THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM among western cultural elites is that God is dead and we are well rid of him.  Who, after all would want to relive all those religious wars and suffer again under the merciless rule of the Spanish Inquisition?  No, whatever superstitions may have warped men’s minds in the past, the world is clearly moving away from God and towards a secular future. In God is Dead: Secularization in the West, British sociology professor Steve Bruce interpreted the modern era as a normal process of secularization from the enthusiasm of the Protestant reformation, a society based on egalitarianism and individualism naturally evolved out of a society “much more preoccupied with supernatural beliefs and practices.” 

In the United States, things look a little different.  According to Robert William Fogel the United States of America is in the midst of a Fourth Great Awakening.  The revival in religious activity that began in the 1950s with preachers like Billy Graham has blossomed into a great movement of religious awakening, one that ranks with the Great Awakenings of the eighteenth century.  But this Awakening has not merely been a purely religious phenomenon; it has spilled over into politics and into the so-called “culture war.”  The enthusiastic Christians enrolled into the religious awakening have spilled over into politics and become part of the “base” of the Republican Party.  According to the theories of Fogel and McLoughlin, this is not surprising, but part of a familiar political-religious cycle in American life.  Yet many people have been taken by surprise, for conventional wisdom maintains that the capitalist West is on a trend of irreversible secularization.  Why should the United States have experienced this upsurge in religious enthusiasm?  And why should it have been so clearly a Protestant phenomenon, of simple people attracted to a simple faith reduced to the essentials of Bible study and faith in Jesus Christ?

Many Americans are not just surprised by the rise in religious enthusiasm: they are dismayed.  Millions of Americans are deeply suspicious of the power of religion.  They echo the psychologist who wrote that Americans face “a continuing struggle to move from a Puritan, pioneer, outlaw heritage of fighting for basic survival needs… to a civilization that is nonviolent, fair, and respectful of others.”  For such people, the task before the United States is to cleanse society of “rigid views of gender, parenting and punishment” that prevent the resocialization of the nation to the more advanced ideas of community and caring.  They wonder how anyone can continue to believe in the antiquated Protestant ethic that might have had some relevance in the nineteenth century, but hardly in the global community at the turn of the twenty-first century.  We shall analyze this worldview in later chapters.

The idea that religious faith is outmoded is not, of course, a new idea.  If Time magazine stumbled onto the Death of God in the 1960s, keener minds had experienced it earlier.  Provoked by Hume and Kant and the investigations of German philologists into the authorship of the Bible, the generation of Carlyle and Emerson had already lost their faith in the 1840s.  After the hammer blows of Lyall’s Principles of Geology and Darwin’s Origin of Species, it was left to Nietzsche in the closing decades of the nineteenth century to inaugurate an era of atheist orthodoxy, even atheist respectability, and to try to imagine a creative life beyond the good and evil of Christianity.  At the end of the twentieth century, educated people understand that religion has been dying for 200 years.  Back in the old days of superstition the churches were full to bursting with people terrified of God’s wrath.  But now people take a more sanguine view of religion and are no longer frightened by fire and brimstone and the fake emotion of the sawdust trail.  They are no longer persuaded that the world is a battleground between God and Satan, between Good and Evil.  No longer paralyzed by the fear of God, society has relaxed its religious enthusiasm, and people have become more secular in their outlook.

The only trouble is that the educated people are wrong.  Religion is not dying out, at least, not in the United States.  It is growing, and has been for 200 years.  Back in 1776, according to sociologist Rodney Stark, only about 15 percent of Americans were religious adherents.  Two hundred years later, in 1980, 62 percent belonged to a church.  The present outburst of religious enthusiasm is not surprising or unusual.  It is merely a wave in a continually upward rising tide. 

But what about the well-known fact that churches are becoming more secular?  How does that square with evidence that more and more people identify with a church?  Stark explains this with a theory of secularization and renewal.  There is no doubt that churches do become more secular with time.  The fierce Puritan sects of the seventeenth century became in time rigid Calvinist churches—Presbyterian and Congregational—with well-paid, well-educated ministers.  And in the twentieth century, they became “mainline” churches: highly secularized, worldly organizations retaining barely a whisper of their former rantings.  The Methodist church that grew from nothing in 1750 to several millions at its peak in 1850 became in time the “mainline” United Methodist church, with declining membership and weakly propagated doctrine.  But swirling against this ebb tide of secularization is a flood of revival and renewal.  New sects are forever splitting off from mature churches in rebellion against the secularization of the mother church, and committing themselves to return to a pure religion uncontaminated by secularization.  Those churches that do not decline are those that implement a deliberate policy of revival and renewal.  And new cults are being formed all the time.  The evidence is all around for those with eyes to see.

In the aftermath of the key South Carolina presidential primary of February 9, 2000 in which candidate George W. Bush salvaged his campaign for president with a decisive victory over John McCain, The New Republic published an article by Hanna Rosin, Religion Editor of the Washington Post.  Her piece, “Upwardly Mobile,” used an interview with church volunteer Mary Johnston to try to capture the essence of the religious right, the controversial group of evangelical conservative Christians that formed a key part of the Republican party base in 2000.  It was the overwhelming support from voters like Mary Johnston that had made Bush the winner.

Mary Johnson lived in Rock Hill, South Carolina, a striver suburb just across the state line from Charlotte, North Carolina.  She had voted for George W. Bush out of “class envy,” wrote Rosin.  She wanted to give her children all the opportunities he had.  “‘We don’t have the money the Bushes had, but I’ll make sure they go to the best schools, first grade to college.’” 

Mary Johnston desperately wanted to acquire the education and respectability of Bush.  Born a redneck in the “wooly backcountry of the Appalachians,” Mary, along with “almost all the religious conservatives [Rosin] interviewed… used to have rednecks as neighbors or as relatives, or… they used to be rednecks but no longer are.”  Uneasily poised between their redneck heritage and their goal of Bush-like respectability, they were anxious to acquire the status symbols of upper-middle class success.  And they were ashamed of their redneck past.  When Rosin visited her, Johnston was quick to hide a photo in the Rock Hill Herald that featured a protest at Chester, back in the Appalachian hills.  The protesters had organized a committee to protect mobile homes, “protesting new limits on that ubiquitous and cherished Southern institution.”  “(‘Protect the mobile home!’ Johnston exclaimed. ‘Can you believe it?!’)”  Mary Johnston used to live in Chester, and it was “a stain on her past that never ceases to embarrass her.”

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill