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An examination of Christianity's place in American life through history, from the Puritans to the administration of George W. Bush. The struggle within American Christianity, historian Wills argues, has been between the head and the heart: reason and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism. 18th century America saw a religious revolution--an Enlightenment culture emerged whose hallmarks were tolerance for other faiths and a belief that religion was best divorced from political institutions. Wills shows how radical a departure this was, and shows the steps by which church-state separation was enshrined in the Constitution. He shows a repeating pattern in our history: a cooling of popular religious fervor, followed by an explosion in evangelical activity--generally during times of social transformation and anxiety--and then a backlash. Wills's message is to be vigilant against the triumph of emotions over reason, but to know that the tension between them is necessary, inevitable, and unending.--From publisher description.… (more)
User reviews
The topic is not Christianity in America, but the varieties of Christianities. For example, rapture theology might be a recent innovation, but it comes from a deep current in American religious practice. Under Wills' hands, Deists have their time in the sun, the Methodists take over the country and the Baptists evolve from an embattled minority fighting against established religion to proponents of faith based government.
While Wills spends a great deal of time on mini-biographies of seminal figures, he has a major theme which he follows through the centuries, the swing of the pendulum between Enlightenment (head) and Evangelical (heart) religion. He does not see these as enemies or opposites, just poles that most of us swing between. It is an excellent organizing principle.
So who is this book for? It is a good general text on religion and its impact on American history, sure to inform a general reader without becoming academic. It is excellent at the Enlightenment and Romanticism and how they fit into the development of of American intellectual and religious history. It helps explain how denominations come into existence, grow and mature. It covers the rise of the Religious Right and its century long impact on U.S. culture.
I give this book high marks. I like an author who knows what he is talking about. I like non-fiction that doesn't just cover the winners and gives the forgotten giants their due. The text is clear, but not dumbed down. I like opinions when they don't get in the way of solid analysis. I wanted to read it twice.
Wills begins with the story of Mary Dyer, the Quaker woman who was hanged in Boston by the Puritans for...well, being a Quaker, and follows the history of Christianity in America through the present day. He pays particular attention to the deism of the nation's founders during the Enlightenment era, which is his area of greatest expertise. Unfortunately, he doesn't do as well with some other areas, such as his coverage of the so-called "Gilded Age", which is so one-sided as to be mere caricature, objecting to "social Darwinism", "robber barons", and "American imperialism" (to be fair, though, these subjects are relevant to the religious developments of the period which he's exploring). There's also a problem with his basic explanatory framework, his notion of "head" and "heart" as poles toward which religious expression can move (and the ideal being some moderate amount of each)---unfortunately, this is a sort of equivocal package-deal, which in various places he uses to mean mind-body integration, intellect and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism...but what it really boils down to is reason vs. blind faith. Christopher Hitchens is much more consistent in identifying the correct principles involved in his God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Still, even though I disagree with some of his evaluations, Wills's historical analysis is usually dead-on (with a few exceptions, such as his strange cherry-picking of quotes from The Age of Reason to make Thomas Paine seem less irreligious than he actually was, something which he does not do with any of the other founders and in fact criticizes other Christians for doing). This book is a valuable resource for anyone concerned about religion in America today...and if you're not concerned about it, you should be.
Considering how many time's I've read this thesis before, I was surprised at how much new material I encountered, especially in the area of the religion of the Founders and the early history of Evangelicalism. Also, Wills prose is so easy to read, that even going over material I had dealt with before, I did not find myself impatient or skipping ahead.
Written in 2007, the last chapter of this book deals with the Bush II administration's use and misuse of religion. I almost skipped that, but I'm glad I didn't because it contain, among other things, one of the most lucid critiques of Evangelical abortion "theology" that I have ever read.
As a general history of Christianity in the U.S., this book is heavy on the Puritans, Founders and Second Great Awakening and light on the 20th century, especially the great divide between modern Biblical criticism and Evangelical fundamentals. However, Wills is relying on some excellent books as his source material, and (if you can dig them out of the footnotes) you can follow up on any topic you want more information on.
I think if you are interested at all in the history of religion and its relation to politics in the US, you will find much of interest in this book.
It was Enlightened Religion-religion focused on the “laws of nature and of nature’s God”-that gave us our unique freedom of religion and “might also be considered the typical American religion.” Evangelical Religion, on the other hand, focused on an experiential religion, best symbolized by the “revival,” of which America has experienced several major movements.
Obviously, a scholar (especially one of Wills’ stature) is free to choose any sort of analytical rubric to describe his or her topic. However. In this case, it becomes painfully obvious as the book progresses that Wills’ decision to adopt a tired dialectical construct serves in the end to flatten rather than enrich his view of the peculiarities of American religiosity.
In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the book is an apology for Enlightened Religion over against Evangelical Religion. This does issue in a very fine discussion of the historical development of the principle of “separation of church and state,” a concept that has been very much abused by progressives and conservatives alike down through the years. However, Wills has a clear distaste for all things Evangelical that sometimes borders on active malice. It is clear by the end of the book (published during the end of George W. Bush’s presidency) that Wills’ key fear was an apparent Evangelical “takeover” of government. It is a bit ironic to me that a book that so stresses the need for separation of “church” and “state,” ends up in its final chapters becoming a commentary on the presidential administration. It seems Wills himself cannot seem to keep those lines clear.
I don’t mean to misrepresent Wills. I think he honestly does try to remain fair-handed in his analysis, and he does emphasize at several points that Enlightened and Evangelical religion really do need each other in order to survive. However, as the book progresses, bias begins to slip in, perhaps most egregiously with his claim that Evangelicals believe that gays “have no rights at all.” Of course. All Evangelicals believe that same-sex orientation strips you of all human and political rights. In my lifetime as what Wills would call an “Evangelical” (more on THAT in a moment), I’ve NEVER heard ANY leader who was deeply convinced that homosexual acts were defined by Scripture as sinful say anything other than that we should treat all people with respect and dignity and, most importantly, show to everyone the love of Christ. Perhaps I’ve been sheltered, but I rather believe that Wills is looking to some very “fringe” voices as representative of what HE thinks the Evangelical arm of American Christianity looks like.
Which leads me to my last (and most important) critique of this work. I was absolutely flummoxed to find that NOT EVEN ONCE did Garry Wills mention Pentecostalism. He claims that the iconic element of American Evangelical Religion is the “revival”…but fails completely to discuss the dynamics and global impact of the Azusa Street Revival. I’ll be honest: I find this omission absolutely inexcusable, especially for someone like Wills. It is either evidence of woeful ignorance or an inexcusable bias. The Pentecostal revival is perhaps America’s greatest impact of the 20th-century on the landscape of world religion.
What makes this omission so crushing to Wills’ work here is that Pentecostalism was despised by BOTH the enlightened Modernists and the evangelical Fundamentalists (for different reasons, obviously). However, it was something truly new and different…an actual “third way” between the poles of Enlightened and Evangelical Religion. Therefore, because Pentecostalism did not “fit” Wills’ framework, he apparently deigned it unworthy of his analysis.
For me, this book concluded as just another lesson in the failure of dialectical analysis that forces us to define only TWO sides to every story which leads to all sorts of distortions of the complexity of lived reality and destroys the ability to nuance. And it made me very sad. I liked reading Wills; his research was always thorough, his style was easy to follow, he shared many important insights. But, I feel that I must conclude that, though he stresses the important role of Enlightened Religion in American history, Wills’ understanding of American religion (at least, as it presented in this work) remains pretty unenlightened.