ABSTRACT
Dogmatic, for the majority of the new self-declared atheists, agnostics or simply anticlericals, were often acting out of spite and without much reasoning; irresponsible because, by simply pulling the masses away from weekly sermons and offering no alternative moral guide or civic virtues, they had promoted debauchery, laziness “and even the dismantling of the sacred virtues of the home”. Mallada’s moderate tone on this particular matter contrasts with the often-aggressive terms of the discourse on science and religion by some of his contemporaries. Nationalist and imperial ideologies in the so-called “age of empire” stressed the importance of creating a new social order based on science and technology. Engineers were very active agents in the modernization of the nation and of the state, but they sit uneasily in Manichaean stories of the relationship between science and religion in Spain. Nationalism and patriotism, and accusations of lack thereof, were central in the peak of the Polemica in the mid to late 1870s.
