Head And Heart: American Christianities - Garry Wills - Book Review - New York Times

I think this New York Times Book Review of Garry Wills' new book, Head And Heart: American Christianities , worthing noting.

"The “head” of Wills’s title is Enlightenment religion, embodied in the thoughtful but sometimes chilly deism of Washington, Jefferson and Madison. The “heart,” by contrast, is evangelicalism, to be found in America’s emotionally intense but intellectually thin revivalists, like George Whitefield before the Revolution and Charles Grandison Finney not long after. These are the great polarities of America’s religious history, and their creative conflict has contributed to America’s religious diversity and vitality, and to church-state separation. “Head” has generally been the religion of the elite and “heart” its populist counterpart under the leadership of revivalist stars like Francis Asbury, Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham."

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How did we get from the Puritan ideal of zealous intolerance to a contemporary America in which no church is established and most Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others try to coexist? By means of the Enlightenment. Wills praises the Anglo-American philosophers and statesmen of the late 17th and 18th centuries, beginning with John Locke, who advocated toleration, disestablishment and humanitarian reform, and whose influence reached its height in the era of the American Revolution.

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Too much head or heart, unbalanced by the other, causes trouble. Wills rebukes today’s evangelicals for their intellectual feebleness. He shows that their effort to make born-again Christians out of the founding fathers is simply bad history. He dismisses their claim that creationism is a science, and he reproaches them for demonizing the social transformations of recent decades as a “secular humanist” conspiracy. A Christianity that refuses to face up to intellectual difficulties, he believes, will always render itself ridiculous.

On the other hand, brainpower alone is inadequate. He argues that by the 1830s the Unitarians, honorable heirs of the Enlightenment, were more than a little short on heart; even their response to miracles was ponderously cerebral. Transcendentalism was the reaction, made distinctive by its borrowings from European Romanticism. Emerson and Thoreau rejected what they saw as the arid confines of Scripture to become nature mystics. They repudiated tradition, yet even they could not shake off “the Puritan focus on self-scrutiny, a kind of rapt contemplation of their own souls.”

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Historians and sociologists for nearly a century have wondered about America’s resistance to secularization. Why, they ask, has religion thrived so much more in America than in the rest of the industrialized democracies (where, by now, only tiny minorities still go to church)? Because, says Wills, religion is not entangled with the state. Both benefit from separation, and neither is distorted by the other. Conversely, he believes that both have suffered from periodic attempts to reduce the separation, like Prohibition in the early 20th century or George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives in the early 21st.

A few years ago I got in a heated argument with one of my conservative Republican friends about this very subject. He could not understand why I was against religion mixing with government. For all his usual concern about government involvement into anything, he saw nothing wrong with government mixing with religion. Government always corrodes and corrupts religion. Read this review, if not book. Besides, I generally enjoy reading Wills.