Garry Wills Interview Part I

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Garry Wills on recent October afternoon to talk religion and politics. The conversation was mainly focused on his new book “Head and Heart: American Christianities,” which manages to be both comprehensive and concise at once, outlining long-term trends and painting mini-portraits of protagonists in the […]

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Garry Wills on recent October afternoon to talk religion and politics. The conversation was mainly focused on his new book “Head and Heart: American Christianities,” which manages to be both comprehensive and concise at once, outlining long-term trends and painting mini-portraits of protagonists in the great experiment that is America.

We talked for about 90 minutes, which equals, I think, about 5,000 words, very few of which were pedestrian. A 1,000-word story is available to clients on the wire. But some of the nuggets dropped by the historian were too interesting to let lie. So I’m posting a transcript of the conversation entire here on the blog in five parts. Here’s Part One.

Q: I’ve counted that you’ve written nine books in the last five years. How do you do that?


A: Well, most of these have gestated over many years. Almost everything I’ve written about recently has been an interest for a long time. And some of those books, (like the books translating parts of St. Augustine’s Confessions) are fairly short. It’s not as if I’ve been writing whole big books each time.

Q: But this one (“Head and Heart”) is a big one. What did you set out to accomplish with it?

A: I’ve taught the constitutional subject of church and state for many, many years. All of these things have come in but I’ve never had time to set them all out systematically. I retired from teaching two years ago and I thought that, now that I’m not doing it on a regular basis, I’ll sit down and write the whole thing out.

Q: What did you want people to know about religion and America from your book?

A: I’m amazed that people that people talk about America in terms of the amount of religion. We’ve got a lot of religion in America. We didn’t at the outset but we do now. But that’s not so important, it seems to me, as what kind of religion (we have). And that shifts over the years. Sometimes you have the enlightened religion foremost, sometimes you have the evangelical; one with an emphasis on rational faith, the other with an emphasis on the private experience of the individual’s salvation by Jesus and the need to preach that to others.

So, I tried to trace when and how the relations between these two shifted. There have been many times when religiosity of the evangelical sort is very salient and by accident they all happen at the beginning of the century. Partly I think that is because what leads to fundamentalism, according to Martin Marty’s big study of the subject, is fear of change. And in all three cases at the beginning of all three centuries there was rapid and somewhat disorienting change.


In the 19th century, it was our tremendous expansion westward into uninhabited territory (except for the Native Americans) and this stretching out of ties and traditions, religious and other traditions, so they had to be emphasized more assertively out on the frontier.

In the beginning of the 20th century, it was the disorientations of the Industrial Revolution.

And at the beginning of the 21st century, it’s the techonological revolution, tremendous changes have come about because of the new inventions, the Internet, the computer, all of those things, which challenge people who are distrustful of science and who love, for example, the revival of opposition to Darwin and science in general. so when people become frightened about their rootedness and feel that other people are trying to take it away from them, you have things like the growth of the homeschooling movement, where they don’t trust teachers. They think that their children will be torn away from them by secularism, by Darwin, by sexual promiscuity, by opposition to school prayer. And the homeschooling movement has led to the creation or strengthening of a whole tier of evangelical colleges: Patrick Henry, Ave Maria, Regent, all of those, and because of the evangelical mindset of the Bush administration, young people from those colleges have gone directly into the regulatory agencies, the congressional staff, they went, as that wonderful book on the Green Zone demonstrates, into the Iraq occupation force. That qualitatively changes the kind of religion we have.

To be continued …

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