There’s a phrase that’s haunting me: “Monkey-god science.” A slur hurled at biologist and Christian Janet Kellogg Ray during the early days of COVID, when she dared suggest that public health precautions might be a form of love-thy-neighbor. It wasn’t the insult itself that stuck with her—it was what it revealed. As she writes:
“The description of my masking position as ‘monkey god science’ was not really offensive—it was more perplexing… I wasn’t talking about the science of evolution. I was talking about medicine, vaccines, and public health policy.”
But that’s precisely the point: in much of white American evangelicalism, it’s all part of the same Venn diagram—evolution denial, COVID skepticism, and climate change dismissal overlapping like so many cracked tectonic plates. This dissonant triad forms the beating heart of The God of Monkey Science—a book that, while not solving the rift between faith and science, dares to sit in the divide, bear witness, and sketch a better way forward.
This is very personal for me — COVID killed my mom, in what likely could have been a preventable death had her evangelical, Bible-belt town took mask mandates and other public health measures seriously.
Like me, Ray is not an outsider to the evangelical world. She grew up steeped in it—“twice on Sunday, and again on Wednesday night,” the kind of faith where The Wizard of Oz was off-limits because it aired during church. Evolution? Not just wrong, but unthinkable. She shares:
“We would have no more questioned the Genesis creation story than we would have questioned the existence of Jesus.”
And yet—she fell in love with science. It began with awe. Moved through doubt. And landed in what many post-evangelicals might recognize as a quiet form of heresy: refusing to lie about what she knew to be true. Evolution wasn’t a threat to her faith—it was a revelation of how God might actually work.
Ray’s tone is part Sunday school teacher, part veteran scientist, part cultural detective. She unpacks how anti-science sentiment isn’t just an intellectual failure—it’s a deeply emotional, social, and political one. As she puts it:
“Evolution, climate science, and COVID appear to be some sort of denialist package deal.”
She traces that package to its origin: the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where William Jennings Bryan made evolution sound less like a scientific theory and more like a societal cancer. Bryan didn’t bother arguing the data; he painted evolution as a moral danger. Ray writes:
“What the people heard were the consequences of evolution… to their families, to their faith, to their freedoms.”
This—Ray insists—is the evangelical denialist playbook, on repeat:
- Cast the science as shoddy or incomplete.
- Insist it will erode faith or morality.
- Frame acceptance as a threat to personal liberty.
It’s a script she sees re-used, nearly verbatim, when it comes to vaccines, climate science, and even geology. (Her Kansas public school erased chapters about mosasaurs and the Western Interior Seaway because, apparently, fossils are too threatening.)
But Ray isn’t merely deconstructing. She’s not here to shame the evangelical world she still, somehow, claims. She writes:
“I’m not critiquing evangelicals as an outsider… Am I in agreement with everything I hear at church? No, but then I don’t agree with myself of twenty years ago.”
This is where The God of Monkey Science truly shines: in its commitment to conversation over cancellation. Ray models a kind of intellectual hospitality that many of us hunger for. She engages science honestly without weaponizing it. She defends her faith without pretending it hasn’t caused harm. She invites us to hold multiple stories at once, even when they sting.
And she’s not afraid to call out the real stakes. During COVID, she notes, the consequences of science denial turned fatal. White evangelicals, as a demographic, were among the least vaccinated, most mask-resistant, and most hostile to public health guidelines:
“The COVID pandemic revealed a deeply ingrained and carefully cultivated distrust of science by those in the evangelical world.”
This isn’t a neutral point of view. It’s an indictment—but not a blanket one. Ray knows her readers. She knows many feel torn, caught between the wonder of their scientific education and the fear-based tribalism of their inherited faith. She sees you. And she offers a way out that isn’t abandonment—it’s integration.
What I find most refreshing is her emphasis that this isn’t a battle of facts. It’s a question of trust. Who do we believe when science shifts or evolves? Whose story gets centered? Who mediates reality—pastor or professor? Politician or peer-reviewed journal?
Ray gets that this is as much about formation as information. The modern evangelical mind has been shaped by decades of messaging, from creationist rafting trips to homeschooled curricula and Christian radio soundbites. If you’ve grown up swimming in these waters, it’s not as simple as “just follow the science.” As Ray notes, even saying that phrase has become politicized.
And so, she offers not just critique, but tools: discussion prompts, digestible explanations of core scientific principles, and gentle questions meant to spark real conversation. This book is made for church basements and Wednesday night study groups. For deconstructing college students and curious parents. For pastors willing to risk the wrath of their board by opening up hard questions.
Ray closes not with certainty, but with invitation:
“As Christians, we are called to truth. Speaking it. Defending it. Living it. Why be afraid of science? If God is truth, all truth is God’s truth, including scientific truth…
Science and faith are not enemies. Science does not have all the answers. With a mind for Christ, may we live as people of faith in a modern scientific world.”
In that spirit, I find The God of Monkey Science to be a liturgy of re-enchantment. A call to love God with heart, soul, and mind. A balm for those of us who still believe in miracles, but want them to sit comfortably next to mitochondria.
For more on Janet Kellogg Ray:
Spiritual Brewpub Podcast Interview
The Deconstructionists Podcast Interview
Related posts:
The God of Monkey Science | Janet Kellogg Ray
How Do We Really Know What We Know? | Dr. Rosemary Laoulach on Science, Faith & Wonder
Changing the World with Faith, Hope & Love: Ecology, Identity, Class & Solidarity in the Way of Jesus with Joerg Rieger!
Is it okay to call God “Mama”? My conversation with Daneen Akers
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