The Trump era has led to the rise of a particularly gag-worthy slogan in centrist-lib circles: “BELIEVE IN SCIENCE.”

It’s clearly well-intended, a way to draw a line between the sharer on one side and the misinformation and magical thinking of the Trumpists on the other. Yet it does so by ironically co-opting the language of religion, and it’s based on a fundamentally naive assumption that science is or has ever been fully extricable from politics.