In the fall of 2008, if you had asked me what kept me awake at night, I would not have said “the end of democracy.” Politically speaking, I was more optimistic than I had ever been. Barack Obama’s election felt like a profound turning point — the most qualified candidate in the field had won decisively. Something had changed. Could America finally begin to fulfill its foundational ideals?

For a brief moment, despite a global financial crisis, hope felt palpable. I was running a technology company, raising three children, engaged in the work I had chosen, not yet awake to the fight that was waiting for me. My son was an infant. I did not yet know what I would learn from him.

From Obama’s inauguration onward, the backlash was immediate and sustained. White supremacist organizations rose to new prominence, fueled by racist conspiracy theories — the birther narrative Trump spent years promoting being only the most visible. The pattern was the one Carol Anderson has documented so meticulously. Every advance in the political standing of Black Americans has been followed by a counteroffensive designed to undo it. The Obama presidency was not an exception. It was an accelerant.

I watched this happen the way most Americans watched it. With concern, but from a distance. I was not yet the person I would become.

Then my not-yet-three-year-old son spoke up. Followed by the years of learning, of pediatric appointments and school meetings, and fights I had not anticipated and had not sought.

In the beginning, I was about as ill-prepared for this moment as you can be. Engineering was all I’d ever known. I had a life that did not require me to testify before anyone or write anything that anyone read in anger or gratitude or both. I became an advocate the way many of the most effective advocates become advocates. Not by choice but by necessity. Not by ideology but by love. Not by plan but by the arrival of a small person who needed the world to be different from what it was.

Dr. King acknowledged, late in his life, that idealistic optimism must give way to practical realism. The dream was still the dream. But the dream required work the dream did not prepare you for. It required showing up in the places where showing up was costly. It required understanding that the people opposing you were not going to be persuaded by your sincerity — only by your persistence, your organization, and the evidence that you would not go away.

That realism is where I live now.

My son will be eighteen by the time this book is published. It wasn’t an easy journey for him. But I am grateful and proud to be his dad. He has an outlook on life that only comes from seeing the world as it truly is — and that is a far cry from what most people experience.

He has grown up seeing the extremes, both the best and worst that people have to offer. I think about this often. That my son has spent his entire life being told, by adults with enormous power, that his very existence is a problem.

Left to their own instincts of curiosity, the children in his life have almost uniformly gotten it, with a speed and a completeness that fills me with hope. This is in stark contrast to the actions of so many adults he has encountered.

The very leaders who bear the responsibility of making wise choices — the legislators, the executives signing orders, the ones voting on his existence — are the ones who seem incapable of understanding, or unwilling to learn, who he is. They seem to have lost that most uniquely human drive. That burning passion to challenge preconceived notions, to explore, to seek absolute truths. To be curious.

My son is still learning how to navigate a world that is making it impossible for him to live. He sees the schools who once embraced him being forced to remove evidence of his existence — from books in the library to even the mention of his identity in the classroom. He sees some of the most renowned medical centers in the world abandoning the evidence-based, gender-affirming care practices they spent decades developing, bending to a presidential executive order demanding they comply or face the loss of federal funding.

I want to widen the frame for a moment, because the logic that is being deployed against transgender kids is the same logic that has been deployed against other populations in this country for a very long time.

America’s conscience must reckon honestly with the historical injustices inflicted primarily upon Black and Indigenous communities — injustices that were authorized, sustained, and morally justified by the very religious institutions and doctrines this book has examined. The case for reparations is not a radical proposition. It is the logical conclusion of taking seriously both the history of what was done and the evidence of its ongoing consequences.

The wealth gap. The health gap. The incarceration gap. The educational opportunity gap faced by Black and Indigenous Americans. These are not the residue of ancient history. They are the compounding interest on a debt incurred through centuries of slavery, legal apartheid, and policy that explicitly funneled resources and opportunities to white families while denying them to Black ones.

To acknowledge that faith is not fact is also to acknowledge that the supernatural justifications offered for these arrangements were not facts. The harm they produced is real. Genuine reconciliation demands more than acknowledgment. As Dr. King understood too well, justice is not an abstraction. It has to touch the ground.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail — the letter that is, arguably, the most important document in the American tradition of moral advocacy — Dr. King spoke to the white moderates who expressed sympathy for the goals of the civil rights movement while urging patience with the pace of change. He wrote: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

In a similar vein, it is not the committed Christian nationalist who worries me most. It is the person who understands the threat posed by Christian nationalism and yet continues to attend and support a Church that is aligned with those ideals.

The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade made the stakes of faith-based governance explicit in a way that is difficult to misread. Justice Alito’s majority opinion explicitly invoked religious and common-law doctrine dating back centuries — including the writings of Matthew Hale, a seventeenth-century English jurist who sentenced women to death for witchcraft and held that a husband could not be guilty of raping his wife because she had given irrevocable consent upon marriage. That is the intellectual lineage of the doctrine now governing women’s bodies in more than twenty states. Justice Thomas, in a concurrence, signaled that the same reasoning could be applied to overturn the cases protecting marriage equality, sexual privacy, and contraception.

The certainty being used to write the laws of a twenty-first-century democracy is medieval in origin, theological in character, and, by design, immune to the kind of evidence-based challenge that democratic governance requires.

This is what it costs when we allow faith to operate as fact. It is not a theoretical cost. It is measured in the lives of women denied miscarriage care. Of transgender people denied the right to exist in public. Of children taught that their history and their identities are too dangerous to be named. The cost is real. It is ongoing. And it falls, as it always has, on those with the least power to resist it.

The root cause is the confusion of faith with fact. The permission granted, in law and in culture, for supernatural certainty to override the evidence of human suffering. The willingness of otherwise decent people to look away from the consequences of that confusion because looking requires them to revise what they thought they knew.

That is what Scientific Rebellion demands. That they not look away. That none of us look away. That we insist — in school board meetings and at the ballot box and in conversations near the food table at summer gatherings, in every space where the false certainty is being deployed — that the evidence matters. That every human being counts. That the democracy that was founded on the proposition of equality has not yet finished the work of making that proposition real.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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