what you have to do as a person of faith who’s also say, like the country’s leading scientific mind, is you have to talk people into that. I’m sure that’s just like part of your endless bio. Do you think institutional mistrust now is the primary obstacle of how people of good faith across difference can, can start to even have like, neutral categories again?

Francis: Boy, there’s a lot to unpack there. And it does go back more than a hundred years. Science was considered a form of natural theology, and the word scientist didn’t get invented until the 1800s. And there were several parts to that. There was certainly Darwin, which was troubling to some, but not all. A lot of Christians said, hurray. We have discovered the answer to how this all came to pass. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t God amazing? This elegant process of evolution made it possible for this diversity of wonder things all around us and ourselves.

Kate: Yeah.

Francis: And hallelujah. And thank you, Lord. But at the same time, there are other movements, particularly in the South, that we’re focused more on literal interpretation of the Bible as the only acceptable way of going a long way from what maybe Saint Augustine would have warned us about back in 400 A.D. about not trying to turn Genesis into a science book. Ellen White with the Seventh Day Adventists really coming forward with the very strong argument that this was literal and that therefore there’s a young Earth and that everything we can see in the fossil record and geology is a consequence of the flood, which then became much more of a positive, embraced attitude by conservative Christians. And then we had Scopes trial, which just left.

Kate: This year was 1925 on a hot day, and Dayton, Tennessee… I was always really good at this lecture. Mostly because you can get students to act it out. I mean, I think if you watch a late night talk show that a lot of people imagine that science that, has always been at odds and then to realize this is just like part of it’s just a it’s kind of become like a, like a Punch and Judy show, like a kind of an unnecessary Punch and Judy show.

Francis: And somehow we seem to like those. So if somebody says, yeah, it’s irreconcilable conflict, we’re like yeah. Let’s hear about that. As opposed to wow. There’s a remarkable complementarity and harmony that’s possible to discover. And there’s plenty of places where there’s active, vigorous dialog and disagreement about exactly what the answers are, but nothing that you can’t see a path forward to resolve. And that’s not what people hear. And it’s partly because in our culture it’s the extreme voices that get the attention. So we have the angry atheists saying that religion has been a terrible, damaging influence and we should just stop it. And we have on the other side Fundamentalist Christians who are saying, if you don’t believe in a young Earth, you’re going to hell. And those scientists are all involved in a conspiracy. They know evolution isn’t true. They’re just trying to kill your faith.

Kate: I wonder if you could have ever imagined that the response to Covid would be such a shocking catalyst for this divide.

Francis: I didn’t, Kate. And it breaks my heart when you see how that divided us just at the point where we most needed to come together. I was naive about, I guess, this strength of cognitive bias that can kick in even in a circumstance that’s life or death and where the science is just really clear. With vaccines, for instance, the vaccines that got developed in those 11 months by an amazing effort on the part of thousands of people who are working 100-hour weeks, me included, to try to coordinate all of this and do something that previously had never been done in less than 5 or 10 years and usually failed anyway. And to in those 11 months to come up with these mRNA-based vaccines and test them in really rigorous randomized, double-blind trials and prove that both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine had 90 to 95% effectiveness in preventing serious disease and a very good safety record. I mean, the data was absolutely beautifully clean and clear. I had prayed so hard about this and done everything I could scientifically, and I felt like it’s been answered. We are going to be able to actually save all these lives that are still at risk. I confess I cried like a baby that night. It was just like, we are here. But 50 million Americans said not to me. And a lot of it was sort of unfortunately built on that ground of distrust about science and the group that was most likely to say, not for me were white evangelical Christians. I’m a white evangelical Christian. Those are my people. And to see that happening with answers like, well, this doesn’t feel like God’s plan, or maybe there is something suspicious about what’s in those syringes, or maybe this is the mark of the beast. I just was stunned to see that happen. And as much as various leaders in the church tried to turn that around, I’m not sure how much it actually made any difference. People were so dug in. There was also a reflection about how our church communities, our spiritual communities have been so contaminated with politics because that was the other big driver. Somehow science seemed to be attached to the left and faith seemed to be attached to the right. Does that make any sense? Why should those topics, faith and science, have a political allegiance as a requirement for whether you’re going to be really part of the club? But the bottom line here is this, this was not just this time an unfortunate social disagreement.

