The New Age of Reason

Is the Fourth Great Awakening finally coming to a close?

Ronald Bailey from the April 2008 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Environmentalism arose as a movement just a few years before the Moral Majority, with an end-of-the-world undercurrent that harked back to the millenarian sects of the Second Great Awakening. Green millenarians do not expect a wrathful God to end the corrupt world in a rain of fire; instead, humanity will die by its own gluttonous, polluting hand.

Such apocalyptic visions were limned in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which predicted massive cancer epidemics as a result of chemical contamination of the environment. Paul Ehrlich asserted in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that in the 1970s “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” And the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth announced the imminent, catastrophic depletion of nonrenewable resources. In the run-up to the first Earth Day in 1970, the ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” The Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Even the staid New York Times editorial page warned of the human species’ “possible extinction.” It wasn’t so far from the evangelists’ fears of a literal Armageddon, embodied in books like Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).

Although all those predictions failed, environmentalism still exhibits millenarian tendencies. Former Vice President Al Gore has warned that man-made global warming is producing a climate crisis that might “make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.” For Gore, global warming is not merely a technical question of how to produce the energy humanity needs without emitting greenhouse gases. It is “a moral issue.”

It is possible that environmental revivalism may supplant the fundamentalist aspect of the Fourth Great Awakening. If so, we may be in for a period in which campaigns for green reform programs dominate American politics. And it’s worth noting that some evangelical churches recently have embraced environmental issues. In 2004 the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an “Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility” affirming that “because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation.” Huckabee, the evangelical candidate, says plainly that he wants to be “a good steward of the earth”—and, to that end, favors an economy-wide “cap-and-trade” system to control greenhouse gases.

The heirs of the Social Gospel have also enthusiastically embraced and promoted modern campaigns for clean living. Contemporary anti-smoking campaigns resemble the old crusades against demon rum, particularly in the willingness to go beyond educational efforts and push draconian government controls. Campaigns against lifestyle diseases are just beginning. In 2006 New York City public health officials began requiring medical labs to report the results of blood sugar tests for all the city’s diabetics directly to the health department. This is the first time that any government has tracked people with a chronic disease. The New York City Department of Health will analyze the data to identify those patients who are not adequately controlling their diabetes. They will then receive letters or phone calls urging them to be more vigilant about their medications, have more frequent checkups, or change their diet. If nagging is not sufficient, more coercive steps may be taken. For example, in a 2004 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Friedan called for “local requirements on food pricing, advertising, content, and labeling; regulations to facilitate physical activity, including point-of-service reminders at elevators and safe, accessible stairwells; tobacco and alcohol taxation and advertising and sales restrictions; and regulations to ensure a minimal level of clinical preventive services.”

Scientifically unfounded fears about the danger of exposure to chemicals have displaced religious anxieties about spiritual impurity with new worries about bodily impurity. (They also have fueled new lawsuits and regulations. Excessive fears about exposure to secondhand smoke, for example, prompted the city of Belmont, California, to forbid smoking in private apartments.) The contemporary cult of the body, with its obsession with diet and exercise and its emphasis on beauty and perfection, has roots in the biblical notion of the body as a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”

Still, it’s not clear these attitudes have seized the public imagination. Despite all of the hullabaloo about environmental issues, for example, polls regularly show that they are at the bottom of most Americans’ concerns. A December 2007 USA Today poll found only 2 percent of Americans saying they would take environmental issues into account when deciding for whom to vote. Every year Gallup asks Americans to identify the most important problem facing the country. In 2007 only 2 percent of respondents mentioned the environment.

Smoking bans are proliferating, although the percentage of Americans who believe second-hand smoke is very harmful has not budged from around 55 percent since 1997, according to various Gallup polls. And while it is true that most Americans favor some restrictions on smoking in public areas, they are against total bans in workplaces, bars, and hotels. In fact, Americans remain largely tolerant of their fellow citizens’ lifestyle choices. A 2003 Gallup poll asked Americans if they respect someone more or less because that person smokes, drinks, or is overweight. Seventy-seven percent said that smoking makes no difference and 83 percent said the same about drinking and being overweight.

Liberated Spaces
Perhaps the best evidence that the evangelical phase of the Fourth Great Awakening is winding down is that large numbers of young Americans are falling away from organized religion, just as the country did in the period between the first two awakenings. In the 1970s, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that between 5 percent and 7 percent of the public declared they were not religiously affiliated. By 2006 that figure had risen to 17 percent. The trend is especially apparent among younger Americans: In 2006 nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Americans in their 20s and almost as many (19 percent) of those in their 30s said they were nonaffiliated.

The Barna Group finds that only 60 percent of 16-to-29-year-olds identify themselves as Christians. By contrast, 77 percent of Americans over age 60 call themselves Christian. That is “a momentous shift,” the firm’s president told the Ventura County Star. “Each generation is becoming increasingly secular.”

Just as movies and the pill enticed people out of the pews, so is modern technology making it harder to impose any single moral vision. In the old days, Roman Catholics could pressure Hollywood to adopt a Production Code decreeing that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Today the means to produce video entertainment are increasingly cheap and the methods of distribution are becoming more and more decentralized. The notion that a book could be banned in Boston—or anywhere with an Internet service provider—is laughable. Social utilities like Facebook and MySpace encourage the proliferation of virtual communities. Virtual worlds like Second Life enable people to privately experiment with different personalities and lifestyles.

Global trade, too, is making it harder to impose any single vision on a society. Attempts to restrict advanced biomedical treatments such as embryonic stem cell transplants will simply shift such activity to more tolerant jurisdictions. The next couple of decades will see the development of biotech and nanotech enhancements that dramatically extend the range of human capabilities. If they are outlawed in one country, more liberal ones will make them available.

In 1908 Clarence Darrow told the Personal Liberty League, “The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men’s business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs.” That has been true for a long time now, but we may finally be heading toward a better world—one where Americans are increasingly willing to live and let live.

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey is the author of Liberation Biology (Prometheus).

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