THE THIRD GREAT AWAKENING?
by Forrest Church
September 24, 2006
President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil." Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. . . .
"A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. "There was a stark change between the culture of the '50s and the '60s—boom—and I think there's change happening here," he added. "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."
—Washington Post, September 13, 2006
If our political leaders are going to hail the advent of a Third Great Awakening, it will be helpful for us, and them as well, to know at least a little about the First and Second.
The 20th century French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a book called The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In it he speaks of alternating currents of spiritual energy over the course of history. Dynamic periods, as he terms them, follow static ones. Then, after a burst of creative spiritual energy, order is restored and another static period follows in term. Jesus and Martin Luther, for instance, blew the tight lid off the religious establishments of their day—exhorting the people to liberate themselves from the sway of corrupt, encrusted religious hierarchies in favor of a direct relationship with God. Each was so successful, that when the revolutionary flame of their dynamic passion flickered out, as such flames always do, a static soon-to-be encrusted and corrupted religious hierarchy stood at the ready to erect churches in their holy names.
To adopt Bergson's model, America's first two Great Awakenings were dynamic cycles in the alternating current of religious history. They were anti-establishmentarian, personal in their appeal, and radical in their message, which was: Don't let some self-interested ecclesiastical or government authority tell you what to believe, but read the Bible with your own eyes and open your heart directly to Jesus, who will take you into his sweet embrace and save your troubled soul.
The First Great Awakening took place during the middle of the 18th century. Its liberating gospel shook the establishment rafters so vigorously that the roof collapsed on the British during the Revolutionary War. People discovered that the patriarchal church establishment, not to mention the parliament and crown, didn't in fact have their best interests at heart. The Methodist minister George Whitfield, principal impresario of the First Great Awakening, introduced, in place of God the judge and Christ the King, a sweet, benevolent, loving God, ready to save anyone who turned her eyes heavenward. On one occasion he exclaimed, "In Heaven I expect to see Charles the First, Oliver Cromwell, and Archbishop Laud singing hallelujahs together." That would be like Billy Graham preaching today, "I expect to see George Bush, Ted Kennedy, and Osama Bin Laden singing hallelujahs in heaven together." Whitfield's Philadelphia publisher and dear friend, the amiable Deist Benjamin Franklin, calculated that more than 10,000 citizens gathered in Philadelphia's streets on one occasion to hear him preach. You can well imagine how well this went down with the tall-steeple clerics, especially given that Whitfield was telling people, "You don't need their, or even my, good offices in order to be saved. As much as Enlightenment political thought did, by undermining the authority of the colonial and British religious establishment, the First Great Awakening cleared a direct path to the Revolutionary War.
The Second Great Awakening is more a historical construct than a discreet event, but during the early decades of the nineteenth century a two-winged Christian revival did indeed course across the American countryside. A spiritual breeze—call it the Holy Spirit—whistled through America. On the American Frontier, Baptist, Methodist and Scotch Presbyterian ministers—"wandering stars" some called them—were coursing through the Western firmament. By the thousands, seekers gathered at interfaith camp meetings to be liberated by the gospel of freedom in Christ from all earthy authorities, including, once again, the authority of the established church. The politicized religious establishment, including the Unitarians, in states like Connecticut and Massachusetts, who leaned on the government for direct financial support and were campaigning to reestablish the United States as a Christian state, looked down their nose at these wandering vagabond preachers as they advanced "with their Magpie voices" even in New England to "undermine the settled and ordained pastor and break up and destroy" the authority, some feared, of church and state alike. In the early Republic, most Baptists stood on the religious left as champions for church-state separation; an equal majority of Congregationalists and Unitarians, to bank up the social pyramid that placed them on its pinnacle, lined up on the religious right to demand a stabilizing seat for God in government.