Kate: No, it was not. It was like real life consequences. In which, what was it? A million Americans died?

Francis: 1.3 million died. Of those, 234,000 people who basically turned it down, the vaccination. A lot more people turned it down than that. But those are the people who lost their lives as a result. Those are all people in graveyards. That’s four times the number of deaths in the Vietnam War, unnecessarily lives snuffed out by a virus that we should have thought of as the enemy, because somehow we figured out that there were other people around us who were the enemy. We shouldn’t trust them. I am stunned that such a thing is possible in the most technologically advanced country in the world.

Kate: I really thought from a religious perspective that one of the things we would feel most connected to is the experience of the weak and the suffering.

Francis: You would think.

Kate: Some of the followers that I had gotten, for instance, on Instagram, in being part of evangelical communities that I care about, that I could see an immediate like backlash around just as, you know, being immunocompromised at the time. And I was… Christians have been such a historic part of the development of hospitals, around leper colonies, I mean, sheltering people who no one wants to touch.

Francis: Who weren’t worth the trouble, yes.

Kate: Regardless of what’s happened, it’s really had the effect of having an accidental or deliberate cruelty. It was a brutal time for everybody to be sick.

Francis: It was.

Kate: So it just felt so odd to feel the very Darwinian attitude about who is going to, who, who gets to survive. That was like, conversations that we had early on about the elderly. Like those those blew me away. They blew me away.

Francis: Yeah. And they still do.

Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back.

Francis: I got to tell you, Kate, I am deeply troubled about what’s happened to our nation, our world in this regard. In four areas that you would have thought would be anchors that we could depend on in a storm and in troubled times. First of all, truth, we have to kind of agree that there is such a thing as truth and try to seek it out. Second, all science as a means of discovering truth about nature. Distrust of science has just gone way up just at the moment where I think historians would say what science did, responding to Covid, was probably one of the most amazing achievements ever by humanity in the face of a crisis. And then what’s happened to our faith communities? How have we ended up, as you say, becoming so hardhearted in some cases and participating in a lot of the vitriol that’s directed at people we just don’t agree with as opposed to come let us reason together? Let’s hear what you have to say. And I’ll tell you what I have to say. And then the fourth thing is trust, because you can have the other things working. But if you can’t figure out how to trust each other appropriately and how not to trust information that’s actually wrong, then it’s not going to go anywhere.

Kate: Let’s know what kinds of trusts are, what kinds of trust, layers of untruth. You have some nice categories that I really liked that I thought people might want to think with you through about that when we’re trying to evaluate a truth-claim that maybe there’s some categories we might be able to use.

Francis: Yeah, because that’s where a lot of the confusion happens when somebody says, Well, that might be true for you, but it’s not true for me. When is that okay? If it’s about an established fact, like, yes, the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around, I’m sorry. That’s got to be true for you and me.

Kate: It has to be true all of us.

Francis: Exactly. If it’s like, well, dogs are better pets than cats. Sure, we can disagree on that. That’s an opinion, that enlivens our social discourse. That’s okay. What happens is those categories gotten all blurred, and especially in social media, somebody will put forward some statement without providing evidence. Oftentimes there isn’t any. And then it goes viral and pretty soon it’s somehow shoved into the category of established fact when it doesn’t belong there. And alternatively something that is an established fact, gets attacked because somebody doesn’t like it, and established facts don’t really care whether you are liking it or not. They just are. And then that gets shoved out of the category where it belongs and that becomes an opinion. And we muddled that all up.

Kate: You had some, I think I have the list of because it I think I can’t remember if you or I added the one saucy word in this list but it had.

Francis: Well, here we go.

Kate: Kinds of truth. You had ignorance.

Francis: And that is not being stupid. That just means you weren’t, you didn’t have access to the information.

