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Head and Heart: American Christianities |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > American Prophecies > Item 33
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Head and Heart: American Christianities
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by Garry Wills
Sales Rank: 30303
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List Price: $29.95
$19.77
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on 8-6-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 640 pages
Published by: Penguin Press HC, The October 4, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 1594201463
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1594201462
Book Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
Weighs: 2 pounds
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Stephen Prothero
Denominational lines no longer matter much in the United States, not least because few Americans know any more what distinguishes a Baptist from a Methodist or a Lutheran from a Presbyterian. As the furor over homosexuality in the Episcopal Church demonstrates, the issues cracking open U.S. churches today are political rather than theological -- gay marriage and abortion rather than baptism and Holy Communion.
In his latest book, Head and Heart, Garry Wills surveys the fault lines in U.S. Christianity and argues that the real fracture is between "Enlightened" religion (of the head) and "Evangelical" religion (of the heart). Throughout American history, he writes, Christians have oscillated between these "two poles of religious attraction." Wills is a liberal Catholic and an outspoken champion of the separation of church and state, so it should not be surprising that his sympathies run with the enlightened camp. But the genius of American religion, he argues, lies in our promiscuous mixing of the heady and the heartfelt, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. And America's saints -- among them, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet (to whom the book is dedicated) -- are those who synthesize the two most effectively.
A popular history of American Christianity, Head and Heart starts in New England with Puritan ministers, then lingers over the Unitarians of Boston and the Transcendentalists of Concord before jumping rather abruptly into the "culture wars" of the 20th century. Throughout, Wills focuses almost exclusively on the thinking of white men. Head and Heart reads, therefore, like U.S. religious history books of an earlier generation -- before interest in Buddhism challenged the preoccupation of historians with Christianity, before historians of the West challenged our preoccupation with New England, before scholars of ritual upended our preoccupation with religious thought, and before women and blacks made places for themselves at the historiographic table.
Another peculiarity of this book is its frequent shifting between historical and biographical modes. Head and Heart contains more than thirty subsections devoted to individual thinkers, so at points it reads more like an encyclopedia of American religious biography than a narrative of American religion.
Still, the book has its virtues, particularly some fine writing and a bravado sorely lacking in more standard histories. Wills calls them as he sees them, and he delivers his calls with all the nuance of a World Series umpire. Anti-Catholicism was the "organizing principle" of Puritanism, he writes. "The Civil War was a religious war." "Abortion is not even a religious issue." And today's Bush administration has given us not only "faith-based social services" but also "faith-based justice," "faith-based health," "faith-based science" and a "faith-based war." While other interpreters of American religion downplay the importance of Transcendentalism, Wills understands the centrality of Emerson, Thoreau and their kin to their own time and our own. Calling Transcendentalism "the American religion of the 19th century" may be going a bit too far (there is, of course, evangelicalism to consider), but Wills is right to recognize that we all speak Emerson now, that our preference for spirituality over organized religion and our willingness to seek divinity in the woods as well as in church were bequeathed to us from our Transcendentalist forbears. (See related review on page 10.)
Wills also makes a strong case for enlightened religion as religion. In the 1920s, Princeton seminary professor John Gresham Machen proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with people who did not see the Bible as the inerrant word of God as long as they didn't pretend to be Christians. And today there is a strong bias among fundamentalists and atheists alike toward restricting the category of "Christian" to hardcore believers. Enlightened religion is, in their view, a cop-out for Doubting Thomases and others of little faith (and courage). But as Wills makes plain here, enlightened religion is no less religious for believing that God gave us brains as well as hearts.
Sometimes Wills's advocacy trips him up, however, and he becomes more culture warrior than historian. He devotes an entire chapter to trashing Karl Rove, he perpetuates more stereotypes about evangelicals than he upends, and he repeatedly draws on military metaphors ("warring absolutes," "counterattack," even "machine gun bursts") to describe American religion today.
