Under God after Bush and Rove

In the wake of George Bush's reelection as president in 2005, Garry Wills published an anguished op-ed essay in the New York Times entitled "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out." According to Wills, the election confirmed "the brilliance of Karl Rove" in using the prospect of same-sex marriage to turn out religious conservatives for Bush. Historically considered, the election represented William Jennings Bryan's "revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925" that had "discredited" Bryan's attack on evolution. Wills referred to recent polling data to inquire plaintively, "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" His answer: the only counterpart in the world to the "fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity" that Wills saw behind the defeat of John Kerry was extremism in the Muslim world. He ended this cri de coeur by predicting that the overreaching of "the moral zealots" who had won reelection would send at least some Americans on a course "to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment."¹

Head and Heart: A History of American Christianity represents full-scale documentation for the abbreviated claims of this opinion piece. Like many other noteworthy books from Wills in his long and productive writing life, the combination of wide-ranging historical research and strongly opinionated commentary pays off in both unexpected insights and major problems.² The insights come from fresh examination of individuals, incidents, and controversies set against the framework of large interpretive questions. The problems arise from forcing historical material into answers demanded by those questions. Here the larger framework is Wills's contention that a persistent struggle between the forces of Enlightenment and the forces of emotional enthusiasm has not only defined the history of American Christianity, but also played a very large role in national political history.

In filling out this framework, Wills covers much territory: New England Puritanism as the progenitor of all American intellectual history; the individuals (Roger Williams and the Quakers) and events (the colonial Great Awakening) that promoted or occasioned the growth of Enlightenment thinking; the founding period as the triumph of the Enlightenment under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; Transcendentalism and the Second Great Awakening as two sides of America's Romantic era; the Civil War as a religious conflict; fundamentalism and the Social Gospel as dividing American religion early in the twentieth century; and then the evangelical Christianity that led to the rise and fairly rapid decline of the Republican–Christian Right alliance of recent electoral politics. As this summary suggests, the book is far from "the history of Christianity in America" announced in the subtitle, since there is little on Roman Catholics and nothing on Lutherans, the Orthodox, Mormons, and representatives of other significant Christian traditions. African American Christians appear only when they impinge upon political life with Frederick Douglass in the mid-nineteenth century and the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth. Likewise absent are important aspects of any religion—preaching, liturgy, sacraments, hymns, ethnicity, marriage, family, social service, devotional literature—except where these matters had a political impact. Women, who have always made up the majority population in Christian churches and the worshiping lives of other religions, are invisible. A better title, in other words, would have been Under God Updated, with reference to a well-received book on similar subjects that Wills published in 1990.³

If this book is read as an extended essay on religion and politics, it contains much general wisdom as well as considerable insight on specific topics. Wills' depiction of American public life as consistently contested by religious forces offers a reading of the past that has been too often neglected by other historians. In the late colonial period, advocates of revival and their opponents did define broad agendas for public life. The American Revolution can be defined as a victory of the Enlightenment (Jefferson, Madison...