Gary Wills has won significant acclaim for his bestselling works of religion and history. Here, for the first time, he combines both disciplines in a sweeping examination of Christianity in America throughout the last 400 years. Wills argues that the struggle now—as throughout our nation’s history—is between the head and the heart, reason and emotion, enlightenment and Evangelism. A landmark volume for anyone interested in either politics or religion, Head and Heart concludes that, while religion is a fertile and enduring force in American politics, the tension between the two is necessary, inevitable, and unending.
Head and Heart
Key to Brief Citations
Introduction
PART ONE: PRE-ENLIGHTENMENT RELIGION
I. Puritans
1. Mary Dyer Must Die
2. The Puritan Psyche
3. The Puritan Conscience
4. The Puritan Intellect
II. Preludes to Enlightenment
5. Precursors: Samuel Sewall, Roger Williams
6. Spurt to Enlightenment: The Great Awakening
PART TWO: ENLIGHTENED RELIGION
III. Unitarians
7. Against the Awakening
8. Quakers
9. Deists
IV. Disestablishment
10. Beyond Tolerance
11. Jefferson's Statute
12. Madison's Remonstrance
13. First Amendment
15. Madisonian Separation
PART THREE: THE ROMANTIC ERA
V. Transcendentalism
15. Schism in New England
16. Emersonians
VI. Religion of the Heart
17. The Second Great Awakening
18. Schisms over Slavery
19. God of Battles
20. Religion in the Gilded Age
PART FOUR: CULTURE WARS
VII. Doomsday or Progress?
21. Second-Coming Theology
22. Second-Coming Politics
23. The Social Gospel
VIII. Reversals
24. Evangelicals Riding High
25. Evangelicals Brought Low
26. Religion in a Radical Time
IX. Euphoria
27. The Great Religious Truce
28. The Rights Revolution
29. Evangelicals Counterattack
X. The Karl Rove Era
30. Faith-Based Government
31. Ecunemical Karl
32. Life After Rove
Epilogue: Separation Not Suppression
Acknowledgments
Notes
Appendix I: Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
Appendix II: Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments
Index
“ A major contribution to the national debate over separation of church and state.”
—Los Angeles Times
“ Challenge[s] the conventional wisdom on many issues while synthesizing much of the finest recent scholarship.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Essential reading.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
