In a time of alternative facts, rampant conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and an apparent upsurge in flat-earthers, it is a breath of fresh air to read James Ungureanu's erudite analysis of why so many people came to believe, and still do, that religion and science are implacable enemies. In six eminently readable chapters and an excellent summary conclusion, Ungureanu introduces the reader to John William Draper (1832–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918), authors of two books singled out as the chief instigators of the “conflict theory” of religion and science—Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and White's A History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom (1896). By reading these works as primary rather than secondary sources, Ungureanu demonstrates that neither Draper nor White posited an irrevocable rift between science and religion. They were both deeply religious men who believed that liberal forms of Protestantism would preserve and strengthen Christianity by reconciling science and religion. Readers, however, misunderstood their nuanced positions and accepted the “conflict theory” at face value.

While providing an Ariadne's thread through the complex landscape of nineteenth-century religious controversies, Ungureanu demonstrates that the “conflict theory” did not originate with Draper and White but emerged centuries earlier in the writings of Protestants intent on undermining Catholicism by emphasizing the irrationality of Catholic doctrine and the falsity of the historical narrative supporting the church. Over time the weapons devised by Protestants to attack Catholicism were utilized by liberal Protestants against their conservative coreligionists. The conflict was therefore not between religion and science per se but between two theological traditions: a liberal one emerging in the seventeenth century among English Latitudinarians, and more orthodox forms of Protestantism.

In a separate chapter, Ungureanu describes the “communication revolution” that provided Draper and White access to a growing market for their work as a result of cheaper paper, new forms of publication, the increasing ease of transporting printed matter, and a rise in literacy. Their publisher, Edward Livingston Youmans, was a key figure in popularizing their work, even though he rejected their assumption that liberal Protestantism would bring an end to the conflict. Instead, Youmans rejected Christianity altogether in favor of the “new religion” of scientific naturalism.

Ungureanu's book will appeal to anyone interested in the complex relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century and the profound effects the “conflict theory” has had on scholarship to this day. The idea that religion and science were incompatible became a stock theme in the writing of historians up to the 1950s, and it influenced scholars in the newly emerging fields of Sociology and Anthropology, many of whom contrasted the modern, rational, disenchanted West with the irrational and still enchanted East. The “conflict theory” also had a profound effect on the founders of the History of Science, distorting this disciplinary field well into the twentieth century when scholars like Koyré and Gillispie began emphasizing the multiple connections between science and religion.

Ungureanu's book makes an important contribution to understanding the role the Protestant Reformation played in paving the way for modernity and setting the stage for secularism. But this is not the whole story. By concentrating on the conflict between liberal and conservative Protestants, Ungureanu leaves out the important role that esoteric forms of religion and philosophy played in undermining the legitimacy of Christianity. From its inception, Christianity was a bricolage of conflicting philosophical strands deriving from classical and near- and far-eastern sources—Aristotelanism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, Skepticism, Arianism, Hermeticism, and Manicheanism, to name a few. From the early church fathers onward, these sources called into doubt key Christian doctrines such as the eternity of hell, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, Original Sin, the Fall, the Atonement, and the need for a separate caste of priests or an institutional church.

Esoteric sources did more, however, than undermine Christianity. They provided the West with alternative religious and magical beliefs, and this was especially true in the nineteenth century. For all the doubts occasioned by advances in biblical scholarship and science, religion has not disappeared, as many scholars predicted. Instead, it has proliferated in what is best described as a market place of competing spiritualities. Paulo Rossi, Frances Yates, Charles Webster, Betty Jo Dobbs, and Richard Westfall are among those who have shown that the very scientists held responsible for disenchanting the world—Bruno, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton—were themselves magicians, alchemists, and mystics. Egil Asprem has emphasized the enchanted world of quantum mechanics and Christopher White the way twentieth-century science and mathematics created space for alternative worlds and realities. Even more ironic is the fact that academics like Weber who were committed to the idea of disenchantment were themselves enmeshed in occultism and gained much of their knowledge about the non-West from esoteric sources. Sociology and Anthropology are largely responsible for the revival of paganism, shamanism, magic, and New Age beliefs and practices. What all this underscores is that secularism is not synonymous with disenchantment or desacralization. Secularization is a fact of modern life as the state and private organizations took over functions previously performed by religious institutions, but disenchantment is not. This is a point made by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), in which he explores and explodes the grand narrative of western exceptionalism based on the idea that unlike the East, the West is rational and scientific.

Ungureanu has criticized Josephson-Storm for not sufficiently stressing the role that liberal Protestants played in the religion-science debates, which is why his own book is so important and valuable. But strength lies in numbers, and when taken together, these two books provide clear evidence that the old dichotomy between religion and science is way past its expiration date.