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Chapter 2:
Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn
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To many progressives, the rise of the religious right is an insult, a threat to return America to a barbarous past, a cancer that must be stamped out before it metastasizes and kills the body politic. To Fogel in the Fourth Great Awakening, the sudden upsurge in religious enthusiasm is not a cancer but a negative drug reaction, a wakeup call for progressives. They need to change the prescription before the patient loses faith in the progressive doctor and leaves to find another one.
We shall return to analyze the curious phenomenon of the intolerance for religion among elite classes that so boldly advertise their tolerance. But first we shall examine the present upsurge in religious enthusiasm. Is it mere coincidence that the unlooked for upsurge in religious enthusiasm has occurred on the progressive watch when progressives and secularists have dominated the culture, or is it a direct response to the progressive hegemony? Perhaps this spiritual Awakening is a rejection by the ordinary people of the very basis of the progressive vision, the idea of leading the lower classes to leap in one bound from pre-bourgeois victimization and rural idiocy to cosmopolitan creativity and community. Maybe the Mary Johnstons and the Juan Riveras have a better idea. Maybe they just want to seek out and plod along the road to the middle class, not saunter along an I-beam like Mohawk ironworkers. Unlike the educated elite, they live close to their redneck or inner-city roots, and they know the danger. They know how drugs and drink and cheating hearts can destroy a life and damage all the lives nearby. Having found the road to the middle class, they want to stay on it, and are content to drive a car built for safety, not for speed.
Of course, this spiritual Awakening among the ordinary people of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century is not unique. It is not even particularly special. Similar outbursts have occurred again and again down through recorded history. But to understand the outburst of our own time, it is well to understand the Awakenings that have come before. One such was the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. It led to the American Revolution of 1776.
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Click for Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Hugo on Genius
“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up
rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
China and Christianity
At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
