In an act of supreme irony, there's a recently released fakeumentary out there trying to make the case that "Big Science" is waging a war on poor, defenseless Christianity. From the trailers, it's hard for me to tell if Ben Stein is satirizing Michael Moore's abuse of the documentary format and disregard for truth, if Stein is cynically trying to emulate Moore (who, himself, seems rather cynical), or if he truly believes the premise that the scientific community is waging a holy war against religion. So to speak.

Is it newsworthy if an academic institution resists hiring or retaining a biologist who wants to teach that evolution doesn't exist? If so, perhaps there's a documentary to be made on these other scintillating topics:

• the conspiracy of economists against people who doubt the theory of supply and demand
• the crusade of physicists against those who deny the theory of gravity
• Big Medicine's unrelenting smear campaign against deniers of the germ theory of disease

I almost included in that list the conspiracy of Saturday Night Live writers against anything that might be funny, but that would have violated the comedic "Rule of Three."

Persecution complexes tend to manifest themselves in the weak and the cruel. Hitler, and the Nazis in general, had a persecution complex when it came to the Jews. The Clintons coined the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" long before we started meeting on a regular basis. Richard Nixon, for that matter, allowed his own persecution complex to destroy his presidency and his legacy.

The great paradox of the persecution complex is that it betrays a weakness in character, but not in actual power. This is where I find the notion of "Big Science" persecuting the Christians to be particularly unseemly. Christianity holds more sway politically, culturally, economically, and socially in the very fabric of American life than any other force. For decades (well, centuries, actually), it has insisted on regulating what and how we teach our citizenry, from the birds and the bees to the moon and the stars and everything in between.

Now here comes a Defender of the Faith, in the form of a self-styled intellectual, to declare that when scientists would prefer that science be taught in the science classrooms, Christianity is under attack. Kind of like the way Germany was under attack when France wanted France to be run by, well, the French.

Is Christianity so weak in character that it needs this kind of defender?

[Then again, are liberals so weak that they need Michael Moore as a defender? Hmmm.]