A New Great Awakening May Be Nigh

as of this recording, and it's going well. But now that that's done, I can get back to telling you guys all these crazy stories from history that lately have been following themes that I've been concerned with both in and out of grad school, and speaking of my thesis, that is the theme that we're finally getting into with this new set of episodes. Last time was imperialism. The time before that was basically a sort of deeper dive

into the Israeli Palestinian conflict in various corners. But this time we're going to be talking about the phenomenon of American Christianity and American belief itself. Before we get into that, I want to quick give a shout out to my longtime executive producer level supporters on Patreon, John Andre Sather and Mike Maleban, who have been sticking with me all this time, and I cannot tell you, guys how much

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Let's get that average score up a little bit. I think I've pissed off a few people lately seeing where the score is sitting at right now, So let's get up to a four point five, which might be a little low for some people's taste, especially mine. So yes, without further ado, let's get into this episode, which, like I said, has to do with the phenomenon of American Christianity.

A little background. This is adapted from an essay I actually wrote for now unfortunately defunct but not forgotten Areo Magazine under the stewardship of Helen pluck Rose and Ione Italia, who are both still doing great work. Iona over at Couillette, where I occasionally correspond with her and Helen on her own substack. I believe it's called The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain. Great title. So yes, this essay was published

there at the beginning of twenty twenty one. Actually, so some stuff in there might feel a little dated to a certain degree. I can understand that, but I do think it's kind of important for at least for me to look at this because it gets into something that I think has been happening more lately, and I appreciate that, which is the memory of the we could say, the

pandemic years. What I've come to see. And this is where the thesis comes into play, because it's sort of the angle I'm taking is the new and I think enduring Unfortunately in many cases relationship between individuals and institutions thanks largely to the perceived and very real failures of

those institutions. And when you start to think about that relationship, especially the further back in time you go, you start to realize that those institutions might have changed, but that relationship, at least in the United States, remains the same pretty consistently throughout the entire history of I would go so far as to say English colonization. That's basically what my thesis is getting into. You guys will find out more about that as time goes on and I get more

work done on it. But that line of thinking was animating me when I wrote the essay that this is based on what you guys are about to listen to. But in this particular case, we're talking about just the general scope and continuity of American Christianity, or really America's relationship with religion. In general, if the title of this episode has not made it clear, I'm definitely interested in the idea that we might be living through or maybe already have. I mean, it's hard to say what would

be termed one of our great awakenings. There's a bit of dispute on how many great awakenings we've had. We've at the very least had two. I believe we've had four now possibly five. I've heard people making the argument that we've had six already. So there's not a consensus

in academia or otherwise. There's some academics, historians Frank Lambert comes to mind, who completely discount the idea of a great awakening at all and just see it as a sort of post hawk rationalization for religious ecstasy in a way, or a way to sell future revivals, that kind of thing. I don't know where I fall on that yet. I mean, I think that it's safe to say that we've had them. We've had these events, whatever you want to call them

of maybe not ecstasy but religious agitation. I think they've happened multiple times. And well, to put my cards on the table, guys, I mean, I think a lot of you who followed me for a long time. Know that I carry within me not just a pretty deep distrust of organized religion, but even of the religious impulse itself. That's sort of been what has kept me from being

anything other than an atheist most of my life. Honestly, if you guys tuned into the conversation Brendan O'Neil and I had the last episode, you probably remember us talking about that about how the challenge from being an atheist comes from finding wonder in the world. Doesn't mean it's impossible. You of course can, but there is a challenge, and

that challenge is self imposed. I don't think that anyone would be honest if they said they were an atheist but didn't have that kind of challenge, and I can't do anything about that. I know a lot of you listening our believers, and I do respect all of you for it. I wouldn't have said that when I was in my twenties, because, as I said to Brendan when we talked about this, it's because I was in my twenties. So as I've grown up, I've come to appreciate those

who practice religion. So please know that when I'm talking about this kind of stuff, it's not with derision, at least for those who believe this stuff, and especially as I've learned more about our great awakenings, our religious traditions.

Whatever one thinks about religion does nothing to diminish the fact that the people who experience these things, these phenomena, whether they believe they were demonic possession or the possession of the Holy Spirit, whatever you want to call it, they really did believe, at least most of them did, that they were going through these things. And whether, again, whatever you think about that or not, personally, you have

to respect that they actually believed it. You have to respect that their behavior was affected by their belief in these things. And it wasn't necessarily always a bad thing. I would argue a lot of the times it is, and that's sort of the ultimate trade off that one has to think about when thinking about religion, or especially popular religion. So with all of that said, that distrust that I have felled in my life led me to pretty quickly recognize what I believe at least we were seeing,

especially in the summer months of twenty twenty. But I think continuing on and to a certain degree, even continuing on to this very day, but especially during those early years, I basically thought what I was seeing was more of a religious phenomenon than a political one. And there were two things that made me think this. The first, unfortunately I have to describe this because it's an audio medium,

was a photo. It was taken a few blocks from where I grew up, right at the site where George Floyd was killed, where, if people forget, that was a site that had and I think to this day though there's been some dispute about it, as I understand it, at least in Minneapolis, politics is a memorial site, and in those early months, it was something much more intense. It was the site of what only could be described

as a religious revival. And there was a photo of this young woman standing in a tub about to be baptized at the site of what was deemed a second degree murder at the sight of To put a less controversial point, ONYX, I know people like to dispute that

the site where somebody died who shouldn't have died. I mean, if you'll let me editorialize for a moment, that's grotesque, At least to me, It's almost as grotesque as when Nancy Pelosi said to George Floyd in absentia that he sacrificed himself for all of us, which I'm sorry, I don't think George Floyd would have felt that way, never mind the fact that he's not Jesus in every sense of the word. He was not apparently a very good guy. But he shouldn't have died, and he didn't sacrifice himself.

He died unnecessarily. That's it. Anyway, point should be well taken. There. What I'm talking about, am I editorializing aside? It doesn't really matter, like how grotesque it might have or might not have been. What obviously was going on in that photo, a woman being baptized at the site of a national tragedy, is really revealing to what's going on. What we're looking at in that image is a religious right being done through a supposedly secular lens of racial justice. The Christian

Post reported this. Actually they wrote that quote, a number of Christian groups that have been holding revival services at the site where George Floyd died in Minneapolis say that they're seeing many people turn to God in baptisms and miracles,

which apparently are occurring unquote. Now, these images were coming out as I was reading the Masterful Tone of Christian History by Tom Holland, Dominion How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, in which in his final chapters of that book he made the parallels between Christian tradition and what

we now call quote unquote wokeness quite explicit. He had actually written his book a few years before everything that happened in twenty twenty, but the rhetoric was already quite apparent, especially in the vestiges of what the famous or infamous rather Curtis Yarvin calls the cathedral or what I just prefer to call the elite academic to professional class pipeline that has always existed in one form or another. I

don't know. Maybe I'm naive to call it that and not give it a much more ominous name like Jarvin did, but you know whatever. Anyway, these connections that Holland had made were only made clearer in twenty twenty with the tent revival atmosphere of the George Floyd protests, and even the riots to a certain degree being obvious to anyone who knew even a little bit about America's Christian history.

And this is what led me to do some more digging, and what resulted in this essay and now this episode you're about to listen to. So with all that said, let's get into some impossible history.

is by no means over or predetermined to end. Though this may not seem obvious, given that Americans have seemingly never been less religious than they are now. Back in twenty nineteen, the Pew Research Center found that almost a quarter of Americans were unaffiliated with any religion, and that three percent and four percent of them were atheists and agnostics, respectively.

