Who is the best interpreter of American evangelicalism?
An article that I find thrilling has just appeared in The New York Review of Books. It is an essay-review by the estimable Andrew Delbanco (author of The Death of Satan, a book I admire) of Garry Wills’ new book Head and Heart: American Christianities. Wills’ book is sure to find a large audience, but Delbanco is quite critical of it for reasons that should please liberal-evangelical Christian believers. It is a fact that sometimes a sympathetic nonbeliever can give a better account of Christianity than a believer (Delbanco is a Sephardic Jew, probably nonobservant). The great Harvard historian Perry Miller, who was an unbeliever, was a dazzlingly insightful interpreter of the Puritans of New England (and a superlative literary stylist to boot). Miller did not get everything right, but he is a joy to read and he tapped into something enormously important about Christianity in early America. If you think you don’t like the Puritans, read Miller (a good place to begin is Errand Into the
