The New Age of Reason

Is the Fourth Great Awakening finally coming to a close?

Ronald Bailey from the April 2008 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

First the Moral Majority and then Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition launched political crusades against abortion, premarital sex, explicit entertainment, sex education, drug use, and homosexuality, all in the name of promoting traditional family values. For the first time since the 1920s, even evolution became a live political issue. Among other things, “traditional family values” meant restoring the authority of the husband in the family, because, as Falwell said, quoting Ephesians, “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” Falwell blamed women’s lib on a “mi­nority core of women who were once bored with life, whose real problems are spiritual problems.” He added that “many women have never accepted their God-given roles.”

As in previous awakenings, concerns about sexuality were paramount. In the 1980s, Falwell and evangelical leader Donald Wildmon campaigned against the “distributors” of pornography, by which they meant ordinary stores with magazine racks. Responding to the anti-porn crusade, the Reagan administration created the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1985. The commission concluded that smut contributed to sexual violence and discrimination against women, and it sent letters to 12 chains of drug, grocery, and convenience stores threatening to list them as “distributors of pornography.” Subsequently, thousands of outlets yanked Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves. Some frightened stores even dropped Cosmopolitan and the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

The crusades were firmly bipartisan. In 1985 Tipper Gore, wife of Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), and Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, founded the Parents Music Resource Center to attack rock music lyrics. At a 1985 Senate hearing, Baker testified, “The proliferation of songs glorifying rape, sadomasochism, incest, the occult, and suicide by a growing number of bands illustrates this escalating trend that is alarming.” In 1986 the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart joined the anti-rock crusade, declaring that music magazines were “pornography, pure and simple. They’re more dangerous than Hustler and Playboy.” In response to Swaggart, Wal-Mart pulled 32 rock and pop publications from its stores, including Rolling Stone, Creem, and Tiger Beat.

As gays began demanding greater acceptance, Falwell thundered, “If homosexuality is deemed normal, how long will it be before rape, adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, and incest are labeled normal?” In 1981 he persuaded Congress to overturn a District of Columbia ordinance that would have decriminalized sodomy. In 1986, the same year a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans considered homosexuality a sin, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick. Falwell crowed that the Supreme Court “has issued a clear statement that perverted moral behavior is not accepted practice in this country.”

Unlike their fundamentalist forebears, the evangelical crusaders of the Fourth Great Awakening have not demanded that the government leave them alone; they want to use government for their own ends. As Bill Mc­­Cartney, founder of the Christian men’s organization the Promise Keepers, explained in 1997, “Social problems are moral problems, which ultimately have a spiritual cause.” This inverts the Social Gospel conviction that poverty, slums, and ignorance prevent people from leading
Christian lives. On this view it is impossible to solve social problems without embracing spiritual reform first. So the followers of the Fourth Awakening are enthusiastic supporters of faith-based tax-funded social programs. Although Congress has never approved these programs, President George W. Bush issued an executive order in 2001 to create the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In 2005 it distributed $2.1 billion to support religious efforts, about 11 percent of all federal community grants.

The election of the “compassionate conservative” Bush in 2000 was the high water mark in the reform phase of the Fourth Great Awakening. The Bush administration embraced abstinence-only sex education in public schools and appointed evangelically motivated advisers to the Food and Drug Administration, where they opposed the agency’s approval of the abortion pill RU-486 and the over-the-counter sale of the emergency contraceptive Plan B. Asked if intelligent design should be taught in public schools, Bush answered that “both sides” ought to be presented. Bush also supports a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to two people of the opposite sex. And the president’s condemnation of foreign “evildoers” surely is informed by his Christian faith. (It wasn’t the first time the awakening had an impact on international affairs. Many evangelicals interpreted the rise of the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies indicating the impending return of Jesus and his thousand-year reign of peace. Thus it became “God’s foreign policy” that the U.S. should back Israel.)

But just as each of the previous awakenings cycled through revival, reform, and resistance, there is evidence that the resistance phase to the Fourth Great Awakening is now under way.

