City on a Hill By PATRICK ALLITT NYT SBR: December 9, 2007
Garry Wills, one of America’s best journalists and historians of the last half-century, has always enjoyed taking familiar subjects and staring at them long and hard until they look strange and new. In “Head and Heart” he invites readers to reconsider American religious history, challenging the conventional wisdom on many issues while synthesizing much of the finest recent scholarship. It is an odd and quirky book, however, going into extremely fine detail in some areas, hurrying past others with a few casual remarks, and deviating in its last hundred pages into political polemic.
HEAD AND HEART American Christianities. By Garry Wills.
626 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95. Related Featured Author: Garry Wills
626 pp. The Penguin Press. $29.95. Related Featured Author: Garry Wills
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.
The Massachusetts Puritans of the 17th century predated both, and their shadow looms over all later episodes. They too were intensely but narrowly intellectual, agonized over the destiny of their eternal souls, sought signs and portents of the imminent Second Coming and expected regular divine intervention in their everyday lives. They thought of religious freedom and mutual tolerance not as ideals to strive for but as instruments of the Devil. In 1660 they hanged Mary Dyer, a 40-ish mother of six, for boisterous declarations of her Quaker beliefs. A few decades later, by contrast, they made a heroine of Hannah Duston, who escaped captivity by killing 10 Indians with a hatchet, six of them children, and bringing home their scalps for a bounty.
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.
Wills is far more heady than hearty, but he recognizes that the two need each other. Occasionally they come together perfectly; he reserves high praise for people who blended intellectual rigor, humanitarianism and evangelical zeal. Anthony Benezet (1713-84), for example, who he suggests is “the one unquestionably authentic American saint,” was a Quaker who worked out a powerful Christian case against slavery, permitting reason rather than Scripture to have the last word but warming his arguments with God’s love. Both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass exemplified the ideal combination in the Civil War era. More recently Martin Luther King Jr., long a hero to Wills, took arguments from brainy theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr but inspired grass-roots civil rights workers by adding the fiery rhetoric of African-American tradition. 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.”
The high point of Wills’s book comes in two chapters on Jefferson and Madison and their arguments, during the Revolution, for complete disestablishment and religious freedom. Wills analyzes Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” with the same microscopic scrutiny that he devoted, in earlier books, to the Declaration of Independence (“Inventing America”), the Federalist Papers (“Explaining America”) and the Gettysburg Address (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”). Disestablishment, embodied in the First Amendment, was, he argues, “a stunning innovation” and “the only original part of the Constitution.” He emphasizes too that Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was designed just as much to protect the churches from the state as vice versa. 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.
Wills never loses sight of contemporary affairs, and readers will have no doubt where his political sympathies lie. The book ends with a long attack on Bush, Karl Rove and their manipulation of religion in the interest of the Republican Party. He finds their use of the Terri Schiavo case particularly offensive, a form of pandering to religious extremists. By contrast he sees Barack Obama as a candidate whose ideas about the use of religion in politics are just right. A lengthy quotation from one of Obama’s speeches seems to affirm Wills’s views about the different roles churches and politicians should play in confronting problems, like AIDS, that have both moral and political dimensions. He ends with the argument that throughout most of the nation’s history, attempts to force particular religious views into political life have been beaten back. He interprets the outcome of the 2006 election as a rebuke to Rove’s theocratic tendencies.
By this point, however, the book’s analytical energy has slackened. Wills seems content, once he gets to about 1920, merely to summarize other religious historians’ general accounts. A great cliché-smasher elsewhere, he now relies on stock phrases in passages on “the Roaring Twenties” and “the Radical Thirties.” A weak chapter on the 1960s begins tendentiously: “It was a time for burning flags, and draft cards, and R.O.T.C. buildings and bras. Also for self-incinerations.” What follows is hardly more than a list of radical individuals and groups, and there is no explanation of the (extremely rare) cases of antiwar protesters who set fire to themselves. He mentions the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and the American Indian Movement, but not their religious dimensions, even though each had a fascinating religious history of its own, with continuing resonances today. A section on religion and the Vietnam War is bizarrely attenuated, consisting of just two sentences. Particularly disappointing is that the Catholic Church, about which Wills has written brilliantly at many points in his career, gets short shrift here. An early passage promises a discussion of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez as exemplars of both head and heart. When it comes to the point, however, Chavez gets just a page and Day is forgotten completely. Catholicism seems altogether not to fit very well into Wills’s principal categories. These shortcomings make the end of the book less rewarding than the ingenious and thought-provoking 400 pages that precede it. Patrick Allitt teaches history at Emory University and is the author of “Religion in America Since 1945: A History.”
