As I mentioned earlier, I recently sat down to talk to Garry Wills about his new book “Head and Heart: American Christianities,” a full-length history of evangelical and enlightened religion in the U.S. A 1,000-word version of the story hit the wire last week. But far too much material hit the threshing floor to waste, so I’m posting an entire transcript on the blog in five parts.

Here’s part two. We join the conversation as Wills is explaining the factors behind three great surges of evangelical activity in America.

Wills: It’s interesting that all three of these surges spent themselves, as all things tend to do, but more rapidly over time, I think. The first one, in the 19th century, was a self-starting religiosity, didn‘t depend on government. There wasn‘t much government. It was entirely self-organized, self-supporting, so it had more life in it, I think, than the later ones.

What broke it up was slavery. Slavery hit at the very heart of evangelical religion because some people said “The Bible supports slavery so we have to” and others said “No, there are things in the Bible that make us oppose slavery (e.g.) `Do unto others as you would be done unto by them’ You wouldn‘t want to be made a slave, so you shouldn‘t try to make other people slaves.” Both sides were so certain of their positions that it broke apart _ the Methodists, the Baptists, the Presbyterians _ and that effectively stalled the movement.

In the 20th century, it did involve the government. Now the government was a bigger part of everyone’s life, had more resources, so they tried to use the government to ban the sale of alcohol, for instance, or ban the delivery of mail on Sunday, or ban the teaching of evolution in school. When that happens people get a little way because of our tradition of separation of church and state. It’s more upsetting to a lot of people. And so that didn‘t last as long. That lasted about 20 years, in its more fervent stages, as opposed to 30 (for the previous awakening).

The current one, I think, is running out of steam in about 10 years. You can see it running out of steam in the reaction to the Terri Schiavo case: 81 percent of people thought that was terrible. You can see it in the changed attitudes towards gays, you can see it in the growth of the evangelical movement to protect the environment, the action of moderate evangelicals like (former Missouri senator and Episcopal priest) John Danforth.

I think a lot of people think it’s clearly gone too far. For the government to spend millions of dollars, for instance, on abstinence-only sex education, which doesn‘t work, has been proven not to work, and is simply a sop to far-right prejudice.

Q: What effect to you think this so called “astroturf“” lobbying groups, the groups that exist to stir up and mobilize the grassroots, have had.

A: The first Great Awakening, I don’t count that, because it was not after the Founding Fathers, so there’s not an enlightened religion that its reacting against, but it was largely foreign-inspired. It was the Scottish and English, Whitfield and others, who touched it off. It was very egalitarian and democratic. So, in that sense it was even more divorced from government efforts.

The second one (evangelical awakening) was more organized. The best example of that was the tremendous organization of the Prohibition lobby. That was an immense lobbying effort, really strong-armed and rough-and-tumble, a forecast of some of the more recent ones.

The more recent ones have, of course, perfected a lot of the techniques, incorporating a lot of digital tools they didn‘t have before: direct mailing, the Internet, television evangelism. So now its very organized and the impact of that is, of course, very strong.

You couldn‘t have the homeschooling movement without the Internet.

In all those ways (the last evangelical awakening) is organized somewhat from the top down. And of course, once Bush administration started infiltrating these people into the regulatory agencies and things like that, then it becomes really top down.