American Christianity is no doubt divided into enlightened and evangelical camps. And part of what makes 11 o'clock on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in American life is that it is divided along political and racial lines as well. But the culture wars are more a product of the media than the mainstream. Most Americans want a way to think and talk about religion that is more sane, more informed and less shrill than what you hear from the average talking head on television. A book that argues for the importance of integrating the head and the heart could have provided a model for moving above and beyond the culture wars; instead, it succeeds in demonstrating how necessary this remains.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The history of Christianity in the U.S. is a dialectic of the intellect and the emotions, Wills maintains in this big new book, which ought to be the one volume everyone interested in the subject reads--it is lucid and grandly informative--and reacts to, thus keeping the conversation alive. Although intransigently theocratic, the Puritans brought both heart (passion) and head (reason) to their religious practice, passionately persecuting dissidents unto death, reasonably fostering broad tolerance and social justice in the words and deeds of Roger Williams and repentant witch-trial judge and abolitionist pioneer Samuel Sewall. Eighteenth-century Quakers merged head and heart to spread antislavery sentiment. The deist Founding Fathers observed the head-heart conflicts and with the First Amendment opted the new federal government out of them by forbidding a national church. That "disestablishment" has been a godsend because, ever since, head and heart have seesawed in influence. Although the Puritans and disestablishment occupy the best pages in the book, Wills' traversal of nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments is full of what will be not only revelations to most Americans but also, they may decide, things they really ought to know. If it is disappointing that Wills ends in contention, arguing that the Bush II administration poses the greatest threat ever to disestablishment, it is also true that his case for seeing abortion as a nonreligious issue is as cogent as it is refreshing. Olson, Ray
Reader Reviews
Garry Wills is one of my favorite writers on religion. He is himself a practicing Catholic, but he has not shrunk from criticizing the church when he feels it has gone over the edge, as in the abuse scandals of recent times. He has a certain fair-mindedness that is lacking in much religious writing. It was thus with some anticipation that I read through his recent book "Head and Heart: American Christianities." This is a very important document which follows the history of the two main streams of Christian religious thought in America - the Enlightened Religion (that of the Founders of our country) and Evangelical Religion (the mainly emotional appeal of being "saved"). Indeed, Wills thinks that we need both and that their avowed antagonism is to some extent overblown, but perhaps necessary to maintain some sort of balance. For full disclosure I must note that I am a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) who considers himself agnostic on religion. I am, however, sympathetic to Buddhism, as well as the more compassionate streams of thought in all religions. I have had some contact as a representative of my Meeting with a number of other religious groups. Finally I am also a professional biological scientist. My background does in no way give me special insight to review this book, but it does warn the reader of my own possible biases. It is, in fact, hard to review this over 600 page book with its many notes and do justice to its depth. Wills has researched his subject thoroughly and gives us the whole panoply of religious thought from the Puritans to the recent ascendancy of the televangelists and talk show ministers. The Puritans did not come to America (as is sometimes reported) to foster religious freedom, but to impose their brand of "purified" Anglican faith onto the people living around them, including the Native Americans. Wills speaks favorably of the later colonists, the Quakers (in fact dedicating his book to Anthony Benezet, an anti-slavery Quaker who worked with the more well known John Woolman), in their founding of Pennsylvania and their views on religious freedom. It has also been said that Quakers came to the New World to do good and did very well indeed - meaning that some became very wealthy. It is true that the Quakers, although often slave-holders themselves, were among the first to disavow the practice and were heavily involved in the underground railroad that helped runaway slaves reach the North. The Founders of the United States were mostly Deists who, none the less, understood that religious freedom was necessary to the ultimate health of the new country. They (perhaps especially Madison) believed in a "free market" for religious ideas, thinking that in such an atmosphere the best religion would prevail without government aid. In fact, despite many opinions to the contrary, it is obvious that the United States was not founded as a Christian Nation, but as a society with respect and toleration for all points of view as long as they did not disrupt the fabric of civil society. Wills believes (accurately) that such a system fosters religious activity instead of destroying it, as some would have it (as the Baptists and other minority sects of the period were well aware). State sponsored religions tend to decline, as they have in some European countries with no separation of Church and State. Theocratic states tend to become violent and authoritarian before they decline. We should take some warning from Islamic states like Iran in this regard. Evangelism has its pluses. Would anybody not brought up in the evangelistic traditions of the South ever have been able to give the speeches of a Martin Luther King? Still, our country occasional gets out of balance between the two major trains of religious thought and recently it has gotten way out of balance toward (in my opinion) a mostly corrupted evangelism. Wills points to the gory "Left Behind" series and the dire pronouncements of the anger of God behind Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the attack on the World Trade Center. To me this is a sign not of the End Times, but of man's inhumanity to man and a desire on the part of certain individuals to control the country. Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world and that worldly riches and power were not worthy pursuits, but (as Wills points out) there has been an American tradition of valuing wealth and power as a sign of God's favor. I sometimes think that some of these people don't read the same bible as the one I did. In short Wills has presented a fascinating history of religion in the United States. This is another essential book for those who would like to understand how we got to this point in history.
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Head and Heart: American Christianities
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