This was up from the fifteen percent reported by the American Religious Identification Survey in two thousand and eight, the one that was touted by Bill Maher and his docu comedy Religious, which was itself already double that of the numbers cited in the nineteen ninety report. The reasons for this decline are many, not least the incredible pace of scientific and technological advancement, which has satisfied many people's desire

for immediate wonder. But the decline was also due to the market increase in beautifully written, oftentimes and generally logically sound works by members of the so called New atheist movement, including such luminaries as the late Christopher Hitchens my favorite, of course, but also figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and of course people forget this amplified by YouTube videos of their debates with religious figures, the

kind of events that would previously have only been available

to ticket holders or viewers of book TV. Some of you listening might not be old enough to remember this, but the late two thousands, one of the most popular things to search for on YouTube was something known as the hitch slap, where you had compilations never longer than ten minutes, because that was the limit back then of how long videos could be of chrispher Hitchin providing hitch slaps where he essentially smacks down rhetorically speaking his opponents

and debates, sometimes about politics but oftentimes about religion because that was just what he was so good at.

to often all her limbs. She can't be sentenced to death, but religious law means she can be raped by the revolutionary guards, and she's not a virgin anymore, then they can kill her. Do what thou wilt shall be. The whole of the law used to be considered the motto of Satanism.

fatuously wicked things when this subject comes up. The suicide bombing community is entirely faith based. The gentle mutilation community is entirely faith based. Slavery is mandated by the Bible. People keep hearing how many abolitionists were Christians, Well, it was about time that they took a stand against it, having mandated it for so long. So it's it's it's

it's not even a tautology. I think to say that that there's a relationship between the human impulse to do evil, to be selfish, to be self centered, to be greedy, and a contrast between that and faith. Because given only faith, mountains can be moved, and millions of people who would never normally acquierce and evil are brought to it straight away and with ease and with self righteousness. There that's my answer to that. And the question did not answer

my challenge. Name an ethical statement made or action performed by a believer in the name of faith that couldn't have been by an infidel, And name if you can, this is easier a wicked action that could only be mandated by faith, And then you'll see how silly your question was.

neo Enlightenment arguments. This had already been clear since at least January sixth of two thousand and two, when the quote unquote spotlight article exposing the widespread rape and abuse of children within the Catholic Church hit the front page of the Boston Globe. It was therefore unsurprising when eight years later Christopher Hitchins defeated former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in a debate over whether religion was a force for good in the world, a loss that Blair himself

actually conceded. So it was clear in the late two thousands and early twenty tens that irreligiosity was growing, and in some ways seems to still be growing, depending on which polls you look at, and many non religious folks become understandably complacent, believing that hey, maybe this whole religious thing, this whole Christian thing, is over. Unfortunately for them, at least, they may be about to face a rude awakening, no

pun intended. Many of the new atheists, including Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, seem to have accepted that religion is probably here to stay, despite declining church attendants and the statistics I referenced earlier. Now, this doesn't mean that the new atheists have given up their fight. However, some of the recent trends in the supposedly secular world have taken on an increasingly religious character, and at least in my view, that shows that growing irreligiosity seems to lead to an

increase in spiritual yearning. You can kind of see this with the number of former atheists public atheists at least, who have turned to Christianity. I'm thinking specifically Ion heir Cili and Neil Ferguson, her husband, the Scottish historian, both have taken to going to church and seeing themselves as cultural Christians. Even Richard Dawkins referred to himself I believe.

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I believe he referred to himself as a cultural Christian at one point, or at least respected, in his words, the Christian origins of the society in which he calls home. So there has been a shift in that sense, but that seems to be more of a political shift. The shift on the ground that I'm talking about is the one that seems to have more to do with what

I just called that sense of spiritual yearning. Well, things don't seem to be going in his favor as much as they used to. Take Jordan Peterson for example, He's had a guru like appeal for a long time with his most dedicated audience, at least who are mostly comprised of young men, to be fair, and his appeal to

them has always had a distinctly religious character. Put aside the fact that he can't admit that he's a Christian, because I starting to suspect, as many have pointed out, he probably isn't He's probably an agnostic, but who's also a Christian apologist? Regardless of that, though many people have claimed, and I would be reasonable to assume, many still claim that he and his book has changed their lives. Who want to jump in a time machine and jump back

to this event. It was a big event at Liberty University, that is Jerry Folwell's university back in twenty nineteen. A young man rushed the stage as Jordan Peterson was speaking. There's video of this and it's striking to watch. The guy says, my name is David, I'm Unwell and I need help. I just wanted to meet you. And then he collapsed in tears.

than he is. They just want to get their lives together, as he likes to say. However large his audience, Peterson alone hardly explains, though, the current spiritual yearning that seems to exist in Western culture, particularly American culture. The other factor here, in my view, is that of social justice part two, a new religion. Despite a founding members claim that the organizers of the now since long disgrace Black

Lives Matter organization are quote unquote trained mark systs. The social justice movement, widely speaking, has a distinctly religious character, as the linguist John mcworder has written. He wrote this back in twenty fifteen, actually for The Daily Beast, but he's written a whole other book about the subject called Woke Racism that you guys might remember. But as he wrote back in twenty fifteen, quote, anti racism is now

a religion. It is inherent to a religion that one is to accept certain suspensions of disbelief, certain questions are not to be asked, or if asked, only politely, and the answer one gets, despite being somewhat half cocked, is to be accepted as doing the job. Over the years, as opposition to the Trump administration, the first Trump administration at least, and support for movements like Black Lives Matter had grown, it became increasingly clear that social justice was

more than just a political phenomenon. I use the term social justice advisedly because it is a very wide term and seems to have more to do with other things than what we were calling anti racism only a few short years ago. It has to do with basically the idea of standing up for the marginalized, whether they want you to or not, and in ways that you see

as correct, whether they agree with you or not. That is how I would at least broadly define what came to be known broadly speaking as social justice or critical social justice. But mcwerder's definition can really be applied to all facets of it. Most recently we were seeing it being applied to the quote unquote gender question or gender affirming question that seemed to pretty much blow up in the faces of those advocates during their hearing at the

Supreme Court. But regardless, it was pretty clear in the late twenty teens and up into the early twenty twenties that this formally simply political phenomenon became something else. And this wasn't just because of the fervor of its adherents. But it also doesn't mean that the movement had no secular power. Observant Christians like Andrew Sullivan have noted similarities between the Devout. We could say of both main factions.

That is, back then the Trump supporters and anti racists, but today we'll just say the pro Trump and anti Trump faction at this point. But he made the comparison between them and cult followers when he wrote the following quote, The need for meaning hasn't gone away. But without Christianity, this yearning looks to politics for satisfaction, and religious impulses, once anchored in and tamed by Christianity, find expression in

various political cults. These political manifestations of religion are new and crude, as all new cults have to be. They haven't been experienced and refined and modeled by millennia of practice and thought. They are evolving in real time, and like almost all new cultish impulses, they demand a total

and immediate commitment to save the world. But, however, fervent the support for Trump, and despite the events of January sixth, twenty twenty one, and despite everything that has been going on with him, both right before he was re elected and after, and in the first now going on eight months of his administration, it really did, at least back then, pale in comparison to the spiritual yearning that suffused the

rhetoric of the Western leftist social justice movements. Many people pointed this out back then, and it is really important to remember that even though today a lot of that stuff seems to be on the back foot just because it's not very popular anymore, and the overstepping that occurred in the pandemic years kind of I think maybe killed it a little bit. It was something that everybody was noticing across the political spectrum, at least those who cast

a critical lie. That's everybody from Jonathan Height to Douglas Murray to Coleman Hughes to hell and Pluck Rose to Josh Zepps to Peter Bagosian to Sam Begee Hall and many many others. Those are just the ones I could think of when I originally got to work on this essay. And now this all makes a lot of sense. After all, as Andrew Sullivan put it, quote, we are a meaning seeking species unquote goes back to what I said in

the intro. I think it might be an innate characteristic of all of us to be looking for something to believe in, but to keep things rooted in the context of the pandemic years, Rudderless twenty somethings at elite colleges and under and unemployed twenty somethings trapped in their homes during a pandemic with nothing but rage filled social media to keep them company might well panic when the lack of meaning in their lives finally hits home. You have