As these dynamic Baptist and Methodist missions threatened to pull worshippers from their cold pews, the besieged established clergy joined the band, establishing voluntary associations (mission, temperance, tract, and anti-slavery societies) and becoming unwitting practitioners of the very democracy they so disdained. The Second Great Awakening was a democratic movement. One social revolution it triggered was that women began emerging in positions of spiritual power. Extreme pietistic sects, such as the Shakers, were founded and led by women. In the West, not only did women preach in camp revivals, but they also received the greatest social benefit from the moral reforms that followed upon their husbands being saved. In the East, women were the engine that ran the charitable voluntary associations that emerged from the establishment wing of the Second Great Awakening. Moral movements do have a conservative impact on social behavior, but when those same movements liberate individuals who before operated only under the thumbs of their husbands and pastors, liberty is served.
Initially the breeze of spiritual renewal blew most steadily at the back of democratic Christians like the Baptists—the left wing of the Second Great Awakening—who squandered none of their energy trying to convert the president of the United States, as long as he granted them full freedom to worship God however they pleased. In the Second Great Awakening the sectarian Christian pioneer spirit and Jeffersonian egalitarianism were joined at the hip. Rejecting every pretense of top down governmental and ecclesial direction, common sense religion—think of it as Bible- rather than church-centered Christianity—invested American faith with many of the same radical, anti-authoritarian attributes that Thomas Paine earlier contributed to American politics.
The Famous 1801 revival in Cane Ridge Kentucky—one scholar calls it the Woodstock of its day—drew as many as twenty thousand souls. Entire families traveled great distances to attend as if on summer vacation, their tents dotting the valley floor, many of them gawkers, but as many others sincerely moved by the call to conversion. Converts by the hundreds, from leading citizens to slaves, waved their arms to heaven, jerked, shouted, and rolled on the ground like hoops. Some religious enthusiasts fell stupefied into days long comas, others barked for hours like dogs, causing wonderment or evoking derision, but in either case capturing the imagination of thousands at week-long camp meetings that vitalized American religion on the sin-riddled frontier. Black Christians participated alongside whites; women and children testified. One anecdote featuring a child preacher sums up the leveling, elevating spirit of Pentecostal revivalism. After testifying eloquently, dazzling bystanders by her Christian fluency, a little seven year old frontier girl lay her head down on the shoulder of the man who was holding her up to preach. When she closed her eyes, exhausted by her stirring efforts, one sympathetic observer suggested that the poor thing be put to bed. She opened and flashed her eyes in anger. "Don't call me poor," she cried out with absolute conviction, "for Christ is my brother, God is my father, and I have a kingdom to inherit, and therefore do not call me poor, for I am rich in the blood of the lamb."
These were by no means prim affairs, spiritually or otherwise. To supplement the Holy Spirit, intoxicating spirits were available in abundance. Irreverent commentators speculated that more souls were conceived than converted in the ecstasy of the moment. But converts there were aplenty, and a surge of Christian enthusiasm uplifted the American West. Baptists, Methodists, and Scots Presbyterians flocked to each other's revivals, with the churches that were least jealous of their theological prerogatives proving most successful in attracting adherents to their folds. "We could not, many of us, conjugate a verb or parse a sentence and murdered the king's English almost every lick," one evangelist cheerfully confessed, "but there was a Divine unction attended the word preached."
The Right Wing of the Second Great Awakening is personified by Congregational pastor Lyman Beecher, best remembered as a father. Harriet Beecher Stowe grew up to write Uncle Tom's Cabin and Henry Ward Beecher became the 19th century's most charismatic liberal preacher. Lyman Beecher at first was crushed when the Congregational Standing Order was disestablished by popular vote in 1818, bringing religious freedom to Connecticut. His son Charles would never forget the "perfect wail" that pierced the Beecher household upon word of God's crushing defeat at the polls. He recalled "seeing Father the day after the election, sitting on one of the old-fashioned rush-bottomed kitchen chairs, his head drooping on his heart, and his arms handing down." "'Father,' said I, Ôwhat are you thinking of?' He answered solemnly, ÔThe Church of God.'" "It was as dark a day as ever I saw," Lyman Beecher reported years later. "The odium thrown upon the ministry was inconceivable. The injury done the cause of Christ, as we then supposed, was irreparable." Soon Lyman Beecher had completely changed his mind, perceiving a hidden blessing in what seemed at first blush nothing less than a catastrophe. Disestablishment was "the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut," he now believed. "Before the change, our people thought they should be destroyed if the law should be taken away from them," he said. "But the effect, when it did come, was just the reverse of the expectation." Without government props to support their every need, the Congregationalist clergy were "thrown on God and on ourselves, and this created that moral coercion which makes men work. Before we had been standing on what our fathers had done, but now we were obliged to develop all our energy." In short, a static church became dynamic.
