Gary Wills has written _Head & Heart - American Christianities_ (2007 The Penguin Press, New York), which chronicles the history of our country's tensions between Enlightenment and Evangelical religion, not as separate religions but as strong tendencies within many churches with the greatest impact on our country's religious ethos.

He writes: "People at various times have expressed the antagonism of these two forces. In 1853, a prominent minister could complain of 'an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect.'"

Jeepers, how many times I've heard a version of that one!

From the jacket:

quote:

As Gary Wills examines the key movements and personalities that have transformed America's religious landscape, we see again and again the same pattern emerge; a cooling of popular religious fervor followed by a grassroots explosion in Evangelical activity, and an aggressive reassertion of religious values into the public sphere, generally at a time of great social transformation and anxiety. But such forces inevitably go too far, interfering too much in American public life, causing a backlash, and the cycle begins again.

Thus he tells the story of pre-Enlightenment religion and the Puritans & the Great Awakening, the Unitarians & Deists, Jefferson, Madison & Disestablishment, Transcendentalism, the 2nd Great Awakening & Slavery, Second Coming Theology & the Social Gospel, Evangelicals & Prohibition, the Rights Revolution & Evangelical Counterattack and so on.

Wills concludes that the tension is inevitable, necessary and unending.

I wonder if we're in the wash, rinse or spin cycle

quote:

Originally posted by johnboy:
[qb] Wills concludes that the tension is inevitable, necessary and unending.[/qb]

Indeed it is, though I'm sure seeing it play out through history makes for interesting reading.

Talking of intellectual proclivities of the lack thereof, Dan Wakefield writes:

quote:

Now here I was at my first meeting with my newly assigned spiritual director, who, I was I was thrilled to learn, was a Roman Catholic nun. As a mainstream Protestant, I felt a nun would be able to fill me in on mysterious practices with beads and incense that would provide secret shortcuts and greater access to the Divine. My pen was poised and notebook ready for the nun's assignment that would surely introduce me to exciting, arcane practices.

"I want you to look at a tree," she said.

Is that all? I thought.

Maybe she thought that since I was a Unitarian, I wasn't capable of more than the simplest challenge.