nowhere to run when you're locked down. You can't go to work, and you can't go to the now touted third spaces, gyms, bars, neighborhood hangouts, whatever they are. You can't go to these places to hide from that lack of meaning anymore. So it's going to bring that despair to the forefront of your mind, and you will be looking for any kind of outlet you can. That reality was just starting to set in when George Floyd was

killed and the subsequent consensus of righteous outrage. It must have given this unbelievable rush of purpose to a lot of these people. Now, of course, some people are sympathetic to social justice ideas and committed to reducing racism, but they're also uncritical or unaware of the movement's more clerical

fundamentalist aspects that were obviously present at the time. It's understandable that social justice adherents, especially during COVID, should focus on the unsatisfactory outcomes that persist despite the huge legislative gains made over the course of the twenty century in protecting the rights of disenfranchised populations. But the movement always lacked self criticism, at least meaningful self criticism. They considered struggle sessions a form of self criticism, when really all

that was was a form of social shunning. So the lack of real, meaningful self criticism and its tendency in all of us different permutations, from anti racism to pro trans lobbying to whatever you want to point out, was always linked with totalizing explanations that were more concerned with examining the soul and character of humanity rather than proposing

meaningful reforms. In that it was unmistakably an illiberal force, it being social justice in this case as practiced by advocates in the late twenty teens up into twenty twenty, and even a little bit beyond what that secular aesthetic I guess you could say to a certain degree hid

was the religious zeal behind supposedly secular politics. We can easily see this in the pronouncements of people like the educational theorist Betina Love, who wrote back in twenty twenty that quote, we need therapists who specialize in the healing of teachers and the undoing of whiteness and education unquote.

Some hear echoes of China's cultural revolution or even the Khmer Rouge in proclamations like this one, especially those who seem to just be permanently possessed by the Red scare, even though they weren't even remotely close to being alive when that was last happening. But what I hear is the echoes of Jesus camp.

to clean up your acts. Come up here and get washed, because we can't have phonies in the army of God. If that's you, put your hands up here, whoa baby, wash your hands, Father, We just wash them.

of communication or behavioral manipulation. For some greater, usually metaphysical or spiritual purpose, demands for purity and confession of sin quote unquote, sacred science i e. This theory isn't up for debate, or it's not my job to educate you, or loaded language, and especially the prioritizing of the doctrine over the person, and what Lifton calls quote the dispensing of existence unquote i e. The idea that the individual matters less than where they are placed within this ordering

of the world. Anyone who falls outside the order should heed the words of torturer O'Brien to Winston Smith in nineteen eighty four, you do not exist. That is the best way to explain all of that, that behavior that held so much purchase up to the early twenty twenties. As Tom Slater has written, quote identity politics is in many ways more spiritual than material. Heretics must be ousted, Blasphemies must be scrubbed, past sins must be come to

terms with in some vague, undefined sense unquote. That social justice very clearly became a religion is now, at least in my view, surely beyond doubt. The question of where it would go from twenty twenty is a little less open than it was back then. But again, this stuff hasn't necessarily gone anywhere, so the question still must be asked, where will it go from here? Will it persist or will it fade out? Or will something else entirely occur?

That's an open question. What I suspect, though, is that the endgame will probably not be as simple as a mere fizzling or as dramatic as a complete Balkanization of the United States, though I will admit, given how a lot of things have been going since I first started thinking about this stuff almost really over five years ago,

at this point, those are becoming even more distinct possibilities. Regardless, in order for us to get a clearer picture of how things might turn out, we must look to America's past. That's what I like to do here on history impossible. As Tom Holland wrote in his book Dominion in a country is saturated in Christian assumptions, as the United States, there could be no escaping those assumptions influence, even for those who had imagined that they had.

Having studied the Great Awakening in much more detail since I originally wrote this essay, I can say that Sullivan somewhat overstates the case here, And I don't want to impune any motive because he is a practicing Catholic in comparison to the Protestant tradition is it's very different, but

his overall point is sound. Though the Great Awakening was less about admitting sin because of social pressure to do so akin to a communist struggle set and more because people actually wanted to admit their sins and to be saved. There is a certain synergy between these things, at least

when it comes to the impulse. But in discussing the concept of a great Awakening, it's important for us to point out, like I was saying before, that there have been at least two great Awakenings in US history, though that is also contested in some of the scholarship, but put as broadly and simply as possible, saying that there are two great awakenings in US history is about as much consensus as one can find in American religious history scholarship.

But it's also been argued that there have been more, like I was saying, with the most compelling argument, at least in my view, being that there have been about four periods of time seeming to herald a rise in religiosity, however transient it might be. As the writer Sam McGee hall has pointed outquote America goes through cycles of religious panics unquote end quote, through a series of historical circumstances peculiar to the United States. These periodic religious panics have

over centuries been transformed into an unconscious ritual complex. This is why I tend to believe that we can pretty confidently ascribe four great awakenings to the United States history. The United States has long complex relationship with Christianity. But complex, while also being relatively straightforward, stems from the tensions between its undeniably Christian origins as a colony and its fundamentally secular official foundation in the seventeen seventies. We should look

at it this way. We take the most religious English Christians in a lot of ways of the early seventeenth century, we let them establish a new home in the so called New World, and then when they eventually become a United nation nearly two centuries later, their new society was codified by men who said things like quote, in every country, in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. In the words of the I'll say the most interesting

and compelling founding father, Thomas Jefferson. Now this tension between these two standards, the secular and the religious, created a tug of war between fundamental ideals that only increased, I would argue, at least as the culture of the growing United States became ever more heterogeneous. As mentioned a couple times now, scholars differ to put him mildly as to how many great awakenings that America has had. It really

depends on what you define as an awakening. Religious revivals have occurred throughout American history, beginning with the first Great Awakening in the early eighteenth century, about four decades before the American Revolution, though continuing arguably into the seventeen sixties, but its peak really was between the seventeen thirties and

seventeen forties. Now, officially there was no United States at that time, but there was a growing philosophical undercurrent that would come to characterize its founding, and the Thirteen Colonies were by no means as theologically homogeneous as the society's formed by the Puritan arrivals had originally been up in New England. And it's important to note that even the

Puritan colonists had not been an ideologically harmonious group. There was a lot of division there, which in a lot of ways but not all, but in a lot of ways helps explain what was going on during the Salem Witchcraft Crisis, which we will be talking about in another episode. The First Great Awakening largely began from the work of the revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards, grandson of the Puritan Solomon Stoddard.

There was a lot more to the Great Awakening, the First Grade Awakening at least than Edwards's work, but I think credit is due to him because he was sort of the first major name at the beginning of this period of revival. Other names come up that are far

more significant, including George Whitefield and James Davenport. But those names and those stories are part of a much larger mosaic that I am currently hard at work on for grad school, and I'm hoping I can share all that with you at some point in the hopefully not too distant future. But regardless, back to Edwards, it was in his sermons that ushered in the Northampton Revival of seventeen thirty four to seventeen thirty five, which was arguably the

very beginning of the First Grade Awakening. In those revivals, Edwards began attacking various ideologies, including most importantly Enlightenment ideas, which he regarded as fundamentally incompatible with his own Calvinist interpretation of God as an absolute sovereign who could never be questioned and could only be understood through complete piety

and submission to his will. In other words, no matter what the individual did in life, it was God who would ultimately decide whether or not he could or would be saved. Now, Edwards's hostility towards Enlightenment values so to speak, were not consistent, and they didn't remain consistent throughout his career.