The Beginning of the End?
Awakenings don’t end with a bang. Their conclusions begin with nearly imperceptible political shifts signaling a political realignment.

One bellwether event was the tragic case of Terry Schiavo, a brain-dead Florida woman attached to a feeding tube. Her husband wanted to let her die, and her parents did not; keeping her alive had become a rallying point for the religious right. According to a leaked strategy memo written by a senior staffer for Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), congressional Republicans thought the case would be “a great political issue” because “the pro-life base will be excited” by it. Republican legislators and President Bush rushed back to Washington on Palm Sunday in 2005 to pass a law preventing the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. As the courts promptly ruled that the tube could be removed anyway, polls showed Americans disapproved of Washington’s intervention by almost 2 to 1.

Nationally, animus toward gays is fading. In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled its 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick and found sodomy laws unconstitutional. A 2003 Harris Interactive poll found that 74 percent of Americans favored the Court’s decision. The same poll also found Americans opposed state laws regulating private, sexual relations between opposite-sex married couples (87 percent) and same-sex domestic partners (82 percent).

Gay marriage is still unpopular, but the trend is moving away from the fierce intolerance of the early Fourth Awakening. Since 1996 the Gallup Poll has asked Americans, “Do you think marriages between homosexuals should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?” In 1996 only 27 percent of Americans approved of same-sex marriages. By May 2007, 46 percent did, and 62 percent of those under age 35 favored them. Most state ballot measures to ban gay marriage still pass, but in 2006, for the first time, one failed, and the ones that succeeded did so by much narrower margins.

The drug war’s moralistic march into private life may also be slowing down: Since 1996, a dozen states have passed legislation approving the use of medical marijuana, and polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans favor such measures.

Americans now spend an estimated $90 billion a year on gambling, despite myriad prohibitions. And even as evangelicals rail against it, pornography has become widely available and highly profitable, with an estimated $13 billion in revenues in 2006. Meanwhile, its allegedly corrosive effects on society are hard to discern: Since the early 1990s, divorce rates, rape rates, and domestic violence are all down.

Attempts to restrain biomedical progress in the name of religious values are receding too. In 1998 researchers derived stem cells from five-day-old human embryos, provoking a firestorm of protest from anti-abortion crusaders. But by 2007 a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans favor embryonic stem cell research. Congress has twice voted to expand federal funding for such work.

And the party of moralizers lost the congressional elections of 2006. Many voters, admittedly, were motivated mainly by congressional corruption—the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals—and the increasingly unpopular Iraq war. But in the run-up to the 2008 elections, the evangelical coalition seems even less influential than in 2006. The Christian right is weak and divided, its leaders unable to settle on a favorite candidate. Even after Mike Huckabee emerged as the leading social conservative in the race, he failed to duplicate his stunning upset win in the heavily evangelical Iowa and at press time he was fighting for his political survival against a candidate (John McCain) who famously called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance.” Robertson himself went so far as to endorse former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, despite Giuliani’s three marriages and his pro-choice, pro–gay rights record.

One of the most reliable constituency groups of the Republican Party has been born-again Christians. In 2004, 62 percent of born-agains voted for George Bush. In February, the Christian marketing consultancy, the Barna Group, released a striking poll which found that 40 percent of all born-agains say that if the 2008 election were today they would vote for the Democratic presidential candidate and just 29 percent would choose the Republican candidate. Even more stunning is the shift among self-described evangelicals. In 2004, 85 percent voted for Bush, but now 51 percent are either leaning Democratic or are undecided.

The Other Scenario
Then again, the Fourth Great Awakening might simply be taking a left turn. While the fundamentalists have dominated this awakening for the last quarter century, the intellectual descendants of the Social Gospel movement also have been busy, particularly in the movements for healthy living and environmental reform. Some of these activists have an overtly religious outlook, while others continue the secularization of the Social Gospel that began in the Progressive Era.