The New Age of Reason

Is the Fourth Great Awakening finally coming to a close?

Ronald Bailey from the April 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Reformers also preached the virtues of bodily purification. The Rev. Sylvester Graham, who in 1830 became the general agent for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, inveighed against “venereal excess.” He claimed that immoderate sexual passion would cause indigestion, headaches, feebleness of circulation, pulmonary consumption, spinal diseases, epilepsy, insanity, early death of offspring, and more. He also claimed that “high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh; and even the excess of aliment; all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs.” To cool people’s sexual passions, the minister proposed a special diet that included two of his own inventions, Graham crackers and bland, whole wheat Graham bread.

The most politically significant reform movement linked to the Second Great Awakening—and the most appealing from a libertarian point of view—was the campaign to abolish slavery. If all men are equal before God, then no man may justifiably own another. By 1838 the American Anti-Slavery Society had grown to 1,350 chapters, with more than 250,000 members. Politically the reform period of the Second Great Awakening climaxed with the Civil War.

Resistance to these crusades rose in the aftermath of the Civil War. Once again, the expanses of the frontier beckoned Americans to leave behind the constraints of family, community, and church. The restless movement westward was complemented by an unprecedented spate of industrial, economic, and population growth. The richest industrialists indulged in showy displays of opulence, provoking Mark Twain to brand the era the Gilded Age.

The Third Awakening
The revival period of the Third Great Awakening began in the 1870s. Crusades by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago drew tens of thousands of worshipers. Moody, sometimes described as the first Christian fundamentalist, preached a literal interpretation of the Bible and rejected any accommodation with the new evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

A theological split gradually opened within the evangelical movement. On one side stood the modernists: mainstream Protestants who no longer believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and who accepted Darwinian evolution. Their New Theology argued that God worked through natural laws and revealed Himself through the progress of history. Moody’s spiritual heirs, calling themselves fundamentalists, rejected the New Theology and asserted that a believer’s personal salvation was ultimately more important than social action. They insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, bodily resurrection, and salvation only through Christ. A series of 12 booklets, titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, set out and defended these principles between 1910 and 1915. The two evangelical groups’ political agendas did not overlap significantly, although there were figures—most notably the three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan—who straddled the divide, combining fundamentalist religious views with a modernist economic agenda.

It was the modernists who dominated the Third Awakening. In his 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel, the Baptist modernist Walter Rauschenbusch warned of “the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it.” We couldn’t end personal sin, Rauschenbusch argued, without ending social sin; collective sin required collective redemption. Equality of opportunity as preached in the First and Second Awakenings was not enough for Third Awakening evangelicals, who called on the government to redistribute wealth. This, they believed, would enable the lower orders to rise above their spiritual poverty and amend their moral faults. Equality of condition became a prerequisite for moral improvement.

The reform stage of the Third Great Awakening flowered in the first two decades of the 20th century, known as the Progressive Era. This period saw both new interventions in the economy and new restrictions on private and public pleasures, from boxing to the movies. Prohibition advanced with breathtaking speed. By 1900 every state required mandatory “temperance education” in public schools. Under pressure from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, the number of dry states increased from three in 1903 to 32 in 1916. The 18th Amendment, which established Prohibition nationally, was ratified in 1919. Many advocates of the Social Gospel were also prominent Progressives. Lyman Abbott, for example, was both the pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church and a confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt.

There was a concurrent surge in concern about hygiene, pure foods, and sexual self-control. The scientific cooking movement trained women in “domestic science,” showing them how to use precise recipes to produce uniform dishes in the home. One of the more prominent pieces of Progressive legislation was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which empowered the federal government to ensure foods and drugs were not adulterated. The authorities also launched campaigns against opium, cocaine, and heroin. A campaign against “self-abuse” had another lasting effect: The Seventh-Day Adventist doctor John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, a bland breakfast cereal intended to suppress the urge to masturbate.

Resistance to the Third Great Awakening took off after World War I. Millions of troops returning from European battlefields wanted more than drudgery on the family farm or factory floor. Women who had flocked to wartime workplaces resisted being consigned again to the dull routines of homemaking. Wider access to new technologies such as automobiles and movies helped push traditional values into the background. The fact that by 1920 more than half of all Americans were living in urban areas also eroded traditional social bonds and hierarchies, since cities have always been refuges for people seeking greater autonomy and self-expression. The 1920s became the era of hot jazz, speakeasies, bathtub gin, and flappers. Novels, movies, and magazine stories became more sexually explicit. While mild by comparison to contemporary American mores, a new sexual freedom flowered.