In fact, he used a lot of Enlightenment ideas, especially appeals to rationalism in certain contexts, though at the end of the day he was always deeply devout and very dedicated to the idea that only God would know what to do with someone's soul, so to speak, and that was one major area of consistency, as well as a

distrust of the previously established religious authorities. Now we flash forward to the summer of seventeen forty one, we can see elements of these views crystallized, most clearly in Edwards's sermon his famous Sinners at the hands of an Angry God, in which he proclaimed, among many things, quote, there is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out

of Hell but the mere pleasure of God unquote. This fatalistic approach appealed to many of the New England Colonies's young people, and around one thousand new converts joined Edwards's church early on. But going back to his first Northampton revival, Edwards was emboldened by the growing success of his preaching, so he began to study the process of conversion itself. In his essay A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton,

he highlights the four major steps toward conversion. First, a person develops an interest in Christianity and hopes to avoid damnation by following its creed understandable enough. Then, when it becomes clear that the sinner cannot possibly live up to the standards laid out in the Old Testament, the sinner believes that he has committed what Edwards calls unpardonable sin in quotes. There then the sinner realizes, or as Edwards puts it, he will quote unquote awaken or get woke.

If you will, to the fact that salvation is not impossible but inevitable through Christ's sacrifice. Finally, the sinner, now convert, experiences a new light within himself, and without even being consciously aware that he has been converted at times at least becomes a true servant of God. Now, to put it broadly, Edwards's ideas had profound effects on American colonial society,

not all of them positive. As his revivals and then other revivals spread across to England, it became clear that this path to salvation was not going to end well for everyone who embraced it. Bouts of insanity broke out at some of the more emotionally charged events, usually at the hands of other itinerant preachers, as they were known preachers who did not necessarily stay in one fixed place.

As the name implies, we're talking about the more radicals among the Great Awakening, especially as the seventeen thirties became the seventeen forties and we started seeing people like the Aforemation in George Whitefield and especially James Davenport run around.

The insanity I'm talking about went from simply experiencing swooning effects fainting even and great emotional turmoil, which were all very controversial to straight up people experiencing visions and behaving in very similar ways, at least superficially to the demonic possessions that plagued the town of Salem half a century earlier.

In sixteen ninety two, things got so intense, in particular under the preaching of the figures like James Davenport, that we started to see mass book burnings and explicit calls to reject the authority of even moderate revival preachers like Jonathan Edwards. One can say, at risk of overstating it, this was starting to look a little bit like the

French Revolution's terror years. Things eventually subsided, as they often do during great social upheaval like this, but by Edwards's own account quote unquote, multitudes of congregants were so convinced of their own sinful damnation that they killed themselves. Now there are only two confirmed cases of such suicides, but

some historians have found circumstantial evidence of many more. One even cites the quote unquote suicide craze of the seventeen thirties as a major reason for the initial decline of the First Great Awakening, but it is during the first wave that suggests explanations as to why this awakening occurred

to begin with. Now, my beliefs on this have shifted over time, especially the more I've been studying things like the Salem Witchcraft Crisis and the Great Awakening itself, but I do stand by my original view that one major reason for the growth of the Great Awakening during the seventeen thirties was the decline in church attendance in the early eighteenth century, and that actually does connect to what I've been studying and what I've been sort of discovering.

I'll even be willing to say about the effects of the Salem Witchcraft Crisis, which we will explore in the next episode of this mini series of sorts that we're

doing right now. There was also the influence of Enlightenment rationalism that had alienated a lot of people from going to church, at least among the more educated people of the populace, who would then turn to less pious forms of religious practice such as Unitarianism and deism, though that wouldn't really become as common until later in the eighteenth century.

There's an argument made, and I'm not really sure how many people can actually confirmed this, at least through the scholarship that a lot of people even became outright atheists. But regardless of whether that's true or not, many preachers were starting to believe it, and this incentivized preachers from all over New England to begin their calls for revival,

and at first they only attracted small, localized crowds. Now, some historians have suggested, I would actually say, unfairly to some degree, that the pursuit of increased wealth, especially among the land owning class, distracted the early settlers from usual

forms of piety. And again, the dwindling church attendants may also have been a result of the increasing adomization of spiritual life and the colonies over the previous centuries, since the Quakers, the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, the Baptists and others

all advocated their own paths to salvation. Another factor, in my opinion, was present that I'll be discussing in more detail in another episode, and that is, I'll just say the short version a fundamental mental and ongoing distrust in institutions of power in the colonies, specifically in New England.

But I think a good catalyst that we can't forget happened in seventeen twenty seven when an earthquake struck off the coast of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, literally splitting the ground, shaking the foundations of buildings, and injuring and frightening a

large amount of people. Now, at this time, obviously the scientific causes of earthquakes were still barely understood, but it didn't take long for the clergy to convince many people who were afraid and running to churches in a lot of cases, that this was in fact the act of an angry God. Amid the malaise of a potentially meaningless existence revealed by the destruction and fear created by the earthquake. The locals were literally shaken free of their belief that

they were in control of their lives. In many ways, this would set the template for all great awakenings to come. The second grade Awakening that occurred in the early to mid nineteenth century was similar to the first in many ways, but it had a more recognizably American character. Its messaging was far more populist, though let's not understate how populist in nature a lot of the first grade Awakenings preachers

actually were. Again, this is something I've been studying a lot lately, and hopefully we'll be able to share a lot more with you guys in the future. But for the sake of this story that we're talking about here, it is important to highlight just how populous the second grade Awakening actually was, specifically because much of the lower

classes got involved, as did blacks and women. However, the biggest trend that occurred amid the second grade Awakening was the rise of more fundamentalist and even separatist Christian sects, most of which originated in the region of western New York that came to be known as the Burned Over District. So, in essence, and so the second grade Awakening was more

of an American Great Awakening. The first had largely been confined to the more literate class of colonists, though we shouldn't underplay the role of the poor and of occasionally slaves blacks in this case. There were even some Native Americans who got involved in the first grade Awakening, though that was also a relatively small number. But the point is, in this case, the second grade Awakening was much more

universalist in a lot of ways. The second grade Awakening was also characterized by a broader resentment towards elites, even more so than the first was Its tent preachers were plain spoken, and, as historian Chris Jennings explains in his excellent book Paradise Now, the Story of American Utopianism, they

rejected quote traditional denominational authority unquote. So like Martin Luther's Reformation three centuries earlier, this really was about bringing the Word of God to the people, by the people in a very fundamental, again American way. The most famous of the separationist movements to come into being during the seismic shifts was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, better known as the Mormons. Now, I know this is

somewhat controversial for Mormons to hear. I have no idea if I have Mormon listeners, But I'm speaking from a sociological perspective here when I say that Mormonism began as a cult, especially under its more nefarious leader, Brigham Young. While the Millerites and the Adventists simply took a more hardline stance on Christian teachings, the Mormons managed to subvert the entire Christian theology in a way that hadn't really been seen since the writing of the Qur'an over a

millennium earlier. They gave the Bible a sequel which not only explained supposed mysteries like the origin of Native American tribes across the continent, but also placed America at the center of Christian myth. While the idea of manifest destiny provided a convenient religious justification for America's westward imperialism, Mormonism provided the quote unquote real explanation of America's origins. To put it, perhaps too crudely for some, it was the

nineteenth century's very own sixteen nineteen project. Now, the increasingly disparate movements of the Second Grade Awakening arose for reasons similar to those that led to the first, increasing schisms within pre existing belief systems, declining church attendance, abject human suffering, and a natural disaster, followed by periods of economic uncertainty. In eighteen fifteen, the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history at least occurred in Indonesia, where it seems to often happen,

as we've talked about on this show before. In this case, unlike Kakatoa in the eighteen eighties, the explosion happened at Mount Tambora, and this produced the infamous eighteen sixteen year Without Summer. Almost immediately afterward, economic calamities began to occur one after the other, culminating in the Panic of eighteen thirty seven. As historian Michael Barkoon has observed in his book Crucible of the Millennium, these calamities gave many Americans

quote a special receptivity to Millinerian and utopian appeals. However, there was more to this than simple existential fear. The disenfranchised and enslaved suffered the most, and therefore resented the elites the most. As a result, many of the increases in church attendance during the Second Great Awakening were also due to women converts, who, at least one sources claimed, outnumbered male converts by three to two. Now, historians can't

agree on the reasons for this imbalance. Perhaps the economic insecurity hit harder among women, or perhaps many American women had simply had enough of being treated as if they had no minds of their own and being expected to follow their husband's influence in everything. And indeed, many husbands disapproved of these conversions, seeing them as a threat to