Kate: Honest, unknowing. Falsehood.

Francis: That that is a statement that is simply not true, can be shown to be an incorrect representation of the facts. It’s false.

Kate: A lie.

Francis: A lie is more intentional. Right? A lie carries with it some motivation that I’m going to put this forward because I’ve got an agenda and I’m not really caring about the fact that it’s not true. I’m trying to make a point.

Kate: Delusion.

Francis: Well, we all have lots of those too. And you’ve got to be a little more forgiving. Maybe it’s a little bit like ignorance, but a delusion is that you have taken on board something that is not correct and you don’t fully realize it.

Kate: Bullshit.

Francis: Ah yes. This is where you are basically spreading about information with no interest at all about whether it’s true, which is even more hard to forgive. And most of marketing is like that.

Kate: Yes. Reminds me of the beginning of 24-hour television and content filtering. I remember that like I used to study religious media and the moment where people felt that they had 24 hours to fill, was the spread of some very exciting new theological developments.

Francis: Yeah.

Kate: Propaganda.

Francis: Ah. Well, that’s taking the extreme of lying and turning it into a political, oftentimes, agenda and relentlessly putting forward the same lies over and over again. And you would think we being rational creatures would not have that actually affect us. But it does. And that’s how demagogues, most recently Putin, have succeeded in completely convincing millions of otherwise rational people of things that are absolutely provably false, because they keep hearing the propaganda over and over again. And they’re just like, well, I keep hearing that, it must be true. That’s dangerous. And let’s just say it’s not completely missing from our current American experience either. You say the same lie over and over again. People start to say, there must be something there.

Kate: Yeah. It’s very hard to argue forcefully, like argue substantially with the kind of humility that I know you want. We’re entering an election year in which people are already I mean, there’s just fractures everywhere. I know there’s all kinds of community leaders who are just looking at people they love, even in the same building as survivors of the last few years. I wonder how if, we could talk a bit about how we can enter back into conflict because there will be conflict this year.

Francis: Yeah.

Kate: And in the years to come. But like with a kind of, like a soft heartedness that we want.

Francis: That is so much what we need, Kate, I’m right there with you. And it’s not going to come from our political leaders. When you look at the harshness of our own societal discourse, it is mild compared to what happens. And it has gotten so polarized. And our Congress takes that to an extreme. There’s no middle left anymore. So that’s not going to bring us back to some kind of reasonable, humble, winsome discourse. So it’s got to come from us. Which is like, really? We have to do this, aren’t we? Trying to do it? Yeah, it has to come from us. It has to come from each of us basically stepping back and saying, okay, what role am I playing here? And is it a positive one? Or am I actually kind of contributing to the polarization by sticking only to the people in my bubble and imagining that those other people over there maybe you’re not just misguided, they’re they’re dangerous, they’re evil, and we’re all at risk of that. And what can I do to change that? First of all, I think that means all of us, especially if we’re people of faith, to get back to our anchor of what it is that are supposed to be our fundamental values, of loving your neighbor and loving your enemies and seeking out opportunities for love and grace to fall down over all of these issues in a way that will bring us to a place where we can actually love each other again.

Kate: Yeah.

Francis: And then I think it means we all have to work harder at reaching out to people we identify as not agreeing with and listening to them. But you learn so much from people whose opinions when you walk in the room, you think, well, I could never spend time with that person and you end up after an hour and a half like we’re all friends here. We realized we weren’t that far apart. The other group, I got to say, Kate, that I’m really troubled about is what’s happening to young people because they see all of this and they’re being barraged by messages on social media that are really destructive for their mental health, and particularly girls. When you see the increase in anxiety and depression and suicidal attempts, it is deeply troubling.

Kate: Yeah.

Francis: So that’s got to be part of our societal solution or we’re not getting the next generation ready to be able to help. And then I think ultimately, while we can’t convince our current leaders to start being winsome, we, I think are as voters, as part of this society, we should be putting more emphasis on character for the people that we’re putting in charge of important institutions and governments.