In the Second Great Awakening, reconstructed Puritan and newfangled Christian democrat alike were liberated by the establishment's failure to retain the government as a religious fief to its theology. Democratic Christian evangelists prospered in a free religious market; and, the learned clergy, liberated by failure from their obsession with presidential infidelity and the accursed secularity of the Constitutional, were able to redirect their political energies to spiritual ends. By 1827, the logic of populist Christianity had turned Lyman Beecher's thinking upside down. Not only must "political power" rest in the hands of the people," he now said, but "the rights of conscience" must also "be restored to man," with church and government alike no longer dictating "what men shall believe and in what manner they shall worship God." About the old established church, he issued a relieved and telling post mortem: "[Christianity] has survived the deadly embrace of establishments nominally Christian." The secret was simple. When people began freely supporting the church, the church and the people's faith alike grew stronger. From his populist pulpit, Beecher sounded very much like Thomas Jefferson. "The progress of truth will be without resistance," he said, as long as the nation's leaders remain "impartial" and exempt themselves from "sectarian zeal," adding that statesmen needn't "profess religion or afford evidence of piety." To ban good people from government simply because they were not Christian was the "mistake of our pious fathers," Beecher conceded, who thereby were guilty of "obliterating the line between church and world and destroying the channels through which God's moral government is brought to mankind."
By 1835, when the Second Great Awakening had run its course, twice as many Americans numbered themselves as church members. Though the figures were still small (moving from five to ten per cent of the population since 1800), like an iceberg most of the active Christian populace was hidden beneath the surface of church rolls. No matter how one reckons the actual percentage of active American Christians, the number doubled over the first third of the century, all during a time when direct government support of religion fell under attack and then finally disappeared.
So what about the Third Great Awakening. To begin with—you may classify this in the "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" department—it happened already, decades ago. Between about 1890 and 1920, the social gospel leveled its liberating, egalitarian gospel against big business, attacking corruption and demanding government reform on behalf of the poor. In the Third Great Awakening, fearless Christian prophets tackled the political establishment, pressing anti-trust legislation, advocating the rights of workers, and calling for Christian love to supplant the love of mammon.
So there's your nickel tour. Let me close with a few thoughts. First, Great Awakenings Save Souls they don't Damn them. Second, far from being manipulated to serve the agenda of state authority, they arise in rebellion against that same authority. The last thing a dynamic movement would think of doing is to cozy up to a static establishment.
Speaking more directly to the drift of President Bush's claim, it should go without saying, by the President or anyone one else, that Christians are anti-terrorist. So are the overwhelming majority of Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews. To suggest that Christianity is on the rise because Islamic Fascist terrorists have frightened the bejesus out of America, driving Christians by the drove into God's embrace is, politely put, a blasphemy. Being anti-terrorist no more suggests that someone is therefore likely to convert to Christ than being pro-terrorist proves he must be a Muslim. Finally, apart from being unhinged from anything remotely approximating history, our leaders happy discovery of a Third Great Awakening can only add fuel to the already burning impression that the United States has launched on a Holy War against Islam. Our leaders forget the first law of history at their own and the world's peril: Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them.
In sum, even as Great Awakenings are dynamic, anti-authoritarian and liberating, another of history’s lessons can be spelled out in five simple words: Holy Wars are never holy.