familial stability. It's easy to understand why black slaves are drawn to the religious revivals of the time, especially after the extremely violent and religiously motivated Slave Uprising led by Nat Turner in eighteen thirty one. Some Baptist ministries in states like South Carolina were started by slaves, largely as a way for black people to come together as a community and cope with the hardships of their day to

day existence as slaves. We can really see the Second Great Awakening as the first marriage between Christian devotion and what would come to be known as social justice. It would, by no means be the last. The Third Grade Awakening spanned a much longer period than the first or the

second one. Like those awakenings, the third one focused on devotion to Christ and American identity, but it also incorporated a more explicit and renewed focus of contemporary social and even outright secular issues, or at least secular issues by

today's standards. And I've mentioned this a couple times before, but some historians actually reject the notion outright of a third grade Awakening because of the prominence of these more secular concerns and while there is plenty to argue about the nature of the so called Greade Awakenings in American history, again, this is something that goes well, it goes beyond my pay grade right now, but it's something I intend to explore a little bit with my own academic work and

in future discussions on this subject. I do think it's a bit naive for us to simply discount the possibility that there have been new awakenings just because they took on a more secular character. After all, as the Second Grade Awakening showed us, there is no incompatibility between secular populist impulses and Christian revivalism. In this movement, they often

complemented each other. And as I've sort of alluded to in this and you know, even outright claimed and something I'm getting into with my own research, it wasn't even incompatible. During the first grade Awakening, these things were deeply intertwined, and as we modernized and things became more explicitly secular,

that intertwining just became a little less obvious. During the third grade Awakening, the latest and most dedicated and famous causes among Christians were the abolition of slavery and the eighteen fifties of the eighteen sixties, which we can see in Frederick Douglas's Methodist preachings, and of course the famous or infamous it depending on who you are, John Brown's

fire and brimstone approach. These were parts of this, and then later on we see it in the prohibition of alcohol that culminated in the early nineteen twenties, though the movement to get that done was intertwined with another movement that started a bit before that. By a number of decades, we see that intertwining of the temperance movement as it came to be known, with the early women's suffrage movements, which really were getting their start in the eighteen nineties,

at least in a very recognizable way. I know there's earlier incarnations of it, of course, but I'm talking about

this period of their prominence. In this period of American history, and as in the Second Grade Awakening, there emerged yet more atomized religious groupings that began as cults again, and I know it's a pejorative, but that's the best way to describe them, including spiritualist and occult movements of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, like Thalma and Theosophy, as well as the more seemingly legitimate denominations like the

Jovah's Witnesses and the Christian Science movement. There were also non denominational splinter groups like the Chautauqua movement founded by the Methodists, which prioritize more secular aims, especially involving adult education. All of this religiosity was spurred on by external forces, yet again that placed individuals under greater pressure. The wars of the nineteenth century, like the Mexican American War, but especially the Civil War, those really had an impact as

far as external pressures go. That might be putting in a little mildly, especially in the context of the Civil War. There was also extreme economic hardship due to the First Great Depression, which began in eighteen seventy three, and there was, as we've talked about on this show before, a very stark and always increasing wealth gap that existed between the

rich and the poor. Now to this were even more explicitly political issues going on, including growing distrust in government institutions and a rapid rise in immigration that led to increased labor tensions. Again, this is stuff we talked about in fact in the very first episode of History Impossible,

you might recall. Now, while many Americans turned to secular, populist demagogues like the guy we talked about in that first episode, California's infamous Dennis Kearney, whose racist antics were partially responsible at least for the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty two, many Americans looked to God and to

God's communicators his preachers for salvation. Many of these preachers at the time decried the excesses of the Gilded Age and proclaimed that rich industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were in league with the devil himself. After all, these men who by most metrics I believe still, though that might have changed since I originally wrote this essay, I believe they were still richer than the richest men on earth today, including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos if

you adjust for inflation. Though again that might have changed since then. I'm not quite sure, but they were by every metric wealthier than anybody had ever been before, and clearly had more money than they knew what to do with, though they, in my opinion, at least spent it a bit more wisely than a lot of the billionaires of today,

but that's a whole other conversation. They were very much seen as indicative of secular materialisms, limits, and potential for spiritual perversion, so that was largely why they became very easy targets for a lot of these new religious revivalists.

But things did eventually die down and the world was engulfed in two major conflicts as well as a lot of social and economic upheaval that pretty much made questions of siritual revival somewhat moot or at least pushed into the background, which, as best I can tell, was largely thanks to the rapid change in technological progress and the

sheer violence that was about to unfold. Of course, I'm talking about the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Great Depression, and really just the massive amounts

of a miseration that occurred thanks to them. It's definitely something we can't underestimate, especially when you combine them into one essentially lengthy conflict that was only interrupted by about a fifteen year armistice, which is a very compelling way to interpret the World Wars, as Neil Ferguson, the famous historian, has done in his amazing book that I know I've referenced more than once War of the World, and was thanks to these conflicts that America essentially experienced what many

would see as a spiritual deadening, like I was basically saying, a moment ago, there just had been so much suffering and uncertainty caused not only by those wars, but also by the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, which I've talked about quite a bit on this show, as well as the Great Depression of the nineteen thirties and the uncertain beginnings

the existentially uncertain beginnings of the atomic Age. And yet despite all of that stuff, the future looked very bright, especially if you were much more of a materialistically minded person. The economy was by every metric booming, Technology was improving exponentially, like I was saying, and everyone was buying homes and

having families. They were ushering in the baby boom. Not to diminish anyone's actual faith that they might have had at the time, but at a cultural level, at a broad cultural level, life was really just too good to worry all that much about the wrath of God. But the complacency of the privileged could not the fact that despite geopolitical victories, an economic boom, and a general sense of optimism, there were plenty of Americans that were being

left behind and even held back. It is no coincidence that Martin Luther King Junior was a preacher who took crisis his gospel and as his example. There's a reason why people are still impressed with him to this very day, and a lot of it has to do with his love first, non violent approach, which really was what defined him,

no matter how much revisionists liked to claim otherwise. However, as the past great Awakenings had shown, American religious movements don't necessarily remain purely religious for very long, and the further we go into the timeline of American history, that kind of thing seems to become increasingly true. The social justice inspired spiritual fulfillment that King promised gave way to disillusionment.

After his execution in nineteen sixty eight, what could have begun the fourth grade Awakening was cut short and was soon replaced by a highly secular political radicalism, the likes of which America had not seen for nearly a century. What followed was widespread violence across the United States, especially seen in the domestic terror attacks by groups like the Weathermen and the kidnapping of the heiras Paddy Hearst by

the leftist terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army. Although most of the activism at that time was motivated by opposition to the Vietnam War, which was basically seen as the epitome of rapacious Western imperialism, the broad radical movement increasingly devolved into abject nihilism, resulting in a swathe of drug addicts,

rape victims, and single mothers. To put it crudely, at least many of the casualties of the radical movement of the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies began, in their aimless wanderings to end up in cults, the most famous of which was Jim Jones's People's Temple, which united in

extreme socialist ideology with proclamations from scripture. So the fourth grade Awakening had begun, but thanks to the interruption caused by the threat and I say that in air quotes there created by a figure like Martin Luther King, his influence was cut short in favor of these far more fractious and radical movements that really had nothing to do with Christianity, at least in any meaningful way, and that changed the trajectory of how the Fourth Grade Awakening would manifest.

Thanks largely to the fact that all of these cults, these groups would self destruct, oftentimes in spectacular and in the case of the People's Temple under Jim Jones, horrific fashion. When these cults eventually did self destruct, many people probably felt as if there was nothing left. But in what was to become known as the Bible Belt, preachers like Billy Graham were beginning to make a name for themselves, and movements like Pentecostalism were gaining followers as never before.

