Gilbert argues that conflicts between science and religion caused remarkable episodes where American culture was "assembled and integrated." His historical analysis, which begins with the Scopes antievolution trial of 1925 and ends with the construction of the Sermons from Science pavilion in the Seattle World's Fair of 1962, concludes that these episodes affected Americans "across class, professional, regional, and religious boundaries." He believes that the most important were the Scopes trial, which shattered a nineteenth-Century compromise between mainstream Protestantism and a populist science of common sense, and postwar realization of the perils of the atomic age, which led to political, religious, and intellectual critiques of professionalized science.

Gilbert, a professor of history, eschews the fine details of historical scholarship in favor of a pleasingly broad view. His dramatis personae includes not only scores of scientists, religous leaders, theologians, and politicians, but also filmmakers, popular authors, and public intellectuals of nearly every stripe. Gilbert is chiefly concerned with these peoples' connections with organizations and institutions, for example the American Association of the Advancement of Science, the Moody Bible Institute, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Religious Research Association, the Committee on Cultural Freedom. He also discusses a similarly wide range of scientific, religious, and popular periodicals, books, and movies such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Astounding Science Fiction, Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, and the Moody Institute's documentary (produced for the U.S. Air Force!) God of the Atom.

Gilbert's book succeeds rather well, for it provides the reader with the joy of discovering how all these come together in a surprisingly beautiful web of lives struggling with the deepest questions about our world and our place in it.