Kate: That’s my son’s prayer every night. He was like, he was like, Dear God. Please help everyone to have good personal qualities if they run the government. I don’t know exactly how he settled on those words, but I think it’s such a good prayer.

Francis: He has got insight that I wish was more broadly spread across the country. It isn’t good enough to say, well, it’s just a mean person that’s going to protect my needs.

Kate: Yes, my bully is my protector.

Francis: Yeah, that’s that’s not what we need right now. So all of that. I try. And this book I wrote called The Road to Wisdom, talking about faith and science and truth and trust. It can’t just end with a depressing diagnosis. And I think there are plenty of things that we can do, but we have to individually see that as something that falls on our shoulders and not just expect somebody else to start behaving better. It’s us.

Kate: Like sometimes, one of things I find overwhelming when trying to figure out how to engage is so, it’s so rarely like a one issue conversation. Because most people now are so densely networked with other people who have like a cluster of issues. And then you thought you’re going to have a discussion about vaccines. Now you’re having a discussion about the postal system and its efficacy. And now everybody, it’s, everybody is out of their league. And I guess one thing that’s kind of helped me a bit is, I think about, I think about an institution that I’ve experienced a betrayal of trust inside. I’ve had a very difficult time in the health care system. I had a really difficult experience, in particular with the informed consent process with my clinical trial. And I look back and I think I was unfairly treated and I was unfairly treated because there were a set of incentives that that swayed it away from me and I should have gotten better care. When you can see a moment of institutional evil and that doesn’t have to be people of bad character, just a process working the way it typically does. And it’s not for your good. There’s like there’s a heartbreak at the center of that. And and but instead of just saying neutral in my mind, like hospitals or doctors, I can I, I can feel heartbreak. And that heartbreak and that kind of helps ground me in a place of a little more compassion when somebody has their own kinds of heartbreak with institutions I would otherwise see as neutral. When when people tell me their church stories, they break my heart. And also, I’d really like people to continue to participate meaningfully in trying to make the church a beautiful home for everybody.

Francis: And how do we deal with those moments where institutions have failed us without sort of doing a sweeping dismissal of their value because we depend on those institutions flawed like-

Kate: I guess I’ll make my own drugs now.

Francis: Yeah, right.

Kate: I’ll go off into my garage.

Francis: Yes.

Kate: Take out the pipette.

Francis: Yeah. So, yeah. How do we use those moments where institutions fail to try to make them better? Because I think, you know the data here, that the public view of institutions across the board has plummeted. And some of that is earned. But some of it is just general attitude. Ugh, it’s an institution, I don’t trust any of them. And that part is dangerous. People like Yuval Levin, who writes this book about how dependent we are as a culture for our institutions to be successful, says if there’s really this kind of distrust, we got a problem and we got to figure out how to deal with it. And institutions that have screwed up should be ready to say so and apologize and then try to fix themselves and not ignore it either. But that’s another part of the malaise that we seem to have right now is just this sort of general willingness to say these people don’t know what they’re doing.

Kate: Yeah. And then and then we get more fearful because then who’s going to take care of us?

Francis: Right.

Kate: I always want to go through all the categories of the things that we rely on. What I’m trying to talk people into, how fragile we are. I don’t want to talk to them about how anxious we should be, but just how interdependence is actually woven into our everyday lives in a way that we, we need roads. We need bridges. We need doctors. We need teachers. We need mail to go somewhere when we put it in a metal box, like and at every turn, we forget that our contingency is just like that is a fact. And the fact of it needs to then get like, we’ve its way into a hope that we can stitch together something that is like, that’s, that’s going to hold all of us together.

Francis: And we need schools. We have more that we could be doing as a community to invest in the good stuff instead of just tearing the whole thing down. And say, I’m checking out.

Kate: It’s not a sexy time to be pro institution. And I find myself saying it, I’m like, I’m pro institution, and it’s like womp womp. I don’t really have a choice. I don’t think any of us have a choice.

