Book Review

Canada and the United States

Craig James Hazen joins the list of scholars who argue that harmony, rather than conflict, best describes the relationship between science and religion over the course of American history. He argues that, at least in the antebellum nineteenth century, most Americans viewed science and religion as harmonious enterprises cooperating toward the same ultimate ends. Hazen employs historian David Jaffee's concept of the "village Enlightenment" to draw attention to the ways in which Enlightenment ideas were assimilated into popular American culture. What most intrigues Hazen about the village Enlightenment is how it fostered efforts to use science for the purpose of both constructing and validating novel religious worldviews.

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Hazen points out that local newspapers and the burgeoning lyceum system provided antebellum Americans with a rich source of science education. Science, as presented in these forums, became something of a code word for utility, certainty, optimism, and progress. Many of those whose thinking had been greatly influenced by the village Enlightenment assumed that the inductive methods of science were also applicable to the supernatural world. They consequently embraced science as a potential ally rather than enemy of such newly emerging religious systems as Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, Mormonism, spiritualism, and mind cure. In Hazen's words, a good many Americans "considered themselves loosed from medieval intellectual shackles and endowed with the freedom to promulgate new ideas. They were convinced that Baconian scientific reasoning could make unerring choices between competing ideas" (p. 148).

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