I’m reading False Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul, written in 1963. In the chapter called Incompetence and Irresponsibility (p. 154) he writes,
In this day and age, it would never occur to Christians to send notoriously incompetent persons into a scientific milieu to enter into discussion with physicists and to take sides on some theory in physics, on the basis of a few general ideas and clippings from the weekly newspapers.
In this day and age, not 50 years later, it seems that Christians are more than willing to do that very thing. To see “competence” as corruption and an actual disqualifier to speak to an issue (competent=elite; going to college=snobbery). To have politicians spreading rank untruths (to cite two well-known recent examples) on rape (because I heard the body shuts it down) or inoculations (I was told in the parking lot by a doctor who was seven-feet tall) and call them the “Christian” candidates and the pushback on their ignorance, “religious persecution”.
Part of my motivation (aside from the Ellul book) is the interaction I had recently on a "Christian" site. I linked to an explanation showing a popular "Christian" argument in "the culture wars" to be false. To that, somebody responded "I don't think this article is trustworthy because, as scientists, they have an agenda", with no indication that he considered his own cynicism as maybe being agenda-driven or that his motive was more about fear of losing a talking-point than any concern for truth.