Prof. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, PhD

I propose to write a monograph tentatively titled “Religions of Science” that takes its inspiration from Christoph Kleine and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr’s call to “look at societal projects for which secularism or, conversely, the role of religion play a central role and which have resulted in major conflicts over the relationship between the religious and the secular, some of which have extended beyond the demise of the societal project in question” (Preliminary Findings, 32). But it will also depart from the observation that many movements that worked to produce secularism were themselves “religions of science.” I’ll argue religions of science have often been the vanguard of both secularism and various forms of secularity.

This monograph project would explore a series of interrelated sites for the formation of specific religions of science and their materialization of secularity by way of entanglements between Europe, North America, and even Japan. (This project is scalable depending on how much research support the budget permits)

This first chapter (expanding on one of my articles) looks at the Monist "Religion of Science” formulated by the biologist Ernst Haeckel. It shows how the German Monism was transplanted to the United States by the publisher, Paul Carus and how that in turn gave birth to American academic philosophy.

The second chapter will focus on the Japanese deification of the American inventor Thomas Edison as “the Divine Patriarch of Electricity” (電気祖神). This explanation of Edison’s apotheosis will require an account of the history of the lightbulb. It will use the transnational history of the lightbulb and its connection to a Japanese religion of science and an American company to illuminate the entangled construction of science and the secular.

A third chapter will look at Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, and the history of American sociology. It will show how the religions of science invented by Saint-Simon and his student Comte were transplanted to the Americas and how the very academic discipline of sociology took hold around Comte’s idea of secularization. A fourth chapter would focus specifically on the Positivist Church of Brazil, a religion of science founded on Comte’s tenets, and how it aimed to materialize Laïcité for a popular audience.

A final chapter would look at George Holyoake, his ally “the first female sociologist” Harriet Martineau, and their fellow traveler Robert Ingersoll and show how they became the public faces of “secularism” in Great Britain and the United States.

All told, the project will work to “provincialize Europe” in international entanglements and take advantage of the theoretical schema I worked out on my previous visit to Leipzig. In so doing, it will show how religions of science were vitally important in promoting conceptual distinctions and social differentiations between religious institutions and the state; and even how they gave birth to a version of secularization theory. In summary, it will show how multiple secularities are at the roots of multiple disciplines (including religious studies, analytic philosophy, and sociology), and continue to shape their history.