This book is a timely volume by a prolific author who writes regularly on American religion, its strengths and discontents. It will be especially useful to those who want to preach and teach about church and state from the Reformed perspective during the presidential campaign. There are excellent ideas for sermons on Thanksgiving Day or any national holiday when the preacher wants to express gratitude to God for the blessings and burdens of religious liberty.
The organizing thesis of Head and Heart is that religious divisions in the American experience are grounded in polar opposites: the Enlightened head and the Evangelical heart. These polarities in the dominant (Protestant) culture have, even with the current complexity of traditions, primarily influenced the religious ethos. These are tendencies within many churches; they comprise force fields that are empirically observable in different stages of American history. They have been identified variously: as liturgical vs. pietist, ecclesial vs. revivalist; high church vs. low church; rational vs. emotional, Modernist vs. Fundamentalist.
Wills notes that historians have recorded the antagonism of these forces (Ahlstrom) and even their incompatibility (Mead). But their constructs are too pessimistic. “The constitutional framework has done just what Jefferson and Madison said it would — fostered and protected religion.” There are infamous exceptions to fostering and protecting, but over the long view, Wills is correct.
The Enlightenment, which brought the tension between head and heart into American religious culture, is the key. Prior to the arrival of Enlightenment ideas on this continent, the dominant culture in the Congregational North and the Anglican South was Calvinist. “This was a religious culture in which there was no obvious polarity between intellect and emotion. Both were engaged to serve the biblical culture.”
One cannot overestimate the impact of Puritanism on American life, an influence that continued in national public leadership even into the last century. Yet before the Enlightenment came, Puritans hanged Quakers, exiled Dissenters, silenced heretics, and burned books. Anglicans restricted all Free Church expression in Virginia.
It was not until the disestablishment of the church that real change occurred. By disestablishment, Wills means that for the first time in history a government was inaugurated without the protection of an official cult. This “separation of church and state” is the only original part of the Constitution. Everything else — federalism, three branches of government, two houses of the legislature, and an independent judiciary — had been around for a long time. Disestablishment had no precedents. The Constitution never mentions God, an omission that is startling.
Wills argues that only during the founding era could such a great break in history have occurred. At that time alone the influence of the Deists — enlightenment figures all — who were in the majority (together with their more orthodox collaborators) was not opposed by a strong evangelical counterweight. Wills quotes Mark Noll, the evangelical scholar, who describes the period 1750-1790 as the only time of great evangelical decline in our history. In 1776, only 17 percent of Americans were religiously observant. By 1850, that had risen to 34 percent and has been mostly on the rise ever since to a total of 62 percent from 1980 – 2000 (Finke & Stark).
Wills describes how Enlightenment ideas in the colonies, especially as they modified Puritan thinking, brought the changes necessary to make disestablishment effective. Yet he also notes with irony that during the Colonial era, the intervention of reigning monarchs in England — Charles II, briefly James II, and William and Mary — decreed religious toleration in the colonies.
He then shows how most of Christianity became enlightened, and how the founders moved beyond tolerance to disestablishment. He writes definitively and at length about Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute and James Madison’s Remonstrance, which led to the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution and to what he terms Madisonian separation.
The rest of Head and Heart is an examination of American Christianities from the Second Great Awakening through New England Transcendentalism through the Civil War and down to the present time.
Wills describes the religious unanimity that was secured before the outbreak of World War II and that was maintained (Reinhold Niebuhr being the most important influence) for several decades — until the liberation movements that followed the granting of Civil and Voting Rights to African Americans. This unity was broken by the response of the religious right to those movements, and it has been fervent, active, and powerful until recently.
Wills’ discussions of the Karl Rove era begin with faith-based government, and ring the changes of faith-based science, war, and social services. They end with a description of the extraordinary power he exercised over George W. Bush as they tried to build a Republican majority. He wooed Catholics and Jews, in addition to evangelicals. Wills then notes the unraveling of those initiatives.
He closes the book with a post-Rove Epilogue titled “Separation not Suppression.” There he argues for the value of these two polarities of head and heart, encouraging the reader not to stigmatize either position, but to see them as useful for “engaging people in a spirited debate that enhances public life.”
Here is a sobering word for a polarized, despairing church as well.
O. Benjamin Sparks is an honorably retired member of the Presbytery of the James, Richmond, Va. He was an editor of The Presbyterian Outlook for nearly two years, 2004-2006.
