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failing sense of the problems relevant to our age, his new book, just like
its predecessors, is topical as well as learned.
Perhaps the most original of these interlinked essays are those
dealing with "The Religion of the Heart." Hofstadter shows the
somewhat paradoxical development of Protestant religious thought in
this country. Early Puritan religion was based on a firm tradition which
saw the minister as a learned man, a scholarly intellectual and educa–
tional leader. But with the rise of evangelicalism and revivalism, the
decline of the stern Puritan ascendancy, and the drive to
win
the
West for Christianity, the ideal image of the minister changed: it
became that of a crusader and exhorter, a catcher of souls. From the
Great Awakening to Billy Graham one notices a progressive primitiviza–
tion of the Christian message, a growing dissociation of sensibilities;
religion came to stand for emotion and
to
be inimical to mind. By
the middle of the nineteenth-century a clergyman complained that there
was "an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman
is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient
in intellect." In their efforts to win over
to
Christianity the unchurched
frontiersmen and the vast secularized urban masses, evangelical spokes–
men gradually evolved a form of muscular Christianity stressing the
"practical" values of their message. The plain style and intellectually
demanding approach of Puritan preaching declined to the folkish
sentimentalism of Billy Sunday or of Bruce Barton's portrayal of Christ
as a booster: "Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever· lived."
Hofstadter shows how the audience of the religious performer changed
the very nature of the performance. As the minister, no longer preaching
to
a stable and traditional audience, came to be viewed as a salesman
of the gospel to unchurched millions, he adopted the characteristic
vulgarity of the drummer as he played up to the anti-intellectual
prejudices of his audience.
In the twentieth century, the religion of the heart preached by
the earlier revivalists and evangelical preachers finally assumed its most
anti-intellectual form among those neglected and forgotten people of the
Bible Belt who were engaged in a hopeless battle against the spirit of
modern urban America. Here fundamentalism appealed to all those
who felt their traditional certainties undermined by the rising tide of
scepticism, learning and modern education. And in our days, the funda–
mentalist mind, having been routed in its battle agaist encroaching
modernity, increasingly turns in desperation toward the politics of the
extreme right. When the "Scribes and the Pharisees of the Twentieth
Century" seem to have conquered the land, there remains only the
