Technophobia and Religion: Can Businesses Overcome the "God Gap"?Maybe you noticed this curious item in the front pages of the March 3rd Business Week (no link to this story):
In a recent poll, only 30% of 1,015 Americans said they morally approved of nanotechnology--the engineering of matter at the molecular level to create everything from slice-resistant golf balls to cancer drugs. That's much lower than the results of similar surveys in key nanotech markets like Britain (54%), Germany (63%), and France (72%), notes Dietram Scheufele, a University of Wisconsin life sciences professor who ran the U.S. poll. He believes the approval gap is due to religion's "important role" in America. On both sides of the ocean, he says, many who identified themselves as religious objected to the idea of altering molecules.I found the story weird because I've heard so little in the mainstream media about nanotechnology--and certainly nothing that would stir fears of Frankensteinish nanobots running amok. (By contrast, genetically engineered foods have gotten a lot more negative publicity--to say nothing of the hotly controversial stem cell research.)When I did a little further reading on the poll, I became even more puzzled, especially when I read a comment from Professor Scheufele to the effect that the popular opposition to nanotechnology is not due to ignorance about the technology but rather to religiously-based objections: "The issue isn't about informing these people. They are informed."What does this mean? Are we to believe that there are large numbers of devout Christians who are deeply knowledgeable about nanotechnology and have developed thoughtful theological arguments against it? The idea struck me as rather implausible--so much so that I emailed Professor Scheufele for further information.The articles the professor linked me to did a lot to clear up the mystery. Turns out that one of the things Scheufele and his colleagues studied was whether knowledge about nanotechnology is correlated with positive attitudes toward it; and another was how religious belief affects this relationship. As explained in a forthcoming article in Public Understanding of Science, co-authored by Scheufele, Dominique Brossard, and Eunkyung Kim,
. . . highly religious respondents . . . showed the lowest levels of support for funding for nanotechnology; and being more knowledgeable about nanotechnology did little to influence their support for funding. For less religious individuals, however, our data showed a strong link between knowledge about nanotechnology and greater support for nanotechnology funding.In other words, to know about nanotechnology is to love it--unless you are religious, in which case you hate it whether you know anything about it or not. (I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.)I find this story slightly depressing. It suggests that the U.S. contains, at the moment, a large, essentially irreducible minority of people who reflexively oppose new technologies, fear them, and express these fears in moral terms. For these people, scientific innovation is equated with "playing God" or "tampering with nature," and they assume that there is something sinister about technology unless the opposite can somehow be convincingly demonstrated.The apparent link between technophobia and religious sentiment suggests specific issues that business people need to address.If you're in charge of public relations at Monsanto, Dow, Schering-Plough, Amgen, or any other company that is in the business of marketing technological breakthroughs, you ought to consider creating a department for religious outreach. Talk to theologians, including some conservative ones, and work on developing an appropriate, non-scientific, spiritual language for explaining what you do--perhaps describing technology in terms like "human stewardship of creation" and its benefits as "blessings produced by God's gift of reason."And devote resources to making connections with religious leaders, especially in the United States. When future public battles are fought over issues like technology regulation and funding, you'll probably want to have some well-informed, open-minded, and widely-trusted pastors on your side.