The modern Great Awakening has two major currents, according to Fogel.  There is a movement of “old lights,” enthusiastic Protestants like Billy Graham, the TV evangelists, the thousands of independent evangelical and Pentecostal churches, the pro-life movement, the “religious right,” and Christian media phenomena like the Left Behind series.  And there is a movement of “new lights:” the human potential movement, New Age Christians, positive self-esteemers, yoga practitioners, and followers of Zen.

Fogel’s concept of the Fourth Great Awakening is derived from Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, in which religious historian William G. McLoughlin proposed that religion is the engine that powers US politics.  He identified five religious outbursts that set the agenda for a generation of politics.  The Puritan outburst of 1600 propelled the first colonists to New England; the First Great Awakening of 1748-50 led to the American Revolution a generation later.  The Second Great Awakening led to the birth of the Republican party and the Civil War.  The Third Great Awakening and the Social Gospelers launched the progressive politics that has dominated the twentieth century.

If, as McLoughlin and Fogel propose, the United States is indeed in the middle of a Fourth Great Awakening that started between 1950 and 1960, then it is a matter of great moment to those occupying the commanding heights of politics and culture.  If the wrong side wins, the present incumbents could be thrown out of power and reduced to a rump mouldering away in distant university sinecures, all their dreams of money, power, and the love of beautiful women gone up in smoke.  In such an emergency, the suspension of the establishment clause of the First Amendment is merely a necessary expedient.  The progressives must co-opt and control the Fourth Great Awakening to preserve their power to do good, and prevent the United States from falling into the hands of “old lights” and reactionaries who would turn back the clock to 1930 or earlier.

To the observer of establishment culture, it is startling to encounter an establishment author who suggests that religion is a critical factor that drives politics.  It is more usual to encounter the columnist who confidently affirms that America faces 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,” or to sit at dinner next to a man who bitterly rails for hours against Puritanism, repression, and hate.  In the educated circles of the United States, it is received wisdom that organized religion is, if not a superstition, at least obsolete.  The Protestant ethic was all very well back in the nineteenth century, but the complexities and diversities of the modern era require something more flexible than the dualism of Heaven and Hell.  There must be a better way of socializing people than scaring them to death with shame and guilt.  And yet enthusiastic Protestantism is growing rapidly in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

In the 1950s, all church denominations in the US experienced a growth in membership.  However, from the 1960s onwards, only the enthusiastic denominations increased rapidly.  By 1980, the new enthusiastic Christians had appeared on the radar of national politics; by 1990 evangelical Christians had become part of the base of the Republican party.  By 2001, Tony Carnes reported in The Wall Street Journal that a new Pentecostal church was opening in New York City every three weeks, so that “a local research institute has officially identified 3,800 Pentecostal churches in New York, but believes that even that number is an undercount.”

Things were getting so bad that The New Republic sent Hanna Rosin down to South Carolina before the presidential primary in March 2000 to report on the religious right.  What she discovered sheds useful light upon the notion of a Fourth Great Awakening and upon the people caught up in it.  And it elevates the question why, after a triumphant century of the welfare state, people on the road to the middle class should still be thronging into the enthusiastic Christian churches.

| <<prev | 1 | 2 | (3) |

print view

Click for Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.

©2005 Christopher Chantrill