Francis: Yeah, we can demand that the institutions be better at what they do, but to basically say, well, just just tear them all down, that leads to chaos and tragedy. So once again, I’m afraid I kind of come back to it falls on all of our shoulders, yours, mine and everybody else, to try to diagnose what’s wrong and then become part of the solution.

Kate: Yeah.

Francis: Instead of just railing into the darkness about it, light a candle instead.

Kate: There’s a lovely blessing that you really liked, and I wondered if we could use that as a benediction for this conversation.

Kate: I would love that.

Kate: Blessing from Benedictine nun Sister Ruth Fox, and I’m secretly hoping you’ll read it for us.

Francis: I would love to. Many people call this the fourfold blessing. And a lot of people think it came from Saint Francis and it sort of seems like it would. But no, this was the Benedictine sister. Four parts. May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart. May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace. May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. At then, may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world so that you can do what others claim cannot be done. I love that. Thank you, God, for the foolishness that we are occasionally given to try to take on something that everybody else says, no, that’s hopeless. It’s only hopeless if we let it be.

Kate: Thank you for being so recklessly hopeful. I have had a joy talking to you.

Francis: And to you. And I think you got a little of that character yourself. So it’s been a wonderful conversation. And thank you for everything you’re doing to help these kinds of thoughts get spread out there to all those who are listening.

Kate: Thanks for the vaccine. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that Francis and I are the only ones feeling blegh about the state of the world or the division we see inside of our families and our communities. All you have to do is pick up your phone, scroll through social media, and you too can feel the endless blegh as you doom scroll to your heart’s content. How would we even know what to do? What difference we can make? Or what it looks like to engage or reengage productively? If you’re Francis Collins, then it might look like inviting your actual neighbors over, not just the ones who look like you or vote like you, to sing together. No, actually. He and his wife host sing-alongs. How adorable is that? It might look like asking a follow-up question to understand a little more where someone’s coming from. Instead of responding defensively. Which I know is so hard. It might look like double-checking a source before you reshare it that might be untrue or unconfirmed or rooted in fear or anger, just to check. It might look like volunteering for a cause that really matters to you. Sign up for a local soup kitchen. Become a casa. Look up your local United Way. Become a pen pal with someone in prison. Volunteer in an animal shelter. It might look like committing to a local church or community group, even if it still has flaws because, hey, none of them are perfect. And, you know, I love talking everyone into being Rotarians. Gosh, you cannot pull me away from our Rotary Club. We all have to be part of the solution. So how will you start? How will I start? I want to hear all of your ideas. Will you send us your gentle wisdom for engaging productively right now without all the vitriol of us versus them that we’re just trying so hard to escape? Leave us a voicemail at (919) 322-8731. I really want to hear. And in the words of that wise Benedictine nun, may we all have the discomfort that makes us hungry for better. The anger toward every injustice, the tears to mourn with those who mourn and the utter foolishness to believe that we can make a difference. Amen.

Kate: You don’t want to miss our weekly email. Sign up at katebowler.com/newsletter so you can hear about upcoming events, new podcasts, free gifts we want to send your way. And hey, podcasts are a very strange medium that require that we go to war against the algorithmic overlords. So would you mind doing me a huge favor and leave us a review and make sure you’re subscribed on Spotify or Apple Podcasts? It only takes a couple of seconds, but it makes a huge difference to who sees our show. A big thank you to my team and our partners for the work they put into this season. Lilly Endowment, the Duke Endowment and Duke Divinity School support all of our projects. This podcast is my very favorite group project. A huge shout out to my team, Jessica Ritchie, who just had a baby, so exciting. Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hailie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer and Katherine Smith. Who would I be without all of you? Thank you. And for this episode specifically, a big thank you to the Biologos team who let us crash your wonderful conference to tape this conversation. Learn more about their work at Bille logos.org. Join me right here. Same time, same place for a conversation with America’s government teacher, Sharon McMahon. I think she might give us a bunch of great ideas about how to reengage in our communities in small, faithful ways. You’re going to love it. I’ll talk to you next week, my loves. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.