Book Review

Fruitful tension of extremes

Head and Heart: American Christianities

This magisterial survey by one of the United States' leading lay Catholic  writers spotlights two opposing force fields in American religion. Their names are legion, but the ones Garry Wills prefers are "Enlightened" and "Evangelical". The first is studied, the second spontaneous. The first is confident in reason as a means of understanding God's laws, the second trusts in divine intervention. The first is the religion of the eighteenth-century Deists and Unitarians who framed America's constitution, carried forward in the Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century and the lettered Episcopalians of the twentieth. The second is the religion of Evangelical revival and fervour, whether in the hope-filled, black-pastor-led marches of the civil-rights movement or in the pessimism of the premillenarian dispensationalists awaiting the punitive fire of the Rapture. Wills' neat idea is that while they are in tension they are in need of each other, to compensate. It is a rare combination but it can lead to greatness.

Yet Head and Heart could equally be described as a scholarly and passionate defence of America's peculiar model of Church-State cohabitation, which Wills distils as "legal separation, but encouragement". It is an arrangement unparalleled in the Western world and responsible, he believes, for the country's astonishing religiosity. The framework was devised - and could only have been devised, he argues - at a time when Evangelicalism was at a low ebb in the late eighteenth century. (One of the myths of the Christian Right - a myth sustained by secularists - is that America was founded at a time of deep religiosity and has been cooling ever since. The reverse is true: religious adherence stood at only 17 per cent in 1776, yet was 45 per cent in 1890, 56 per cent in 1926, and since 1980 has stood at a remarkable 62 per cent.)

The argument of James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the Untied States, is one of the greatest ever made for religious freedom. Wills disagrees with the American Jesuit John Courtenay Murray, whose advocacy of religious liberty was crucial to the groundbreaking Vatican II document on the subject, that separation was a product of the need for multiple faiths to live together in peace; Madison in fact argued from rights of conscience, not necessity. Religion is a pre-social right, not given, revealed or enforced by any earthly power; while religion was necessary for morality, Madison thought religion would best support morality if it was free and pure, working up from spontaneous and independent routes rather than from favours accorded it in the political sphere. Christian mission as well as political harmony, he maintained, were best encouraged by freedom of religion.

Like the other drafters of America's great governing framework, Madison's creed was Deism, which had taken root in the colonial educated classes in the eighteenth century in reaction to the Great Awakening of the early 1700s; it is the first of the three Evangelical revivals charted in the book. The Awakening reasserted the narrow, punitive theology of the Puritans; in order to escape the vindictive Trinitarian God of the Calvinists, the Anglicans turned to Unitarianism, which emphasised a benign God and denied the Trinity. Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and the others abhorred the atheism of the later French Revolution but rejected the superstitions of established faiths tied to secular powers. Hence the wall they introduced between Church and State - not to protect the state from religion, as in France, but religion from the State.

In the nineteenth century, Enlightened Religion morphed into Transcendentalism, an inner religion voiced in the elegant Romantic striving of Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau. The dead word of the preacher was contrasted with the living gospel of nature; or, as John Wayne once put it, "I don't much like God when he gets under a roof". This instantly identifiable strain of American religiosity persists in the self-celebratory language of CEO memoirs and the self-help gurus from Dale Carnegie to Oprah Winfrey. Wills delights in spotting its Puritan pedigree: the jeremiad, that self-castigating sermon based on the sense of America's mission; the sense of chosenness, of a people set apart with a Manifest Destiny; and individualism, which begins with the lonely soul's salvation and ends - in its secular rendition - with the "self-made man" who has pulled himself up by the bootstraps and is divinely rewarded with wealth.

But most Americans in the nineteenth century were caught up in the great revival known as the Second Great Awakening, when Methodism - mobile, democratic, voluntary - established a remarkable dominance. Conversions far outstripped demographic growth: the 1,800 Christian ministers serving in 1775 rose to 40,000 by 1845. Yet Congregationalists and Methodists fell out over slavery, just as later they fell out over segregation; the Civil War was a religious split before it was a national one. The black Churches - forced into existence by white exclusion - became incubators of the rhetorical power and soulful visions of future Martin Luther Kings.

What ended slavery in the 1840s and segregation in the 1960s was a meeting of the forces: of the Enlightened, idealistic Christianity of the Northern elites, and the capacity for mobilisation of the black evangelical churches. The Quakers, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day and César Chávez are among those mentioned by Wills as fruit of that all-too-rare cross-pollination. We could now add the Illinois Senator Barack Obama, whom Wills quotes at the end of the book, as exemplifying that happy combination.

Chávez and Day, of course, were Catholics, which risks distracting from his identification of an essentially Protestant American dynamic, as does the odd excursus he takes in praise of Jews. But Wills' thesis convinces more than it reduces: Enlightened religion is deficient in piety, feeling and popular power, while Evangelicals are too prone to give reason the day off. Held in balance, they are potent; at their extremes, they fall into sterility on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other. (He does not say that, while the two extremes are present in Catholicism, it is never fatal because Catholic ecclesiology forces them into fruitful cohabitation.)

Head and Heart is a terrific read, enlivened by withering critiques of right-wing Christians, and a brilliantly wide-angled summary of the interplay of religion and politics. It is also a flare sent up to illuminate the disastrous consequences of what Madison and Jefferson attempted to forestall - the manipulation of religion by politicians, most recently under George W. Bush. It ends with an intriguing comparison between the 1920s Evangelical "triumph" of Prohibition and the current struggle to outlaw abortion; both illustrate, says Wills, "the difficulty of imposing a moral regime on people who do not agree with the moral principle involved". To end abortion, it is implied, requires not the conquest of government but the winning of hearts and minds, lest the result be, in Madison's words, "to the scandal of religion as well as the increase of party animosities".

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