American Christianities

The historian Garry Wills describes U.S. religious history as a tale of oscillation and interplay between "force fields" broadly characterized as an intellectual Enlightenment and emotional Evangelicalism; Head and Heart: American Christianities lays out that story in a series of episodes. It's an interesting, somewhat uneven book. It is what I've called tendentious history, very much in conversation with the moment of its writing. That was the middle of the Bush II presidency when Karl Rove was manipulating the Religious Right as a means of taking power for his candidate and conservatism generally. The fact I cannot read this book apart from that moment which so evidently birthed it is not a criticism; none of us are ever fully apart from our contexts and our embedded consciousness of our present. The issues it casts the light of the past upon are clearly still with us, as the presumptive Republican nominee has spent months trying to make and remake himself to satisfy one of those religious poles.

I found Wills' explication of my intolerant Puritan ancestors' virtues and vices very illuminating. Looking at these highly educated and completely superstitious divines from a Catholic perspective, he points out something that I'd not previously understood.

The early settlers of New England faced many foes, visible and invisible. These enemies were leagued with one another against God and against his chosen people. This made for high spiritual drama in their lives, an exciting drama but also a terrifying one. Like Protestants everywhere, they faced this struggle in an almost naked state, stripped of many of the protections that their medieval forebears had worn. … Roman Catholic practice had supplied believers with many shields against devils and their evil power -- guardian angels, patron saints, exorcism, sacramental confession, holy water, priestly blessings, crucifixes and other sacred images. Protestant believers had rejected all of these as superstitions, but had retained the dark magic they were meant to counter.

No wonder these folks ended up hunting -- and burning -- witches, literally. Religion stripped of divine immanence via symbolic ritual left them terribly alone in the wilderness, surrounded by threatening "savage" foes.

These settlers had an enduring but paradoxical influence on the mental furniture of their new land. The colleges they founded, Harvard and Yale, embodied the Puritan intellect:

… formed to defend a pre-Enlightenment religion but [it] would forge tools later useful to the Enlightenment. The intellectual skills developed in the seventeenth century proved adaptable to the tasks of the eighteenth century. The subtlety, rigor, and erudition expended in exploring doctrines like the Trinity, the Incarnation, predestination, justification (by imputed merit), the stages (or lack of them) in conversion, transubstantiation, or covenant did not lapse or fade when different concerns came into view. And the traits that went along with such energetic busyness of the mind would perdure in new and sometimes surprising ways. …

Their intellectual heirs were the religiously tolerant sages of the Enlightenment who founded the new country. Wills expounds in detail on Jefferson's and Madison's intent in drafting the Constitutional "separation of church and state," one of our country's signal contributions to religion and all of humanity, and one still under assault today.

For Wills, one of the great achievements of U.S. religion was overthrowing the Biblical justification for chattel slavery. He credits a little remembered 18th century Quaker, Anthony Benezet, for initiating questioning of millennia of Bible-based acquiescence in the owning of human beings.

Benezet seems to me the one unquestionably authentic American saint. The Quakers made possible all later forms of abolition by proving that one can be a sincere Christian and yet defy the scriptural endorsements of slavery. If reason says slavery is wrong, then it is wrong no matter what the Bible says. They also proved that Enlightened religion is indeed a religion. They are stellar exemplars of both religion and Enlightenment. And they prevailed. At the beginning of the eighteenth century slavery was legally recognized and actually practiced in all the Northern colonies. At the end of the century, only one state was still a holdout, and New Jersey would fall in line in 1804. …

In Wills' telling, the struggle within various U.S. Protestant denominations that led to North-South splits over slavery (Presbyterians, 1838; Methodists, 1844; Baptists, 1845) were the true first episodes of the Civil War that finally ended in 1865.

The nation was de facto divided from the time its principal religious bodies broke apart. In the past, some have claimed that the Civil War was not fought over slavery .… But the elephant in the room remains, and its name is slavery. The breakup of the religious bodies is clear proof of that, years before the war began.

Wills also chronicles the invention within late 19th century U.S. evangelical circles of the wacky notion of "The Rapture." In these days when so many have been exposed to the Left Behind novels, it's worth noting that this idea was a much disputed innovation.

I should not leave the Dispensationalists' theology without a look at their most distinctive belief, the Rapture, by which God's saints will be swept up to Christ before the world-rending Tribulation begins. Critics of Dispensationalism -- even other Fundamentalists -- argued that this belief is a strange one for believers in biblical literalism, since there is no one "proof text" for the idea in the Bible. It emerges, rather, from the whole concatenation of prophecy beliefs. Since the prophecies apply the Jews, they are the ones who will suffer the Tribulation. Christians have no real role in it. They will not, like the surviving mass of mankind, acknowledge the rule of Antichrist in his time of power, so they will be kept hors de combat. It was the total schema, too, that made [John Nelson]Darby [who created and popularized it] always refer to the secret Rapture. Not secret in the sense that no one would notice when thousands of people disappeared. But they would not know the explanation, since Jesus would not be seen except by those meeting him "in the air." This secret coming of Jesus is in contrast with his final coming in glory, which will manifest his power to all. Once the whole framework was in place, the Dispensationalists searched for biblical texts that can be made to conform with it. …

Possibly because I have more immediate experience of mid- and late-20th century U.S. Christianities, I did not feel the contemporary history sections of this book added quite as much as the earlier parts to my understanding of how we got where we are now. (That's the point of history, isn't it? Insofar has history has "a point," that is.) I did find interesting Wills' insistence that, despite the views of Republicans, Fundamentalists, and Catholic Bishops, we should remember that

much of the debate over abortion is based on a misconception, that this is a religious issue, that the pro-life advocates are acting out of religious conviction. It is not a theological matter at all. There is no theological basis for either defending or condemning abortion. … it is a matter of natural law …

Maybe so, but in this land of religious innovations, we seem to have generated a considerable number of "believers" -- some Catholic, more evangelical Protestant -- for whom opposition to abortion is their religion.

There's a great deal to think about in Head and Heart. I suspect my thoughts will often wander back to this book. We are a religious people; there's no evading that. Though I'm a Christian myself, I find it hard to be sure whether I see our national religiosity as more heartening than frightening.