The social historian and essayist Garry Wills is one of our most lucid public intellectuals, and no one working today writes more clearly or with greater authority on the intersection of religion and public life.
"Head and Heart: American Christianities" is a major contribution to the national debate over separation of church and state and ought to be read by anyone perplexed by the current interplay of religion and politics.
Wills' argument is that American history has been marked by an oscillation between Enlightenment and Evangelism -- between head and heart.
The history of Christianity in the US 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.
