Punker Greg Graffin rocks two worlds

CRAMPED VANS, CHEAP HOTELS, and endless travel are familiar to most touring musicians. But for a lucky few, success provides a more humane life on the road. Case in point: Greg Graffin, PhD '03, singer for the iconic punk band Bad Religion. The group has sold more than 3 million records in a career dating back to 1981, and its worldwide popularity as a concert draw continues to grow.

That level of success has enabled Graffin to forsake sharing a bus with his bandmates and travel in style between gigs in the U.S. and Europe. "It's more civilized now," says Graffin. "I take a few days in each place and try to soak in the culture, visit libraries and book dealers. I definitely spend a lot more time learning, and I think it helps my academic pursuits. When the band needs me, they call and say, ‘We have soundcheck in twenty minutes,' and I jump in a taxi and zoom over to the venue."

Those scholarly pursuits have included a doctoral degree in zoology, which Graffin completed after returning to Cornell following a six-year leave of absence. For his dissertation, Graffin surveyed evolutionary biologists' attitudes toward religious beliefs.He posted a questionnaire online, mailed a survey to hundreds of scientists around the world, and interviewed a dozen in person. The result was Evolution, Monism, Atheism, and the Naturalist World-View, published by his own Polypterus Press. He estimates that it has sold more than 6,000 copies, though he acknowledges that "a lot of people are just buying it as a piece of Bad Religion merchandise."

Since then he's kept one foot in music and the other in academia. Last year, in addition to releasing his second solo album, he co-authored a book on science and religion. Entitled Is Belief in God Good, Bad, or Irrelevant? (IVP), the book is based on his e-mail correspondence with Preston Jones, an assistant professor of history at heavily conservative John Brown University; they tackled science, religion, naturalism, and Christianity, debating the pros and cons of each other's position. "I've heard from a steady stream of people saying they were really happy that they could see both sides of the argument," says Graffin. "They like how neither one of us was antithetic to the other." Exploring the inherent conflict between evolution and scripture played into Graffin's lifelong interest in the subject--plus, he notes, "my band has been called Bad Religion since high school."

Last winter, Graffin taught an introductory biology class at UCLA; he calls the field essential to understanding where we come from and what unites us as human beings. "There's no better way to learn that than through biology," he says. "Some would say religion, but I would argue that religion teaches you more about how we are divided. Biology gives you the foundation for a better life in that it teaches you not to believe in something unless it can be verified, unless it's based on a repeatable, observable foundation."

While at UCLA, Graffin spent his nights working on Bad Religion's fourteenth album, New Maps of Hell, which came out in July. Unlike its predecessor-- 2004's The Empire Strikes First, which was chock-full of punk fusillades aimed at the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq--the new album takes a more allegorical approach. "We're staying away from direct criticism of the government and its current policies, because I think it's boring. You'd have to be blind not to recognize what's inept about this administration," says Graffin, one of the band's two main songwriters. "I have a song called ‘Germs of Perfection,' which is pure metaphor for genetic engineering and the concept of eugenics, which most people think is a swear word.We never talk about it, even though we practice it every day when we try to improve crops or choose the best embryos."

The band, whose quarter-century of recording made it eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, is out on the road again this summer, headlining the Warped Tour, a festival of music and extreme sports. "The age difference doesn't feel that strange," Graffin says of playing to an audience of teens and twentysomethings. "It's the same as being a professor lecturing to students half your age: you hope you have something interesting to share with them, that can provoke them to use their minds."

- Jim Catalano