John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White stand at the origin story of what came to be known as the “Conflict Thesis,” a 19th-century narrative that cast the history of science and the history of religion as a long, mostly one-sided struggle. Draper, a physician-scientist and popularizer of science, and White, a statesman, historian, and cofounder of Cornell University, wrote in an age when science was rapidly professionalizing and when religious institutions were being called to account for their responses to new discoveries. Each produced sweeping, rhetorically powerful books that argued a common theme: that entrenched religious authority, especially in its more dogmatic Christian forms, had repeatedly tried to smother inquiry, and that the arc of human progress charts the emancipation of science from theological chains. Draper made this case most vividly in his 1874 History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, while White elaborated a similar, more panoramic version in his multivolume Warfare of Science (first sketches in the 1870s, with the full two-volume history appearing in 1896).
Both writers wrote with zeal and audience-minding clarity rather than with the caution of modern academic historians. Draper’s narrative framed the Roman Catholic Church as an engine of anti-intellectualism, linking theological dogma to censorship, persecution of scientists, and institutional resistance to discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology. White, who had long promoted a nonsectarian university model and saw science as a civilizing, liberalizing force, organized his history as a series of “battlefields” in which theology and traditional authority resisted and, ultimately, were forced to yield to new methods of empirical inquiry. Their histories are studded with familiar emblematic cases, Galileo’s trial, alleged medieval obscurantism, and disputes over anatomy, cosmology, and evolutionary biology, presented, often in trenchant and militaristic language, as episodes in a larger war.
Because Draper and White were writing for educated publics and polemical effect as much as for archival nuance, they relied on broad patterns and memorable stories rather than careful contextualized analysis. Draper tended to treat institutions and traditions as monolithic forces resistant to reason; White, though a trained historian, regularly used selective examples and sweeping generalizations to make his case. Both authors favored a linear narrative of progress in which scientific method and secular scholarship gradually displaced clerical privilege and doctrinal constraint. Their books therefore served not only as histories but as manifestos: they argued that modern liberal education and civic life required freeing knowledge from sectarian control and championed the university as a refuge for unfettered inquiry.
The influence of Draper’s and White’s rhetoric proved enormous. Their versions of the past supplied a simple, potent story, science versus superstition, that fit the spirit of Victorian reform and the ambitions of secular education. Their work entered schoolrooms, debate societies, and popular magazines, shaping how generations of readers imagined the relationship between faith and reason. Phrases like “warfare” and “conflict” captured imaginations and echoed into lecture halls and the emerging mass press, framing later public controversies (Darwinism, biblical criticism, medical reforms) as continuations of the same struggle.
Beginning in the mid-20th century, however, historians of science began to push back decisively against this narrative. Careful archival work, attention to institutional and intellectual nuance, and a preference for complexity over binary storytelling showed that the past rarely fits the tidy drama of perpetual enmity. Many medieval and early modern clerics were themselves active natural philosophers; universities and religiously affiliated institutions sometimes fostered scientific work; and conflicts that did occur were often rooted in a tangled mix of social, political, theological, and personal factors rather than simple doctrinal hostility. Critics have pointed out factual errors and methodological flaws in Draper’s and White’s accounts—selective quoting, sweeping generalizations, and the recycling of popular myths such as the widespread medieval belief in a flat earth, so that contemporary historians now treat the conflict thesis more as a historiographical artifact than as an accurate interpretive frame.
That revision does not mean Draper and White were without value. Their work captured real tensions of the nineteenth century, the anxieties of clergy and laity when new scientific claims disrupted cherished narratives, and the zeal of reformers who saw science as an engine of social progress. Their books are therefore historically useful for what they reveal about modernity’s self-understanding: how a culture in the throes of institutional reform and educational expansion wanted to narrate its past to justify its present. But as histories of earlier centuries their methods and conclusions are now largely superseded; the modern consensus among historians of science favors a “complexity thesis” that recognizes cooperation, conflict, negotiation, and mutual influence across different times and places.
If one seeks a single, short verdict on Draper and White it is this: they were influential popular historians whose polemical framing, science as progressive liberation, religion as obstructive tradition, reshaped public memory, but whose sweeping rhetoric and selective evidence left them open to rigorous corrective work by later scholars. The “warfare” image they popularized still haunts public discourse about evolution, education, and secularism, but professional historical scholarship now reads the past with a finer scalpel, showing that the story of science and religion is seldom reducible to a single, unbroken battle.