Prophets and protons: new religious movements and science in late twentieth-century America

Abstract

Prophets and Protons represents the first book-length treatment of how science and religion are negotiated by new religious movements (NRMs). Benjamin E. Zeller focuses his book on three specific NRMs – the Unification Church, the Hare Krishna Movement and Heaven’s Gate – which flourished primarily, but not exclusively, in the 1960s and 1970s, a period when America’s counterculture also thrived. Zeller’s main concern is to argue that the responses of American NRMs to science during the second half of the twentieth-century are largely predictable based on their influences and theology. His end result is to “offer the basis of a typology of how other new religions–and possibly older religions–might also respond to science” (164). The primary modes he sees exemplified in these movements are to guide, replace or absorb science, and his argument is often persuasive.