An interesting sector of the New Age is a group that could be called the Women’s Creativity Movement.  Representative writers are Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way; Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love; Elizabeth Lesser, The New American Spirituality; and Sonia Choquette, Your Heart’s Desire.  Cameron’s book is a frank invitation to grow from the safe world of blue rule and role to an orange world of post-rational creativity.  She consciously evokes the importance of the ineffable in a creative life, that creative work is part preparation and part inspiration.  An alcoholic who used whisky to open a swiftly narrowing window of lucidity during her days as a scriptwriter, she advertises herself as a representative of the first generation of sober artists.  Marianne Williamson represents the “bad girl” of the Sixties, who went and let it all hang out (regressing to red impulsiveness) and then returned to the Christian caritas and a life of purpose and creativity.  Elizabeth Lesser represents the “good girl” of the Sixties.  Entering Barnard College at the height of the anti-war movement, she was attracted to Sufism, and entered the commune of a Sufi mystic.  Then she and her husband left the commune so they could have a private, nuclear family, and they started a weekend retreat center.  Then they got divorced.  Lesser had done everything the culture recommended for an upper-middle-class girl, yet found herself a single mother in her thirties in a world of hurt.  Her solution was an integrated spirituality of body, mind, heart, and soul.  Sonia Choquette on the other hand is the child of a Romanian war-bride and a spiritual teacher who gives “intuitive readings.”  She promises your Heart’s Desire to those who will follow her nine Principles of Creativity that teach the “universal laws of creative manifestation.” 

These women are tackling the particular consequence, for a woman, of choosing a creative life.  They have understood that it isn’t quite as simple as shouting “Down With Rules” and getting a room of one’s own.  Most women lack the breathtaking audacity of Georges Sand and find it impossible to summon up the ruthlessness to compartmentalize their lives and become thoroughgoing nineteenth century Romantics.  They want to relate and to nurture as well as create.  Nor is the creative woman as cavalier about breaking the rules as the male Romantic.  The rules represent a limitation and proceduralization of power, a departure from the principle of might makes right.  Throwing away the rules means throwing away the defense-in-depth that bourgeois culture has erected against power.  A world without rules would not be a very safe world.  In particular, it would not be a safe world for women.  So the new generation of creative women, the first generation of sober artists, tries to build an integrated world—physical, emotional, mental, and soulful—that transcends the rules but does not abolish them.

But the big story of the Fourth Great Awakening was the rise to notoriety of the Religious Right, epitomized for most educated Americans by Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, and Jim Bakker and his disgrace.  All of a sudden, at the end of the 1970s, these TV pastors appeared on the media radar and became lightning rods for political controversy.  Many Americans were outraged that preachers would dare to enter the political arena from the right.  Other Americans were delighted to see liberal oxen gored by new political upstarts.  Still others were embarrassed by their holy roller rhetoric.  Over all, as Karen Armstrong wrote for many of the elite, the “belligerent righteousness” in “Family Values… must be rejected as inauthentic.” (Armstsrong 1994 p391)  In fact, they were entirely representative of the revivalism that has burst out throughout American history.  They represented, of course, but the tip of the iceberg of spiritual revival, and an entirely normal stage in the great story of the churching of America by enthusiastic Christian sects.  In the seventeenth century, the enthusiastic revivalists were Puritan Congregationalists and Presbyterians.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the revivalists were called Methodists and Baptists.  By the end of the nineteenth century the American Catholic Church was acting very much like a high-tension sect and the Mormons had established a base of expansion in Utah.  In the twentieth century, the fundamentalists broke away from the secularizing Social Gospelers because they felt a profound discomfort with the retreat from a Bible-centered religion.  By the second half of the twentieth century, the revivalist core of Christianity had migrated to Pentecostalism, suburban mega-churches, and the inimitable TV ministries that turned up on the political radar.

As we have seen, the United States began its life predominantly unchurched.   In 1776, only 17 percent of Americans belonged to a church.  By 1890, at the end of the nineteenth century, church adherence had more than doubled to 45 percent, and that in a nation whose population had increased from 4 million to 63 million.  Of course, all that phenomenal growth took place in the nineteenth century, in a different time.  Since, then, however, the adherence rate has increased further, to 51 percent in 1906, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.  Throughout the notoriously secular twentieth century, when the national elites had written religion off as a vestigial superstition by projecting their own loss of faith upon the population at large, religious adherence increased, and not just in absolute numbers.  Despite the huge increase in population, the proportion of Americans adhering to a church increased by over 30 percent during the twentieth century.  Obviously something was going on, something that had been completely missed by the faithless elites and the chattering classes.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill