A Tale of Two Christian Doctors: Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

It was the worst of times. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the horsemen of the atheist Apocalypse led by the Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins were marching through the hallowed halls of academia. While writing my doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge, I trembled at the thundering of their horses’ hooves.

Could I challenge the icy winds of anti-Christian snobbery that blew my way when I shared the Gospel with university dons at high table after I had preached at different Cambridge college chapels for Evensong? Wouldn’t the scientists gently scoff at my belief in Hebrew fairy tales?

Evangelical Hero

But, what the Dickens! It was also the best of times. I had learned that Dr. Francis Collins was heading up the Human Genome Project in Cambridge. And Collins was an evangelical Christian who was in charge of the 15-year endeavor to map the human DNA sequence by 2005.

Now, I could add Collins to the list of Oxbridge scientists (like mathematician John Lennox, molecular biophysicist Alister McGrath, and quantum physicist John Polkinghorne) whose names I had learned to nimbly ease into an evangelistic conversation with atheists dons and students who thought Christianity was for suckers and schmucks.

I was moved by Collins’s testimony. He had converted from atheism to full-blown evangelical Christianity. I bought copies of his 2007 book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief and gave them to atheist friends.

On June 26, 2000, when President Bill Clinton (connected by satellite link to British Prime Minister Tony Blair) commended Collins for leading the project that revealed the three-billion-letter-long code of our DNA, I sensed that the horsemen of the atheist Apocalypse were being routed by God’s knights in shining Gospel armor.

“Today, we are learning the language in which God created life,” Clinton declared. “We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift.”

Collins Sells His Soul

Twenty years later, the best of times had turned into the worst of the worst of times. China had poured its apocalyptic bowl of COVID-19 on an unsuspecting world — and Francis Collins had morphed into Judas Iscariot. My hero, who was heading the National Institutes of Health (NIH), struck a Faustian bargain with Mephistophelian Big Pharma, Big Government, and Communist China.

Collins’s descent into Dante’s Inferno didn’t stop there.

Between 2016 and 2019, Collins spent nearly $3 million on creating the Tissue Hub and Collection Siteat the University of Pittsburgh, which traffics fetal organs from abortion mills to laboratories. Collins explicitly defended the use of fetal tissue from elective abortions.
In May 2019, the man better known as “Anthony Fauci’s boss” gave a research grant to University of Pittsburgh scientists for grafting the scalps of aborted fetuses onto rats and mice. Their findings, published by Nature, include pictures showing patches of baby hair growing amid rodent fur.
The geneticist, appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Benedict XVI, pursued the shockingly anti-Catholic policy of expanding embryonic stem cell research.
Also in 2019, Collins opposed the Trump administration’s decision to ban NIH intramural research using fetal tissue. In the year before the ban, Collins’s NIH spent $115 million on fetal experimentation.
Mouthing the language of the pansexual lobby, Collins wrote in a June 2021 letter that the NIH would join “in celebrating Pride Month,” celebrating “those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and others under the sexual and gender minority (SGM) umbrella.”

Worse, Collins lied to Congress, saying the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” After a seven-hour interview with Collins, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, concluded: “Dr. Collins minced words over the definition of gain-of-function research in an effort to hide the NIH’s involvement in funding the dangerous research in Wuhan.”

Canonizing Collins while Demonizing Bhattacharya

Despite his record, evangelical heavyweights like Russell Moore, Tim Keller, Rick Warren, N.T. Wright, David French, and Ed Stetzer canonized Collins and became mouthpieces for the NIH chief in preaching the gospel of sola vaccina (salvation by vaccine alone).

In her recent book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda,

Daily Wire journalist Meghan Basham writes that “Keller, Warren, Wright, Moore, and Stetzer all publicly lauded Collins as a godly brother, as did Christianity Today and Relevant.” Collins is mentioned in Shepherds for Sale more than any other person.

Most shamefully, Collins slandered his brother in Christ and fellow scientist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) with Harvard University medial professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff, , and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor at Oxford University with expertise in epidemiology, immunology, and vaccinology.

The declaration, signed by more than 940,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists from across the world, objected to COVID-19 lockdown policies for “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”

In a 2020 email to Fauci, Collins trashed the highly credentialed Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Gupta as “three fringe epidemiologists” and called for “a quick and devastating published takedown of [GBD] premises.” He kept asking: “I don’t see anything like that on line yet — is it underway?”

Collins used his BioLogos foundation to leverage celebrity evangelical leaders, including Wright, Philip Yancey, Lisa Sharon Harper, Darrel Bock, and Kevin Vanhoozer into signing a statement titled “Love Your Neighbor, Get the Shot.”

