Reason, faith, and American politics

October 03, 2007|Book Review, Rich Barlow

You did not want the Puritans to give you a block party if you'd moved into the neighborhood against their wishes. When Mary Dyer, who'd been exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for her Quaker beliefs, and the public nuisance she made defending them, returned in 1660, the authorities hanged her.

Her story comes early in "Head and Heart," Garry Wills's history of religion in the United States, Colonial to contemporary. Encyclopedic in detail, the book ignores the wisdom of brevity Wills heeded in his recent books on Jesus and Saint Paul. There are more ministers' names here than on the guest list at a divinity-school reunion. That reservation aside, this is a worthy guidebook. Definition is the first step to comprehension, and Wills deftly defines the two great tides of American faith, what he calls "Enlightened" and "Evangelical" religion.

The former treasures reason for unlocking "the laws of nature and of nature's God" and deems compassion the commandment of those laws. Evangelicals profess "an experiential relationship with Jesus as their savior, along with biblical inerrancy and a mission to save others. . . . The emphasis of Enlightened religion is on the head. The emphasis of Evangelicals is on the heart." The Puritans were heart-believers. The Founding Fathers, aware of Puritan intolerance and its collateral damage, such as Dyer's execution, were head-believers. Wills sides with Enlightened religion. Separating church and state, he notes, seeded America with countless denominations, protecting religion rather than eviscerating it. But he does evangelicals the courtesy of taking them seriously. Of the Puritans, he says, "There was never a more intellectual leadership in religion." And he offers modern evangelicals a thoughtful riposte on matters such as abortion. Many heart-believers understand life to begin at conception, he notes. Yet half or more of embryos are destroyed naturally because they fail to implant in the wall of the womb. Thus, nature "aborts far more persons than any human abortioners can. God is responsible for this silent holocaust." The anti-abortion religious response - God permits all sorts of tragedies but doesn't condone them - does not in itself prove God's existence or, if He does exist, that He intends us to protect all potential humans. Wills writes that "semen has the potential to become a person, and we do not preserve every bit of semen that is ejaculated but never fertilizes an egg. The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one."