Draper’s target was the Catholic Church’s reaction to modern science after 1870, Vatican I and the Syllabus of Errors. He was responding to real events, not inventing a conflict from nothing.

Fair. Draper wrote in the context of genuine nineteenth-century tensions, and his anti-Catholic polemic had contemporary causes. The historians’ criticism is not that he invented conflict but that he projected it backward onto the whole of history and got much of the history wrong, the flat-earth myth included. Draper generalized from real contemporary conflicts to a false universal thesis, and it is the universal thesis that historians have set aside.