As long as you do that with your own money (or money got freely given from other people), sure.

If you use taxpayer money, that's a different game.

Eh, I grew up conservative evangelical, and they were pretty much always going to have a problem with research in evolution and astronomy. Same goes for the fossil fuel industry w.r.t. climate science.

When the scientific evidence interferes with religious doctrine or industrial paycheck, then yeah, folks are still going to have a problem with hard science research.

However I often see this going from "there's issues" to discounting academia altogether and positioning private labs as a good or only alternative.

After all, most people in the open science collaboration which published the seminal paper kicking off the replication crisis were from academia.