Head and Heart: American Christianities
By Garry Wills
Penguin, 626 pages, $29.95
Like John McPhee, Garry Wills is such a good writer, with such an interesting and astonishingly well-stocked mind, that I read each new book by him (and there is always a new book from Wills, sometimes two or three) no matter what the subject. Whereas McPhee induces me to read about subjects far from the beaten path — the Pine Barrens in New Jersey, say, or life in the modern merchant marine — Wills, professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University, seduces me into reading his take on subjects that have already been canvassed and plowed and dissected by hordes of scholars and popularizers and hucksters.
“Head and Heart: American Christianities” is a case in point. This is really two books in one: first, an overview of American religious history to World War II (this takes up the greater part of the book), and then a section of roughly 100 pages, increasingly polemical as it approaches what Wills calls “The Karl Rove Era.” Readers who nodded in agreement with Wills’ New York Times op-ed piece “The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,” published the day after the re-election of George W. Bush, will love this last section. Those who were amused or taken aback — depending on their temperament — by Wills’ curiously apocalyptic tone in November 2004 will be relieved to learn he’s a bit more sanguine now that the way “to a post-Rove world is open.”
As it happens, that 2004 op-ed piece could be read as the genesis of “Head and Heart,” in which Wills argues that American history reveals a persistent tension between “Enlightened Religion” and “Evangelical Religion.” While he acknowledges that many religious traditions have played a part in shaping American identity, he insists that “the two emphases I single out have had the greatest impact on the general religious ethos” and hence on the life of the nation.
Enlightened religion, deriving from the 18th Century European Enlightenment but given a distinctively American character, “professes a belief in ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God.’ It holds that reason is the tool for understanding those laws, and that humane conduct is what those laws teach.”
In contrast, Evangelical religion, with its origins in a transnational movement of revival and reform but again distinctive in its peculiarly American form, emphasizes “an experiential relationship with Jesus as . . . savior, along with biblical inerrancy and a mission to save others.” The enlightened are directed by the head, evangelicals by the heart.
Wills fleshes out this stark contrast with a good deal of nuance. He is careful to say that these are “tendencies,” “poles,” “force fields,” not mutually exclusive, not “two separate religions,” not reducible to the familiar opposition between liberal and conservative. He suggests that at many points in American history the tension between the two tendencies has been “creative,” and indeed that at their best the two “crosspollinate,” as is evident in the lives of such inspiring figures as saintly 18th Century Quaker activist Anthony Benezet (to whom Wills dedicates the book), Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and Dorothy Day.
And yet, alas, the dice are loaded, the deck is stacked. No evangelical appears on Wills’ roster of exemplary Americans, those who heeded head and heart. “Though Evangelicals have the greatest numbers in America,” Wills says, “we remain an Enlightened nation.”
So much for creative tension. Prominent Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus — a bete noire of Wills’, by the way — has observed that the American scene is so vast and unruly, it can be made to support almost any generalization. It is just as true — and just as misleading — to describe America as “an evangelical nation” (or “a Christian nation”) as to label it “enlightened.”
Citing evangelical historian Mark Noll, Wills notes that, contrary to what we hear from many Christian conservatives, the period from 1750 to 1790 — the founding era — was “the only time in our history” marked by a sharp evangelical decline. And this was providential because, he argues, only thus could we have attained the separation of church and state that is the abiding genius of the American system. In his wonderfully readable account of our subsequent history, episodes of evangelical fervor threaten the balance established by the founders but never upset it altogether, as the Enlightenment spirit reasserts itself to right the ship.
Only rarely does Wills fulfill the promise of his opening premise by showing us “the two emphases” working harmoniously together, as he does, for instance, when he says that “Lincoln, in a time of apocalyptic fanaticisms, was an example of both Enlightened religion — the religion of Melville and Dickinson — and of the Evangelical instincts of his black contemporaries: the religion of Frederick Douglass. Like Anthony Benezet, he combined the best elements of both head and heart in our religious heritage.”
I think Wills misreads Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson (I don’t think either fits under Wills’ rubric of “Enlightened Religion” as he defines it, and to say so, it seems to me, means that one has missed something essential about their work), and I’m dubious about his head-versus-heart schema in any case. Dispensationalists, for example, whose latter-day influence is evident in the “Left Behind” series of books, are archevangelicals in Wills’ telling. But a surprising number of the most fervent Dispensationalists I encountered in my youth were engineers, “head people” to a fault, always eager to show you their meticulously prepared charts in which all history was reduced to tidy logical order. I fled from them.
Nevertheless, and without buying the whole package, I think I understand what Wills is driving at when he talks about Lincoln and Benezet. I’m reminded of my own grandmother (a Dispensationalist, as it happens, though not rigidly so) who worked selflessly among poor working people as a city missionary in Aurora, before going to China as a missionary. There was a wholeness to her religion too.
Late in “Head and Heart,” where Wills, like Samson, mercilessly smites his foes on the religious right, there’s a striking change of tone when he recounts U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s visit to Saddleback Church in Southern California, at the invitation of Pastor Rick Warren, whose book “The Promise-Driven Life” is the evangelical best seller of our time. Warren had been castigated for this, but he refused to withdraw the invitation. Wills quotes at length from Obama’s speech — or sermon, if you will — which he describes as “a blend of Enlightened and Evangelical concerns, of reason and apostolic motives.”
It would be foolish to read too much into that moment. Barack Obama won’t deliver us to the Promised Land (though he might make a better president than some recent chief executives, if he gets the chance). And yet Wills was right to highlight this encounter, right to suggest that it embodies a recurring impulse in our history, sometimes faint, but precious, and worthy of our emulation.
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John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly review.