“In the end, more than 8,000 people, many of whom were pastors and ministry leaders, promised to work against the evidence and arguments Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington colleagues were presenting in order to promote Collins and Fauci’s policies,” Basham writes in the Daily Wire.

The smear campaign “completely overturned” Bhattacharya’s life. “I couldn’t eat or sleep for months,” he later told The Wall Street Journal. “There were some very, very nasty attacks.” Formerly friendly colleagues “crossed the street to avoid me.” He even received death threats.

The Hindu Who Surrendered to Christ

Because of his Indian name, the evangelicals signing Collins’s statement may not have known that Jayanta Bhattacharya is a Christian.

Bhattacharya was raised a Hindu in Calcutta — an Indian state reputed for its high culture and intellectualism. He surrendered his life to Jesus as an 18-year-old senior at Claremont High School in Southern California.

“I’m a Christian. That definitely played a role in giving me strength,” he told the WSJ. “I have a purpose in life, and I’m supposed to use my gifts for this purpose.”

When he “saw the widespread adoption of policies that were not grounded in science, that were harming the welfare of the vulnerable, particularly children,” he felt he “had an obligation to speak” because of his Christian convictions.

He used to believe that “what made someone important, what gave them moral worth, almost, was how smart they were.” When he came to faith in Christ, he understood “how evil that idea was” and how “hubris around your accomplishments, your intelligence, is immoral. Sinful, even.”

That understanding helped him withstand the slander he had to endure during the pandemic. “I had all these people essentially saying I was not very smart. But they were attacking a version of me that had already died when I was 18,” Bhattacharya testified.

Preaching Against Covid Leprosy

The scientist, who is also an economist, has been a member of First Presbyterian Church in Mountain View, California, where he has served as a deacon and elder for 27 years.

“For a long time, I’ve been reflecting on how my Christian faith calls me to treat everyone as clean, even if The Science(tm) recommends the opposite,” he tweeted, linking to a sermon he had preached on the topic in February 2022.

Bhattacharya preached from 2 Kings 5 (the story of the prophet Elisha healing the Syrian commander Naaman of leprosy) and from Matthew 8:1-4 (Jesus healing a leper). He talked about the concepts of “clean” and “unclean,” superbly dovetailing his medical expertise with insightful biblical exegesis and application.

Unlike Elisha, who asked Naaman to take a dip in the Jordan River to cure his leprosy, Jesus “made a show of physically touching lepers who approached Him asking for a cure,” the preacher-scientist said, describing “the level of shock this must have caused” since lepers were both ritually unclean and spreaders of a “deadly, disfiguring disease.”

Bhattacharya took the opportunity to preach about substitutionary atonement — how “God holds us as innocent and clean with Jesus taking the punishment for our sin.” He then talked about how Jesus’s very physical act of touching lepers suggests more than spiritual or physical healing.

“Part of following Jesus means not treating each other, our neighbors, as unclean in any way. In the kingdom of God there is no distinction between ceremonially clean and unclean,” he noted.

“I think our Church and our culture have failed to follow Jesus’s example these past two years. In so many ways, I think our culture has embraced an ethos dividing the clean from the unclean during COVID.

“We treat contracting the virus as a sin — as a punishment for not being careful and doing all the right things,” including avoiding the unmasked because they are “unclean.”

Bhattacharya, a former high-caste Hindu, knows only too well the purity-pollution apartheid of the caste system.

“Jay” in Jesus

How tragic that a Hindu convert was treated as an unclean leper by his own Christian colleagues in the academia and ministry. But Providence has the last laugh — and the scientist burned at the stake of public opinion as a “heretic” and “blasphemer” by Collins and Fauci has now been nominated by President-Elect Donald Trump to lead the NIH beginning in just a few weeks.

The Hill called it “the right kind of revenge.” But praying Mary’s song for my daily evening prayer, I see it as one of the many instances of the Magnificat enacted in our midst.

Mary’s God has “scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty” (Luke 1:46-55).

Jayanta Bhattacharya’s Bengali first name means “one who is victorious in the end.” The book of Revelation describes a striking image of “those who were victorious over the beast and his image and the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, holding harps of God.” It ends with a warning for the “cowardly” and “all liars.”

Dr. Collins, if you are reading this, may I humbly ask you and your evangelical sidekicks to publicly repent? And, Dr. Bhattacharya, be assured of our prayers as you bring your Christian faith and integrity to Making America Healthy Again.

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.

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