Resisting political idolatry’s siren call

For over six years I have written about the Covid-19 debacle. In the spring of 2020, when questioning lockdowns, masking policies, Anthony Fauci, or the recommendations and policies of the World Health Organization, I was met with accusations of being “anti-science” and supporting conspiracy theories. 

As the editor and main author of COVID-19: A Dystopian Delusion, which was published in 2022, I sought to preserve a historical record while events were still unfolding. I hoped that, with time, people would revisit those events with the benefit of a fuller historical record, one that would be enriched by congressional hearings, testimony, released emails, FOIA requests, and official reports that were not available while the pandemic was unfolding. Recent developments have begun to provide precisely that opportunity.

The summer 2026 congressional hearings involving Dr. Anthony Fauci raise two serious questions. The first is whether he will ever be held legally accountable for his conduct. History has shown that powerful people are rarely held accountable. Perhaps the recent contempt vote against Dr. Fauci will mark the beginning of genuine accountability. Or perhaps, like so many congressional hearings before it, it will amount to little more than political theatre. 

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That question of accountability matters greatly. Yet there is a second question that receives far less attention: Why do so many otherwise well-intentioned people still fail to agree on some of the most basic facts surrounding the Covid-19 fiasco? This problem extends beyond politics into philosophy and theology. More precisely, it is a problem of both epistemology and morality.

Typically, Christians raise the issue of living in a culture that has lost its moral compass. However, something less frequently discussed is the loss of something more fundamental: A shared understanding of truth itself. It isn’t merely that we disagree about conclusions but also about what counts as evidence, which institutions deserve our trust, and even more troubling, what questions we are allowed to ask. 

One of the many tragedies of the Covid years was not merely that politics interfered with science, but that political loyalties increasingly determined which scientific authorities people trusted and, consequently, what they were willing to accept as scientific truth. Political allegiance increasingly displaced the impartial evaluation of evidence, reducing science from a method of inquiry to a tool of ideological affirmation.

The case of Dr. Fauci vividly illustrates this problem. If you drop his name at practically any gathering, you will quickly discover people are responding to entirely different bodies of information. Some have followed years of congressional testimony, released emails, diary entries, and what they regard as significant contradictions between Fauci’s public statements and the documentary record. Others know him exclusively through how he has been portrayed and defended by most mainstream sources. These are not merely different opinions formed by common evidence but rather indicative of different informational worlds.

This is why such conversations rarely advance anywhere meaningful. Before any meaningful discussion of Fauci’s conduct, mistakes, or accountability can occur, we must first establish what he actually said and did, whether opposing evidence received a fair hearing, and whether there is a common understanding of the facts.

To be sure, none of this is unique to Covid. Unfortunately, instead of asking whether a piece of information corresponds with reality, people increasingly assess information through the lens of political allegiance. Conservatives and progressives are both guilty of this. Some MAGA supporters too readily dismiss  evidence that challenges President Trump’s record or promises. Similarly, so-called progressives quickly dismiss contrary scientific and historical evidence in debates over transgender ideology and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). 

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The truth is objective. As such, it exists independently of our desires, preferences, and ideologies: two plus two equals four whether we like it or not. For Christians, this objectivity is ultimately grounded in God Himself, who is Truth. We do not create truth but seek to discover it. This, in turn, requires recognizing our own fallibility, what philosophers sometimes call epistemic humility: an awareness of the limits of our knowledge.

Accordingly, authentic scientific inquiry should reflect this same commitment to truth and epistemic humility. It welcomes dissent and every hypothesis, theory, or model should remain open to being falsified, refined, or expanded. It also must acknowledge that every scientist, physician, and investigator is capable of error. 

Fauci’s infamous assertion that those who criticized him were “really criticizing science because I represent science” exemplified the lack of epistemic humility that authentic scientific inquiry demands. Unsurprisingly, Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique and repeatedly emphasized that it was not designed, by itself, to diagnose active infectious disease, died just months before the Covid-19 pandemic. 

For years he challenged Dr. Fauci to debate, and sharply questioned his scientific competence, mockingly accusing him of believing that one could simply take a blood sample, examine it under an electron microscope, and know whether a virus was present. More importantly for the present discussion, Mullis also identified a broader and highly relevant epistemological problem: “The vast majority [of people] do not possess the ability to judge who is and who isn’t a really good scientist.” For Mullis, the problem was that scientific authority was increasingly being conferred and judged by people who did not sufficiently understand the science themselves.

Some Christian churches and leaders failed to practice this humility and discernment during Covid. I addressed this problem in my review of QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross, a book that claimed to confront precisely these issues but largely did so in a partisan way. 

In my writing on Covid, I have argued that Christians must resist two equal and opposite temptations. The first is to treat institutional authorities, whether individuals such as Dr. Fauci, Dr. Theresa Tam, Dr. Fancis Collins, media outlets such as CBC, CNN, or Fox News, or public-health bodies such as Health Canada, the CDC, NIAID, the FDA, or the WHO, as incapable of serious error. The second is to reject such authorities outright solely because they have failed. Both temptations abandon the difficult but necessary work of discernment.

Thus, my ultimate concern is not Dr. Anthony Fauci but rather how we as a society are increasingly unable to reason together because we lack sufficient common ground about reality itself. When citizens inhabit such distinct informational “universes,” disagreement is virtually impossible to resolve. Any sort of debate under such a context will further polarize people and create greater incomprehension.

As a Christian, I believe the process must begin with humility. Christians should be the last people to make an idol of political movements, media personalities, scientific authorities, or public institutions lest anything displace the centrality of Christ. Wherever we lie on the political spectrum, we must be willing to follow the evidence even when it challenges our political preferences, preferred experts, or our presuppositions. Repentance is not only a moral virtue but also an intellectual one. It requires the will to love the truth above pride and tribal loyalties. 

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Christ declared that: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). Those words contain both an assurance and a caution. Freedom cannot operate sans truth. It is when politics becomes the lens of judging truth itself that both science and democracy begin to disintegrate. And if we lose our common commitment, or even worse, as we see the Liberal Government of Canada trying to suppress free inquiry as shown with the Combatting Hate Act (Bill C-9), which received Royal Assent on June 18, 2026, we risk weakening the conditions on which science, politics, and democracy depend: a commitment to truth, freedom of inquiry, openness to dissent, and the willingness to correct error.

Scott Ventureyra is an Ottawa-based writer, philosopher and theologian.

A version of this article appeared in the September 13, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Resisting political idolatry’s siren call"