They were, in essence, filling the vacuum created by these cults. Raucus displays of speaking in tongues, hysterical weeping in the presence of the Holy Spirit, faith, healing, and even prophecies were making a comeback. After nearly two centuries of seeming absence. The spiritual void that a gripped America for the past

half century was over. That was when the Republican Party took notice, as they were licking their wounds from their humiliation at the hands of the paranoia of Richard Nixon to put it as bluntly and simply as possible, and they used this momentum, helped along by figures like William F. Buckley, to get the evangelical back to Ronald Reagan elected into the presidency in two landslide elections throughout the nineteen eighties.

This standard, actually, they probably lasted a bit longer than people might expect, with the quote unquote go go nineties being more defined again by materialist progressivism and Bill Clinton's neoliberalism and so forth. But in two thousand and five one could hear those echoes from the eighties of that fourth grade awakening, when George W. Bush claimed that God himself had told him to end the tyranny in Iraq.

It may seem hard to imagine that another Christian revival could take place anytime soon after such a brazen display of supposedly pious warmongering, which has arguably given us the new form that the Republican Party has taken in recent years, and given us the populist backlash that was only intensified by things like the financial crisis of two thousand and eight. And yet, as we have seen, America's Christian legacy has a funny way of reasserting itself at the most un expected of time my.

then we saw racial reconcerviation. And many people said, we've never seen what you're doing happened before, and we want to be a part of something that is going to bring a difference. And we prayed, and the Lord said, we come here as often as we can to pray for people, to minister to people, to get them reconciled, first to God and then one to another. And what happened from there is what now we are seeing as a unity revival, where so many people are coming to Christ.

You're getting them baptized in water.

has largely replaced the idea of a dignity culture. I'm not sure if it's totally replaced it yet in the present day, but it's definitely taken on more value, more social capital, to use a five dollars term, and when it comes down to it, as tempting as it is for some people to point to things like Marxism and postmodernism when talking about the idea of a victimhood culture,

it's actually rooted in Christian values. As a great historian Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion Quote, the measure of a man's compassion for the lowly and the suffering comes to be the measure of the loftiness of his soul.

It was this the epochal lesson taught by Jesus' death on the Cross, that Nietzsche had always despised most about Christianity two thousand years on, and the discovery made by Christ's earliest followers that to be a victim might be a source of power could bring out millions onto the streets. Wealth and rank and Trump's America were not the only indicators of status, so too were their opposites against the

preoptic thrust of towers fitted with gold plated lifts. The organizers of the Women's March in twenty seventeen sought to invoke the authority of those who lay at the bottom of the pile. The last were to be the first, and the first were to be the last. Quote, and indeed, as Holland later writes, quote, the retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values.

Quite the contrary, unquote. Holland views America's twenty first century culture war as a quote unquote civil war between Christian factions, while Sam macgee hall argues that quote the outbreak of personally transformative manias like social justice will lead to collective disappointments or tragedies. Quote. In my opinion, Neither of these observations are wrong, and are in fact a far more accurate diagnosis of the so called culture war that seems

to have no end in the twenty first century. The tragedy of Jim Jones's People's Temple, in which, lest we forget, a concern for racial social justice, was weaponized by what turned out to be a drug addled megalomaniac who convinced nearly one thousand people to kill themselves, is evidence enough of what can go wrong when social justice takes on a religious character. But neither Tom Holland nor Sam McGee

hall ask what this means for American Christianity itself. Given America's history of religious revivals, we may indeed be witnessing the opening stages of a new great Awakening, the fifth one by my count at least, which, like its predecessors, could result in an explosion in the numbers of church goers. Now I'm not sure about that. I'm really not sure what the answer is to that, especially because a lot has happened since I originally wrote the essay that this

podcast you're listening to is based on. Since then, I've obviously started studying American religion with a much greater depth than I ever thought I would. But on top of that, I've read a number of books that have actually tackled this very question, books that didn't exist yet. They weren't out it yet, at least when I originally wrote the essay.

John mcwerder put a very fine point on it when he talked about how what we call wokeness is essentially just a religion, not religious or religion adjacent, but a literal religion. I'm not so sure about that. I think he makes a good case, but I think he puts like I used the word there to find a point on it, in a broader, sort of more balanced way

of looking at things. The theologian and history and terry Isabella Burton wrote in her book Strange Rights, New Religions for a Godless World, that what we're looking at right now, or what we have been looking at, is a remixing of religion. She's using my in parlance, of course, and that's a really good way to explain it to a lay audience. But what she's really talking about is the process by which a religion is formed, the remixing of

past beliefs and standards into new ones. Redefinition, or to use the phrasings of those who went through these changes, these convulsions hundreds of years ago. Revivals remix equals revival, at least as far as I'm concerned. In the conclusion of her mostly amazing book, I have some criticisms of it, and maybe one day we'll get into this book in a little more detail, because it is truly one of the best books I've read in a long time, and

every good book has things to criticize, of course. But in her book Strange Rights, Burton writes the following summary that I want to read to you guys at length to help give you an idea of, partly at least where I'm coming from with a lot of this, and perhaps give an idea of where things are going before give you my own take on things. As Burton Rights quo,

we do not live in a godless world. Rather, we live in a profoundly anti institutional one where the proliferation of internet, creative culture, and consumer capitalism have rendered us all simultaneously parishioner, high priest, and deity. America is not secular, but simply spiritually self focused, no less than the rise of Protestantism, which was inseparable from the invention of the

printing press and the spread of mass literacy. This shift is deeply rooted in the technological changes of the twenty first century. Anti institutional institutional self divinization is at heart the natural spirituality of internet and smartphone culture. Much of

the responsibility for that shift belongs to institutions themselves. Traditional religions, traditional political hierarchies, and traditional understandings of society have been unwilling or unable to offer compellingly meaningful account out of the world, provide their members with purpose, foster sustainable communities, or put forth evocative rituals, and in return, young Americans have lost their faith, not simply in the tenets of

a religion, but in civic and social institutions as a whole. More and more Americans, particularly younger Americans, report plummeting levels of trust in both institutions and in other people. A twenty nineteen Pew study, for example, found that nearly three quarters of American adults under thirty believe that people quote just look out for themselves unquote most of the time, seventy one percent so that most people quote would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, unquote.

Among the over sixty fives, these percentages plummet to forty

eight and thirty nine percent, respectively. Young adults are significantly less likely than their elders, too, to say that they trust the military, just sixty nine percent, due compared to ninety one percent of adults age fifty year older, or religious leaders fifty percent versus seventy one, the police sixty seven versus eighty five, or business leaders thirty four percent versus fifty Some of this failure on the part of religious institutions is due in part to the increasing exodus

of people such as queer and gender nonconforming people and feminists, alienated by what they perceive as many organized religions progressive attitudes towards things like sex, gender roles, and family life. Queer people remain among the most unaffiliated of any demographic, with nearly half rejecting organized religion entirely. It is due too, to the litany of now public sexual abuses rampant not only in the Catholic Church, perhaps the most visible example,

but also in numerous evangelical communities. Several evangelical megachurch pastors like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek near Chicago and Andy Savage of High Point Church in Memphis have likewise been brought down in recent years by allegations of sexual abuse. But we should not overlook the no less obvious institutional failures produced by well apathy. The remixed are most likely to come from either unaffiliated homes or from homes in

which religion was taken for granted or rarely discussed. They were more likely to attend church or synagogue pro forma for major holidays like Christmas or Easter or Rashiashana, rather than for any genuine sense of spiritual hunger and curiosity. In this way, traditional organized religion has found itself something

of a catch twenty two. More stringent, spiritually demanding traditions, like say, Christian Evangelicalism or Orthodox Judaism, may be more likely to retain the average member, but they're conversely more likely to alienate those members who are unable to conform

their identities and values to those of the community. Meanwhile, more progressive in liberal traditions such as mainline Protestantism, are often capable of being more welcoming to those on theological margins, but more often than not fail to retain members or fulfill their spiritual needs. Once you are willing to relax some elements of your faith tradition, after all, what is to stop you from seeking something even more specific to

your personal needs, your identity, your situation. Why not create a mix and match religious identity, fusing, for example, Episcopalianism with yoga, taro and polycommunities, or seek communal and spiritual fulfillment outside of organized religion altogether. Yet it's not just formal organized religions that have failed. Civil religions have failed too.

