“We don’t do white churches.”Looking ahead, Sullivan believes thealienation between religiously motivatedvoters and the Democratic Party need notbe permanent or total. She points to thegubernatorial campaigns of Tim Kaine inVirginia and Bill Ritter in Colorado, twopro-life Democrats who won election in2005 and 2006, respectively. She discussesthe successful effort of RepresentativesTim Ryan and Rosa DeLauro to hammerout and pass the Reducing the Need forAbortion and Supporting Families Act,which sought to decrease the number ofunwanted pregnancies in the first place,and offer financial assistance to pregnantwomen who decided to carry their childrento term. The bill passed in 2007despite a below-the-radar oppositioneffort by pro-choice groups.There is hope the Democrats havelearned their lesson. And, lucky for them,the emergence of the religiously fluentBarack Obama as a leader of the party canonly facilitate the dialogue Democratsneed to have with those who considerreligion a principal source of their ideasabout culture, economics and politics.The Party Faithful points the directiontoward a more humane and tolerantDemocratic Party that can also be moresuccessful on Election Day.Michael Sean WintersBipolar DisorderHead and Heart<strong>America</strong>n ChristianitiesBy Garry WillsThe Penguin Press. 640p $29.95ISBN 9781594201462Over a distinguished career spanning fourdecades, Garry Wills has been a veritableprodigy of journalistic and historicalaccomplishments ranging from works onSt. Augustine and medieval philosophy toNixon Agonistes and Lincoln at Gettysburg(for which he won a Pulitzer Prize). In hismost recent Big Book, Head and Heart, wesee flashes of the earlier brilliance, but onbalance the work fails to measure up to hishigh standards of depth and originality (tosay nothing of arresting prose).The premise of Head and Heart isclearly stated in the introduction. FromMay 5, 2008 <strong>America</strong> 31
colonial origins to the present, <strong>America</strong>nthought and values have oscillatedbetween the poles of “head” and “heart.”Sometimes one is dominant, sometimesthe other. But regardless of which happensto prevail at any given time, the othernever goes entirely away. This leads in thebest cases to a creative dialectic in whicheach needs the other in order to sustainwhat we now call the United States of<strong>America</strong>. At worst, the tension betweenhead and heart emerges in witch hunts,violent nativism and racist hatred.Although these tendencies are primarilyidentified with Protestantism, Willsargues that they can be found in manychurches and, in fact, are better thought ofas “force fields” or strands that figure in allthe major Judeo-Christian traditions.Assessing the two poles, Wills concedessome positive achievements of the heartimpulse (usually labeled “evangelicalism”),but his heart lies clearly with the head tradition(usually labeled “enlightened religion”).The idea of organizing <strong>America</strong>nintellectual history around the dichotomyof head and heart has a long ancestry thatextends all the way back to <strong>America</strong>’s firsthistorians. Its mostimpressive articulationappeared in Perry Miller’sposthumously publishedThe Life of the Mind in<strong>America</strong> From theRevolution to the Civil War,which posited a fundamental“disjunction” in<strong>America</strong>n thought “of thehead versus the heart, ofintellect versus emotion.”It is one of the manycuriosities of Head andHeart that many ofMiller’s works are cited,but not one of the mostrelevant.Having set the context in terms of thehead and heart “force fields,” Willsbegins his narrative by pitting the “pre-Enlightenment” Puritans and the GreatAwakening against the “enlightened religion”of Quakers, Deists and Unitarians.As Puritanism wanes and the new republicis created “without the protection ofan official cult” (which Wills rightly seesas “the only original part of theConstitution”), the Deists and Unitariansremain firmly centered intheir Enlightenment forcefields, while the Puritansare replaced by the heartcenteredrevivalists, especiallyMethodists.Along the way Willstakes pot shots at JonathanEdwards and, by extension,Perry Miller and AlanHeimert, who had thetemerity to suggest thatEdwards was a product ofthe Enlightenment. ForWills, nothing could befurther from the truth. Hedismisses Edwards as a“pre-Enlightenment” dinosaur who“fought off the coming of theEnlightenment.” If this is accurate, a largenumber of scholars have wasted a lot oftime studying Edwards and the GreatAwakening. But happily it is far fromaccurate. Whatever his interpretive faults,Miller was spot-on in recognizing that,first among colonial intellectuals, Edwardsread and really understood the loomingEnlightenment figures Newton andLocke, while his “Old Light” rationalist,anti-trinitarian critics were still immersedin an essentially medieval world ofscholasticism and a psychology that dividedthe self into various “faculties.” Indeed,Edwards understood them so well that hecould take their terminology and insightsand turn them on their heads.Throughout Wills’s narrative, onegroup of historians dominates, namelythe self-proclaimed “evangelical” historians,George Marsden, Nathan Hatchand, above all, Mark Noll. Certainly onecan choose far worse historians to dependupon, but it is one of the more curiousanomalies in this book that Wills makesstrong claims for these historians’ supportof Unitarianism and “enlightenedreligion” as <strong>America</strong>’s religion, while infact they claim the opposite. ForMarsden, Noll and Hatch, <strong>America</strong>’sreligion is not the Unitarian religion norDeism, but, in Noll’s formulation, aunique amalgam of “republican-evangelical-commonsense” religion not foundanywhere else in the world in quite thesame symbiotic (and ultimately tragic)combination. For this reason, Noll concludesin <strong>America</strong>’s God that “Deismnever succeeded in establishing itself as32 <strong>America</strong> May 5, 2008
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