Paul Martin Jensen: How Dogmatic Upbringing Shaped His Battle Against Misinformation

In an age of polarized beliefs and scientific skepticism, one man’s journey from apocalyptic Pentecostalism to science communication offers valuable insights for bridging seemingly unbridgeable divides. Paul Martin Jensen, who once went to bed imagining his public execution during an imminent end-of-days scenario, now consults with the United Nations and other global organizations on health and science communication.

“I’m probably one of a very small club of people who grew up learning conspiracy theories about the U.N. who then went on to go work for the U.N.,” Jensen told STAT during a recent interview at the Breakthrough Summit East in New York City.

For Jensen, the first crack in his rigid belief system came from an unlikely source: snakes. “I love snakes. For whatever reason, snakes are my favorite animal,” he explained. “When I was really little it was one of the first words I learned how to write.”

This fascination put him at odds with the fundamentalist teachings of his church, where his father served as a minister. The biblical portrayal of serpents as evil contradicted Jensen’s innate appreciation for the animals, creating what he calls “a crack of not necessarily believing everything that I was taught.”

That small fissure gradually expanded, ultimately leading Jensen away from his church’s rejection of any science that contradicted Christian scripture. Today, he runs a health research communications and training firm that works with public officials and international organizations—and owns a pet python.

Jensen’s early religious education taught him a binary approach to scientific knowledge. “I was always raised that science was true if it validated our doctrines, and if science undermined our doctrines, then it wasn’t true,” he recalled. “The benchmark was always doctrine… so evolutionary theory, for instance, was a lie.”

What ultimately drew him to science was its tolerance for uncertainty. “Science was a place where saying ‘I don’t know’ was OK, and you could ask any question that you wanted,” Jensen said. “You could breathe in that kind of environment.” This comfort with questioning became not just personally liberating but professionally valuable in his current work countering misinformation.

“The thing that’s so amazing about science is the ability to say ‘we were wrong about that,'” Jensen noted. He believes making it acceptable to be wrong is essential for effective science communication, especially when trying to reach those with entrenched anti-scientific beliefs.

Ironically, Jensen credits his religious upbringing with teaching him valuable communication strategies that the scientific community often lacks. His childhood church was remarkably effective at spreading its message, adopting innovative communication tools from direct mail in the 1800s to digital media today.

“The people I grew up with, they had a message—and they were going to spread that message,” Jensen explained. “There was an imperative to share the message on an individual level and as a church.” The movement invested heavily in reaching communities regardless of geographic or philosophical barriers.

This strategic approach to message dissemination stands in stark contrast to how scientific information typically spreads. Scientists aren’t trained or incentivized to communicate their findings to the public, creating what Jensen calls “a massive gap in the capacity of many scientific leaders to communicate, not just the science, but to contextualize the science to actually show why it’s valuable.”

For Jensen, effective science communication requires understanding the complex, personal nature of belief systems. “As a species, there are no limits to what human beings are capable of believing,” he observed. The key is approaching others with empathy rather than judgment.

“You can’t ever understand someone else’s personal journey that led them to believe what they did. What we believe is the output of all the sum of all the inputs that we’ve ever experienced every day of our lives,” he explained. This perspective allows for meaningful conversations to begin.

Jensen often prioritizes asking questions over making declarative statements, recognizing that challenging deeply held beliefs can threaten a person’s entire identity and social network. Science communicators, he suggests, should model “radical nonjudgment” by separating beliefs from identity.

“Science is in a really good position to teach, to hold beliefs at an arm’s length and look at them as separate from ourselves and make belief something that we can pick up and examine and then put back down,” Jensen said.

In a world where conspiracy theories have moved from fringe to mainstream, Jensen’s approach offers a roadmap for science communicators facing entrenched resistance. While a single conversation might not immediately change someone’s mind, it might create the first small crack in a belief system—one that could eventually bring the whole dam down.