The Massachusetts Puritans of the 17th century predated both, and their shadow looms over all later episodes. They too were intensely but narrowly intellectual, agonized over the destiny of their eternal souls, sought signs and portents of the imminent Second Coming and expected regular divine intervention in their everyday lives. They thought of religious freedom and mutual tolerance not as ideals to strive for but as instruments of the Devil. In 1660 they hanged Mary Dyer, a 40-ish mother of six, for boisterous declarations of her Quaker beliefs. A few decades later, by contrast, they made a heroine of Hannah Duston, who escaped captivity by killing 10 Indians with a hatchet, six of them children, and bringing home their scalps for a bounty.
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.
Wills is far more heady than hearty, but he recognizes that the two need each other. Occasionally they come together perfectly; he reserves high praise for people who blended intellectual rigor, humanitarianism and evangelical zeal. Anthony Benezet (1713-84), for example, who he suggests is “the one unquestionably authentic American saint,” was a Quaker who worked out a powerful Christian case against slavery, permitting reason rather than Scripture to have the last word but warming his arguments with God’s love. Both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass exemplified the ideal combination in the Civil War era. More recently Martin Luther King Jr., long a hero to Wills, took arguments from brainy theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr but inspired grass-roots civil rights workers by adding the fiery rhetoric of African-American tradition. 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.”
The high point of Wills’s book comes in two chapters on Jefferson and Madison and their arguments, during the Revolution, for complete disestablishment and religious freedom. Wills analyzes Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” with the same microscopic scrutiny that he devoted, in earlier books, to the Declaration of Independence (“Inventing America”), the Federalist Papers (“Explaining America”) and the Gettysburg Address (“Lincoln at Gettysburg”). Disestablishment, embodied in the First Amendment, was, he argues, “a stunning innovation” and “the only original part of the Constitution.” He emphasizes too that Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was designed just as much to protect the churches from the state as vice versa. 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.
Wills never loses sight of contemporary affairs, and readers will have no doubt where his political sympathies lie. The book ends with a long attack on Bush, Karl Rove and their manipulation of religion in the interest of the Republican Party. He finds their use of the Terri Schiavo case particularly offensive, a form of pandering to religious extremists. By contrast he sees Barack Obama as a candidate whose ideas about the use of religion in politics are just right. A lengthy quotation from one of Obama’s speeches seems to affirm Wills’s views about the different roles churches and politicians should play in confronting problems, like AIDS, that have both moral and political dimensions. He ends with the argument that throughout most of the nation’s history, attempts to force particular religious views into political life have been beaten back. He interprets the outcome of the 2006 election as a rebuke to Rove’s theocratic tendencies.
By this point, however, the book’s analytical energy has slackened. Wills seems content, once he gets to about 1920, merely to summarize other religious historians’ general accounts. A great cliché-smasher elsewhere, he now relies on stock phrases in passages on “the Roaring Twenties” and “the Radical Thirties.” A weak chapter on the 1960s begins tendentiously: “It was a time for burning flags, and draft cards, and R.O.T.C. buildings and bras. Also for self-incinerations.” What follows is hardly more than a list of radical individuals and groups, and there is no explanation of the (extremely rare) cases of antiwar protesters who set fire to themselves. He mentions the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and the American Indian Movement, but not their religious dimensions, even though each had a fascinating religious history of its own, with continuing resonances today. A section on religion and the Vietnam War is bizarrely attenuated, consisting of just two sentences. Particularly disappointing is that the Catholic Church, about which Wills has written brilliantly at many points in his career, gets short shrift here. An early passage promises a discussion of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez as exemplars of both head and heart. When it comes to the point, however, Chavez gets just a page and Day is forgotten completely. Catholicism seems altogether not to fit very well into Wills’s principal categories. These shortcomings make the end of the book less rewarding than the ingenious and thought-provoking 400 pages that precede it. Patrick Allitt teaches history at Emory University and is the author of “Religion in America Since 1945: A History.”
The truth of the matter is that the USA is the most thoroughly secularized country on the planet.
ReplyDeleteIt is however also pervaded by a an essentially puritannical sex paranoid inherently double-minded religiosity which leads to and causes all sorts of individual and collective hypocracies, including the dangerous pretense that the USA is part of "gods" plan for Humankind altogether---USA exceptionalism.
If god and religion are so big and strong, why the all pervasive "culture" of violence brought to and all courtesy of the NRA and the Pentagon death machine, which is THE DOMINANT USA institution.