The Fourth Awakening
After World War II, American economic expansion resumed. Often described as the era of the “organization man,” the 1950s also gave us books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which exalted drugging, drinking, and sexual libertinism. In 1960 the anarchist sociologist Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, highlighted “the disaffection of the growing generation” with “the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc.” The sexy rhythms of rock and roll became popular, and Playboy magazine, founded in 1953, both reflected and amplified a new wave of sexual liberation. The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women much greater control over reproduction, putting them more on a par with men in the workplace. These liberating cultural and technological developments fueled the social and political eruptions of the 1960s and ’70s.

McLoughlin and Fogel both argue that the upheavals of the 1950s and ’60s were the beginning of the Fourth Great Awakening. Writing in 1978, McLoughlin argued that the Beats, the rise of interest in Asian religions such as Zen Buddhism, the growth of environmental consciousness, and the spread of “experimental life-styles” would “produce a new shift in our belief value system, a transformation of our world view that may be the most drastic in our history as a nation.” He even compared rock concerts to old-fashioned revivalist camp meetings.

In hindsight, this reading misinterpreted the turmoil of the period, which is better understood as a continuation of the arc of cultural liberation that began in the 1920s. But while McLoughlin was getting the period wrong, Dean Kelley was getting it right. Kelley, a United Methodist minister and an adviser to the National Council of Churches, presciently and controversially recognized a coming fundamentalist surge in his 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Membership in ecumenically minded mainline Protestant denominations was declining, he noted, while the doctrinal strictness and discipline of conservative denominations were attracting many Americans. Evangelical Protestant affiliation has grown from 17 percent to 20 percent of the American population in the early 1970s to between 25 percent and 28 percent today. Largely outside the purview of liberal intellectuals who were celebrating the counterculture, a social force was incubating that would eventually power the Fourth Great Awakening. These modern evangelicals were the direct descendants of Moody’s fundamentalists.

Proponents of conservative interpretations of Christianity felt themselves under attack by policies aimed at limiting public expressions of religious belief. In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any requirement that prayers and Bible verses be read in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In 1968 the Court declared that a state cannot ban the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. And in 1973 the Court found in Roe v. Wade that women had a constitutionally protected right to privacy that allowed them to end their pregnancies in the first trimester.

Initially most Protestant denominations did not react strongly to Roe, viewing abortion as a “Catholic issue.” In 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution reflecting the “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”

That moderation was not to last. Just six years later, the same group called for “appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.” The shift on abortion was part of a strong negative reaction to what the Southern Baptists saw as countercultural excesses undermining the Christian moral order.

Although McLoughlin dismisses President Jimmy Carter’s neo-evangelicalism as a dead end, Carter’s professed religious faith awakened his fellow evangelicals to the potential for political action. Carter wore his born-again Christianity on his sleeve, declaring that his religious convictions were “the most important thing in my life.” Although it is not much appreciated now, Carter used the abortion issue to mobilize his fellow evangelicals. He declared during the 1976 presidential campaign that “abortion is wrong,” and he signaled his support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal Medicaid funding for abortions. As president he eliminated funding for abortions for women in the military. Carter was no conservative, but he helped America’s 60 million self-described evangelicals find their way out of the political wilderness. He functioned as a Moses pointing his co-religionists to the promised land of political potency, although it would be another man who would lead them there.

Power to the Pulpit
In 1979 the National Association of Evangelicals, representing 60 denominations and 45,000 churches, passed a resolution opposing abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and homosexual rights. When the Democratic platform defended all three in 1980, evangelicals were horrified. That same year, Jerry Falwell, a 44-year-old Baptist preacher, founded the Moral Majority as a vehicle for evangelical Christians to influence national politics. After the 1980 election, Falwell claimed that the Moral Majority had 4 million members and that the organization had helped mobilize more than 10 million evangelical voters. With that election, the religious right made itself essential to the Republican Party’s political fortunes. The Fourth Great Awakening had entered its reform phase.