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The Catholic Historical Review 86.4 (2000) 713-714



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Book Review

Redeeming Culture:
American Religion in an Age of Science

American


Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science. By James Gilbert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1997. Pp. x, 407. $28.95 cloth; $19.00 paperback.)

James Gilbert examines a wide array of episodes primarily in postwar America (c. 1945-1962) to illustrate a certain "unity of discourse" (p. 4) in the complex relationship between religion and science within American culture. Gilbert maintains that both religion and science ". . . are projections onto the human and natural worlds . . ." (p. 15) with actively committed adherents who engage the other "projection" as competitor or collaborator and sometimes both simultaneously. His careful examination of specific cases of competition/collaboration challenges the standard depiction that reduces the two contingents to unyielding adversaries.

Gilbert uses William Jennings Bryan's Scopes trial debacle to highlight earlier tensions between Americans' democratic common sensibilities and elite scientists' specialized knowledge. Subsequent chapters treat popularizing of science through film such as Hollywood's version of the Manhattan project, Frank Capra's religious framing of scientific research, and Moody Bible Institute's production of science films. The latter films play a significant role in integrating religion into postwar military training which Gilbert analyzes in two chapters. Other chapters focus upon national organizations such as Rabbi Louis Finkelstein's Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, the Moody Bible Institute's American Scientific Affiliation, the religiously sympathetic social scientists' Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association, and the Institute on Religion in the Age of Science. Gilbert uses the controversy surrounding Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision and UFO debates to focus upon politics among scientists and their failed attempts to control [End Page 713] popular religion's influence in scientific debates. The book ends with an account of how the United States Science Pavilion and the Christian Witness pavilion came to be next to each other at the 1962 Seattle World Fair and that placement's symbolic significance.

Gilbert provides a fascinating, well-written narrative. Reviewing footnotes underscores the careful research that informs each chapter. In his treatment of such varied elements of cultural production, Gilbert verifies his initial assertion about a certain unity of discourse on religion and science within American culture. Gilbert ably demonstrates that William Jennings Bryan's response at the Scopes trial is both emblematic of the science/religion debate in a democratic culture and determinative for subsequent Fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant discourse on religion and science. Gilbert is to be especially commended, however, in not limiting the focus to the overly rehearsed Protestant discourse on science and religion in America. The author includes important Jewish and Catholic responses to science and religion. At the same time, Gilbert's focus upon "unity of discourse" circumscribes his analysis of the three religious traditions' distinctive approaches to science and religion. He offers, for example, little evaluation of how the Catholic Frank Capra differs from Moody Institute's Irwin Moon in framing science within religion in their films. Given Gilbert's introductory statement emphasizing the dichotomies between religious and scientific views, it is sometimes difficult to decipher whether dichotomies identified are from Gilbert's perspective or the person's being discussed within a particular chapter. These latter comments do not, however, diminish the significant contribution which Gilbert makes to understanding the cultural dimensions of religion and science and their relationship in the United States.

This book would be of interest to those in American cultural studies, especially Cold War culture, the history of religion and science, and the study of new-age religions. The book, now available in paperback, could be successfully used in upper division undergraduate and graduate courses in science and religion or twentieth-century U.S. religious and scientific culture. College and university libraries should include it in their American history collection.



Sandra Yocum Mize
University of Dayton

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