Under God
Wills, Garry
Even as the election book has be- L come a genre, so has the post-election book: the jottings from the campaign trail that blossom into something quite different. Garry Wills's Under God is the...
...Wills doesn't think separation from the state entails silence in politics...
...Wills on Jesse Jackson is no more insightful than Jackson on Jesse Jackson, and far less entertaining...
...But in a country to which religion bequeathed prohibition, abolition, and half of the Thirteen Colonies, and in which two ministers and a former divinity student ran for President last time out, Wills believes that this will not do...
...It is vital to know how and why elite Protestantism went off the rails, for as long as it remains politically marginal, American Protestantism is like a body without a head...
...He wants Americans with religiously grounded moral concerns to speak up...
...It is given special coverage by an outsider...
...The last time Gallup counted, the ratio of Protestants to Catholics was just under two-to-one, while Mormons, Jews, and Moslems were down in the asterisks...
...What Wills noticed in the course of covering the last campaign for Time and PBS, was the unwillingness of his fellow journalists to notice the religiosity of American life and politics...
...Yet the only William Sloane Coffin who appears in Under UNDER GOD: RELIGION AND AMERICAN POLITICS Garry Wills/Simon and Schuster/445 pp...
...Vietnam was their last hurrah...
...The right wing," he writes, "regularly deplores 'liberal bias' in the media, trying to count how many Democrats there are in the working press...
...So when religion pops up in public life, it is often some form of Protestantism that is conservative, theologically if not politically...
...How does he treat them when they do...
...If he disapproves, as he ultimately does of the goals of evangelical opponents of pornography and abortion, his reaction is more complicated...
...As in previous books, Wills has done his homework and his leg-work...
...Maybe Wills's sympathy with elite Protestantism's last political crusade prevents him from even noticing the question...
...W ills credits the Protestant churches with the separation of church and state...
...or on the uneasy way journalists talk about religion...
...Garry Wills's Under God is the latest example...
...If he approves of the cause, he goes weak in the knees...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 47...
...Sic transit gloria ecclesiae...
...Students of political history will know that anyone who ran for President three times with the nomination of a major party must have had something going for him...
...We learn that Stanley Graham (of graham crackers) and John Harvey Kellogg (of Kellogg's Cornflakes) were both early disciples of Ellen White, a founder of Seventh-Day Adventism...
...It could more tellingly reflect on the number of churchgoers in the national press, as opposed to the general population...
...Roger Williams ran seventeenth-century Rhode Island like an ACLU chapter because he had such a lively fear of the Pope and his dupes (among whom he numbered John Winthrop) that he would not entrust power over religion into anyone's hands...
...Jefferson and Madison made similar arguments, and often counted Baptists among their political allies...
...Wills, who is a liberal Catholic, thus spends most of his time writing about people who can scarcely be congenial to him...
...Wills's great omission is his failure to consider why the liberal Protestant denominations, small in number but still long on prestige, have such slight impact on public life...
...I remember reading some of the sections of Under God when they appeared as articles in magazines, and not only were they fresher, they seemed more thorough and better argued...
...Yet he gives all their preoccupations a fair hearing...
...I wonder what impression his star-studded arguments will make on people who hate the Renaissance...
...If religion intrudes too obviously, as in the case of Pat Robertson's campaign, this is treated as an anomaly...
...24.95 Richard Brookhiser 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 God is William Sloane Coffin, Sr., who is mentioned as an ally, in a fight within the Presbyterian church, of William Jennings Bryan...
...He gives them their due (his portrait of Randall Terry is sympathetic), then drops the reportorial stance to argue that they are mistaken, calling Nabokov, Kierkegaard, Aquinas, and Augustine as expert witnesses...
...A second theme is that America's Protestantisms have also been the source of much of what we consider enlightened about America...
...Echoing Richard Weaver, Wills argues that Bryan was drawn to the Scopes trial not because he was obsessed by biology, but because he feared the effects of Darwinian and Nietzschean social thought on a democratic republic...
...Willsmakes a heroic effort to salvage the reputation of none other than William Jennings Bryan...
...Call Martin Marty' is the editor's easiest recourse for the special case (Where narrowly Catholic or Jewish views are at issue, the call to Marty may be alternated with calls to Richard McBrien or Arthur Hertzberg...
...he just wants it to say different things...
...Some larger themes do emerge from their hardcover afterlife, however...
...He wanted the freedom to protect his own religion, not to attack other religions...
...Moreover, the "liberal" Protestant denominations—Episcopalians, Presbyterians, United Church of Christ —constitute a smallish minority of the Protestant mass...
...He wants the religious right to have its say...
...Wills's reflections on H. L. Mencken, who, besides being a delightful writer, was a soidisant Nietzschean with a rather nasty streak of power-worship, will be of special interest to readers of this magazine...
...His chapters on black religious politicians are written in a tremolo that is relieved only by the sermons and spirituals he quotes...
...The first is that America is still, to a great extent, a Protestant country...
...We listen as Randall Terry, the leader of Operation Rescue, gives his reasons for disliking Thomas Aquinas: "I hate the Renaissance" We must also put up with a lot of ragged rewriting and loose ends...
...But most of us know Bryan only as the butt of Inherit the Wind...
...Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of National Review, is author of the new book The Way of the WASP: How It Made America, and How It Can Save It, So to Speak (The Free Press...
Vol. 24 • January 1991 • No. 1