Our civic ideals the modern day inheritance of the classical liberal and capitalist tradition of the neutral public square, of the power of rational self interest to collectively coalesce into societal cohesion, of our fundamental belief that we are at our core rational creatures, all these two seem to have failed us. In the age of Trump, of a renewed passionate populism across the globe, of a resurgent obsession with our biological and ethnic roots, Classical liberalism seems nearly as

outdated as mid century Protestantism. The better angels of our nature seem from this vantage as much a fiction as nepheline, So too does the classical chaotic liberal vision of private morality and forming an ultimately neutral public square, safely secular, free of any ideology except a commitment to human flourishing and freedom. These ostensibly impartial spaces have provided little more than moral vacuums, an empty space for newer, more potent,

more valent, and more compelling cults to flourish. The result has been a cornucopia of anti authoritarian, anti institutional American religious traditions. Some, even most, take liberal autonomy to the extreme. They accept as gospel the idea that there is nothing and nobody more reliable than one's own self, and that there is no ontological good more pressing than the care, cultivation,

and perfection of that existence. Others long for the power and security that institutions once provided, even as they mourned the possibility of any institution being legitimate unquote. I think Burton makes a very good case there for what is going on, what has been going on for many years now, and in essence, where things continue to seem to be going.

shouldn't consider ourselves completely pasted it. As John Macwadur recently wrote, woke is here to stay, as in overly zealous concerns or social justice are probably here to stay, however, regardless of how that manifests, and it seems to be very firmly connected to much more dire and serious geopolitical concerns, namely involving the ongoing Israel Hamas war and what's been coming out of that, as well as other conflicts around the world and conflicts here at home ever since the

beginning of the new Trump administration. But regardless, I don't think it is unreasonable to say that America seems to be undergoing a fundamentally religious and political reorientation, and a lot of it seems to be rooted in exactly what Tara Isabella Burton wrote. There a fundamental distrust, if not

outright disdain of pre existing institutions. And again, if we'll recall that that is exactly the same kind of social forces that animated the previous great Awakenings, from the first in the seventeen thirties and forties all the way to

the fourth in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties. Now, while it's true that the fourth grade Awakening began to take on a pretty singular appearance in terms of its political orientation, with people who identified with the American right filling the void that was left by the nihilistic radicalism of the American left at the time, there's no guarantee

that that's going to be how things shake out this time. Again, the individualism that animates every awakening, because that is in essence what it is, is at its most extreme than it's ever been. That is one way in which I will say that this is a very unique time in American history, and a lot of that has to do,

as Burton explained, with how technology has facilitated that individualism. Now, of course, it's possible that the people quietly retreating from quote unquote wokeness will start to find Jesus, so to speak, and start going to church, and then might start becoming a little more politically uniform just out of sheer exhaustion from all the individualism. That is definitely possible, because again,

that does seem to be the trend. The hyper individualization that occurs during the awakenings themselves does tend to coalesce around particular institutions. That does seem to be the trend. So what happened after the fourth grade Awakening hit in Earnest in the nineteen eighties and it became the realm

of the Republican voter, that could happen again. However, the GOP is currently I mean quietly or loudly, but I think we're really seeing it with all this Jeffrey Epstein stuff, is frantically trying to reorient its public image in a post Trump world. And while they're still clearly on friendly terms with American evangelicals, we no longer see the same sort of unified front that we at least perceived to be there during the George W. Bush administrations or especially

the Ronald Reagan administrations. Frankly, it's now the left that has been expressing more and more interest in matters of the soul, as best I can tell, even though that

interest is refracted through a secular political lens. That was at least how it appeared around twenty twenty through twenty twenty two, it was almost a guarantee that the terminology used by much of the anti racist, intersectional social justice crowd was increasingly spiritual, especially in the wake of George Floyd's death, like I was talking about at the very beginning of this episode, and that surely did have a powerful effect on many of the online keyboard warriors who

had been under lockdown and suffering from relative social isolation for over a year. We're starting to see the after effects of what that's been doing to people. Was captured very powerfully in the recent film Eddington, directed by Arias, which I highly recommend anybody who's interested in seeing a sort of artistic rendition of the craziness that was twenty twenty put on film, I highly recommend you go see that.

And while it doesn't seem to be the case, at least not clearly so, at least not yet, there may be a growing swath of young leftists emerging looking for any way to replicate the online communities in which their views had been incubating during all those years of lockdown.

Meetups won't cut it, and neither will Tinder. Loneliness was already an epidemic long before COVID nineteen hit, and after a year of being socially distanced sometimes longer, depending on the city you lived in, in your own predilections towards distancing loneliness will probably result in a lot of desperation. I think we've already been kind of seeing that, especially among those who strictly adhered to lockdown orders and hesitated to, as they say, touch grass for a bit longer than

others did. We're already kind of seeing some difficulty with readchi adjustment. People are trying to reconnect with a world that no longer exists, and when they realize that, they're going to have to find a new world to create or one that already exists to join. And the only place is that offer relief from social isolation that don't require proactive planning and scheduling, at least not to any

real significant amount are churches. Now, Imagine how attractive churches could be to those who were so isolated and who were largely non religious people who have been going through psychological turmoil both during lockdown and afterward, as they struggle to find a place in the world, in this new world that no longer really resembles the past one, even

though in some ways it does. We're living in a time of seeming unreality for a lot of people, and unreality can only be fixed by something well fixed, and there is nothing more fixed than faith. Faith is also the anchor that helps people break free, not all people, of course, but some people, many people from things like substance abuse and mood disorders, which have both been spiking. Even in the years after the COVID nineteen pandemic waned,

those numbers are still high. Guys now, keeping that in mind, imagine how effective these hypothetical churches or literal churches in a lot of cases, could be to attracting these people if they adopt the language of social justice, which, as we know, is not exactly incompatible with Christian teachings, as evidence by Christianity's history in America. While it seems like there are a lot of churches, I've seen some of them, especially in my hometown, that have quote unquote gone woke.

It's also possible that that will not continue and the woke will start to go Christian. There may be a rise in Christian religiosity, perhaps of a left character in that sense, or maybe the churches will indeed just go woke, though I find it hard to believe that will be able to sustain itself, thanks largely to the fact that there's a lot of people who just want to go to church to connect with God and want nothing to

do with all of this secular stuff. And I get the feeling a number of the people who really signed on to the social justice tenets of the most recent Great Awakening, if it is indeed what it has been, really want anything to do with that stuff anymore. They want certainty, and there's nothing certain about absolutist secular claims that can be disproven with a simple Twitter post or free press article. As we know, the woke are already

spiritually inclined. They are concerned with things like sin and repentance, and if their ideology matures out of the need for crude, performative vengeance, they are concerned with things like redemption. Unfortunately for them, I have not seen that last thing happen, but it's definitely possible that it could. Being angry is exhausting, forgiveness is liberating, at least for a lot of people,

it is. And if that happens, if the path to redemption becomes a virtue among the so called woke, then the transformation will be, in my opinion, complete, and Christianity in America will take on a new aspect, perhaps a new schism if you want to place it in a little more negative context, but it will be a new aspect because it will be meeting needs that we're thought to be able to be satisfied in the secular world, but we're not, because the secular world is, as we know,

full of fallible, unreliable human beings, unfair and inefficient structures and systems, and just a propensity for greed and opportunism. If enough individuals fail to achieve the aims of the social justice left, there will be a further move towards the literally infallible, that is God. However, it's very hard to say whether or not this will come to pass.

