Historicizing the Here and Now: Science and Religion in Modern America

It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a critical distance on events and ideas as one approaches one’s own time and place. Thus, many historians of science and religion in the United States have simply taken for granted a framework dominant since World War II, holding that science offers only value-neutral, technical knowledge and that genuine normativity emerges from other domains, especially religion. Historians operating under this assumption have focused closely on nineteenth-century engagements between science and religion, simultaneously tracking and rejecting as misguided the pervasive tendency of that era to harmonize religious faith with Enlightenment rationalism. Meanwhile, they have mostly ignored the middle and late twentieth century, with the exception of the creation-evolution debates, which are typically framed as a rearguard action by those who foolishly refuse to cede the realm of physical and biological facts to science. As a result of this distribution of research energies, we know well which forms of inquiry and faith were excluded by the nineteenth-century definitions of science and religion, but we rarely recognize that the definitions current since the 1940s have also excluded important modes of inquiry and faith. The meanings of science and religion continue to represent contingent cultural constructs—and they are still evolving, right under our noses.