This prognostication may well be wrong. We're in the midst of this right now, and you know, my business is history, not necessarily predicting the future, though I do think we can point out some things that seem to be a repeating pattern within the human condition that do seem to be playing out as we speak. As has seemed to be the case, and a lot of people have been pointing this out, at least on more you know, commentariat podcasts,

so to speak. The adage of get woke, go broke has kind of turned out to be true, at least in the sense that a lot of companies do seem to believe that it was probably a mistake to really

lean into all of that woke stuff. This is because of a lot of things, not least of which the changeover of power and the sort of rude awakening that the twenty twenty four election caused with a lot of people, but a lot of Americans, I would say, in general, got really tired of being hectored by the woke elites that pretty much every but he grew to resent many

years ago. At this point, because of that, or at a time when the true believers in social justice, the ones who really loved putting up the black Square during the summer of twenty twenty and many other things that happened, they're now facing with a choice, do they fade away

quietly or do they double down? And once they lack the cultural force to back up their truth claims, which they seem to be lacking or starting to lack, doubling down and sounding like an out of touch has been extremist is going to seem far less attractive than simply

adapting to the new cultural trends. Now, cynics and skeptics like me might then just be proven right, and the whole social justice project might be revealed to be a massive, performative, emotional Ponzi scheme that is making ever fewer people a lot of money while encouraging the rest of us to just distrust and hate each other on the basis of

immutable characteristics. And if this happens, Christianity will remain the domain of the right and the left will continue to search out the latest progressive trends and nothing will really change. That is definitely a possibility that we could be facing

the likelihood of a Christian rebranding of social justice. The completion of our new great Awakening is all the greater if the social justice movement fails, though, because people are highly motivated to avoid cognitive dissonance, and the cognitive dissonance experience by someone who has invested more than a decade of his or her life in the cause of social

justice would be profound. In addition, there already were a lot of incentives to distance oneself from the increasingly corporate side of social justice, and when it became clear that that wasn't a very profitable way to go about things, and companies basically divorce themselves from the mission statement, so to speak, it was a welcome change, I think for

a lot of people. Though we do see some people getting outraged by, you know, Target's lack of a Pride Month recognition, but at the end of the day, most people who are true believers in social justice causes are more than happy to see corporation step out. I mean, after all, the cynical, performative nature of corporate social justice flies in the face of spiritual social justice, and many people hate corporate power as much, if not more, than

they love social justice. In these circles, it's important to remember that all effective activists are opportunistic, keen to grab whatever power and influence that they can get. So many activists unless their funding it's taken from them are not going to relinquish their influence over media and corporate America

out of some vague commitment to principle. There's a lot of these people still deeply embedded within parts of our culture that a lot of folks are underratium when they say that there's been a vibe shift or that wokeness has peaked. These people are still there. Even with the cuts to DEI programs. It's already pretty clear that a split between the corporate and spiritual aspects of the social

justice movement have occurred. Though, because this unholy alliance with capitalism kind of proved the hollowness of most claims towards things like diversity, equity, and inclusion. I originally predicted that this might come about from a subtle cultural shift or a massive economic collapse. I thought that those were possibilities. What I didn't really think about was a massive and very rapid cultural shift. Though I don't think it was

as rapid as it feels like. I think when we look back, we'll see the signs that it really started in earnest in the years leading up to the reelection of Donald Trump. But regardless, it was a massive cultural shift. As I record this. I'm still hearing arguments about the new Sydney Sweeney starring ad for American Apparel, which I just I don't really understand. I just think it's kind of silly and feels like a weird throwback to all

this stuff that I've been talking about. I also did not predict the mass exodus from Twitter after Elon Musk took over, and its own transformation into sort of a health escape of trolls, anti Semites and just overall ghoulish assholes, of which I count myself admittedly, because I'm there and I have a blue check, I'll admit it. But I did predict that there would be an exodus of people from where they normally used to congregate, and that was Twitter.

What I didn't really think about was it was just going to go over to what I didn't even know existed at the time. It might not even have existed at the time, and that is Blue Sky, the other

social media platform. But what I was considering was there could be an exodus from all of these secular technological spaces of these people who were left wanting from the great awakening that was the social justice movement of the twenty tens into the early twenty twenties, and they might realize that there needs to be better met in a place of worship where spiritual and even truly existential meaning

can be married to civic and political concerns. Honestly, all it would take would be one influential, extremely charismatic church pastor who welcome disenchanted social justice warriors into his or her flock. If this started to happen at scale and even straight up turn into a new sort of schism within the American Protestant tradition, the future could well be inhabited by a piously Christian left and a fervently anti

clerical right. It is still very hard for me to imagine the true believers of the MAGA movement being anything other than anti clerical while still claiming to be fervently Christian. At the end of the day, they're the very anti clerical ones these days, is what it feels like. It is also possible that the notion of oppression will continue to become so atomized that the intersection is reduced to the individual, and everyone who calls themselves intersectional will realize

that they've just been anarchists all along. Concerned with absolute individual liberty sovereign citizenship as they are known already, that does seem to be a possibility, But again we're at a point where the future is very uncertain, even though there seem to be trends going in various directions, especially

for what was once the intersectionalist left. Douglas Murray wants Astuteley argued that the big problem with intersectional leftism is the dearth of forgiveness to be found within the movement.

This lack will either lead to widespread despair and even horrible collapse of well being that can go up to and including suicide, because we've already seen that happen, or it could lead to a search for something that will absolve guilty people of the existential sin that they believe they are guilty of because of their whiteness, complicit silence,

or privilege of any kind. In that sense, the woke are true believers in ariginal sin, and if you are a true believer, the only solution to original sin of this kind is the vicarious redemption offered by God's only son, jes.

essay on the fly. So I got kind of a good insight, maybe not that great of an insight, but a decent enough insight into the process that our grand puba Dan Carlin gets into, because as I understand it, that man doesn't do any kind of scripting. He might have a loose amalgamation of notes, but he just goes into the booth and hits record and you know, has some books on hand. And that's essentially what I had to do, especially for the last part of this episode,

and that was well, it was interesting. I mean, it'll be really interesting to see how it comes together in the editing room, so to speak, and it'll be really to see what you guys think of it. I hope

you guys enjoyed that. Before I get going here and we move along and we get to more scholarly pursuits with the next episode, I'm want to give some shout outs to those people who are kind and generous enough to support this show that is History Impossible over on Patreon and substack, though I haven't gotten anybody supporting the show at this level on substack yet, So these people I have nothing but love and appreciation for Zazu, Ben Ben, Bob Downing, Greg Hunter, s So Skip, Achaco, Molly Pan,

John Pisano on a r PJ Raider, Matthew m Rice, Philip Rice, Emily Schmidt, Pierre Vupuni, and of course f you.

show your support. I mean, if you like what I do, you know, a couple of bucks here and there is a very much appreciated But again, like I said in the intro, or like I often say in the intro, at least just spread the word about the show. If you don't have any money to spare, that's usually enough

to just you know, keep things going. We're growing steadily over on substack and on Patreon, but substack seems to be where a lot of people like to go these days, and that is where you're going to find, you know, most of my written work. I mean, I posted on both it and Patreon, but a lot of people, like

I said, seem to like the format. So please consider subscribing if you haven't already, and feel free to send me an email at history Impossible at gmail dot com if you have any feedback you want to give, and stay tuned for the next episode. We have another adaptation from something I wrote at this time for grad school that is actually fitting very well into my work that

I'm doing on my thesis. Like I was saying at the beginning, So please stay tuned for that, and for a number of other conversations that I've recorded and are planning to do. At the very least, we have one coming up. I have to you know, work out some scheduling, you know, questions with some people. But yeah, that's where we're at right now. And stay tuned for a special double feature of the Pop Quiz Show, which is finally

coming back after a very long hiatus. Just thanks to busyness and whatnot, Molly and I got we like spent the time to actually like record a double feature talking about the imperialism episodes that I did, So please stay tuned for that. Everyone has access to that who supports the show at a financial level of five dollars or above. I will let you guys know when that comes out, But until then, and until the next episodes come out, please stay tuned and thank you again for tuning into history.

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