perfidy

Buckethead, the rabbi makes an interesting point. However, as an historian I am duty-bound to make spurious predictions about the future based on my understanding of the past. Here goes.

I doubt this film will spark a Third Great Awakening in the USA, because the first two were so profound, and happened under profoundly different circumstances.

The First Great Awakening was a rediscovery of the populist side of Puritanism among New Englanders in the 1730s and 1740s. As such, it was a response to a great many social forces: the solidification of the relationship urban coast versus the rural interior; the decline of Puritan elders as the moral and political leaders of the region; changing economic patterns, etc.Times were changing, and changing rapidly, and what with the poverty, the Indian raids, and the vestiges of Puritan guilt, a return to fervor was called for.

Characterized by such people as Jonathan Edwards, the FGA featured a "return" to total fire-and-brimstone preaching, a Manichean worldview, and a reassertion of the inner-light doctrine that made Puritanism so troublesome to begin with.

The FGA was a regional phenomenon, and probably gets more play than it deserves. Its main effects were to finally kill of Puritanism for good, and to heighten the sense of community, of [em]unity[/em] among New Englanders as distinct from the Tory asswipes calling the shots over in London.

The FGA is pretty much irrelevant today. Why? 1) it took place in an essentially pre-modern, pre-rational context, and drew on social forces that have largely subsided today, or at least gone underground. 2) it was an attempt to re-establish orthodoxy, something the country no longer has. It did backfire, however, and individual congregations pursued their own visions of hellfire rather than listen to the wisdom of the past. 3) It was, as I said, regional in nature. New England, as much as it likes to think otherwise, is not the USA. I suspect that lingering regional bias among the great historians of the 20th century is what makes the FGA such a big deal in the history books. That, and the fact that there was a second one.

The Second Great Awakening is far more to the point. Occurring roughly between 1820 and 1840, it was even more than the FGA a response to social change. The epicenter of the SGA was the Erie Canal region of New York State, from Syracuse to Albany. Why? Because of what the Erie Canal represented.

The Erie Canal was the first great national infrastructure project undertaken by the USA (building a navy notwithstanding), and it was built in response to the need for a water route connecting the Mississippi river/Great Lakes/Great Planes regions to the international ports of the East Coast. Hence, it was a great aid to the budding capital markets and private ventures of New York, Chicago, Cleveland, etc. Historians speak of a "market revolution" that took place around this time, and it's right that they do. The modern factory system had taken firm root in the North by 1820, and in the decades that followed, society's shape changed. Gone were the quasi-closed household economies of Thomas Jefferson's imagination, and in their place was an increasingly commercial population featuring an increasingly mobile class of young men and women. Women, especially, left their homes in huge numbers to work in factories to support their folks back home (Hm! Internal economic migration!). These changes put immense pressure on the traditions, assumptions, laws, and arrangements that made up the social order. Everything was changing, and nothing was secure.

Concomitant with the market revolution was the rise of "sentimental" literature and art, which put great emphasis upon the emotions, and which put the onus of comprehension/compassion onto the reader. Also making the scene was a new vogue for science, classification, and rationalization that prefigured the Victorian mindset of fifty years later.

Therefore, the time was ripe for high weirdness.

It is no coincidence the hundreds of sects that came into being during the Second Great Awakening were heavily concentrated in the towns along the Erie Canal. It is also unsurprising that most of them relied on an "inner-light" Christianity far beyond anything the Puritans had ever concieved. The typical conversion testimonial from the era has a person wander into the woods in order to commune with God in his natural setting (erm... nature), upon which time he/she feels great joy and relief, and recieves the words of God direct to his or her brain. Then they go and convert their friends. The experience is reminiscent of the "dying child" testimonials of the late 18th century, and is therefore a descendent of sorts of the Puritan conversion experience, but much changed to suit the times.

There's a large body of scholarship tracing the connections between social dislocation, capitalism, the rise of the middle class, sentimental literature, science, and the Second Great Awakening that I don't really want to bore you with here. Suffice to say that the working theories are pretty darn solid.

So:
The First Great Awakening was an attempt to revisit the past. The Second Great Awakening was an attempt to embrace and ward off the scary, scary future, and lend structure to an incomprehensible world.

Although the culture wars are heating up again, I just don't see in today's world the immense social pressures and wild changes that led to the Second, or even the First Awakenings. The nation is too scattered and diverse, for one thing. Also, the aftermath of the Second Awakening is still playing out-- Protestantism was then and is now fervently evangelical and prone to splitting at the drop of a hat, which makes the idea of a unified awakening to faith somewhat remote.

In short, seeing a Third Great Awakening in the works is in my opinion a bit much. Certainly the times we are in will result in a large number of people consulting their consciences, and undoubedly some or many of them will turn to a Church for support or validation. Heck, millions of people might.

But, hellbound running dog of secular humanism that I am, I just don't think the coming storm will be very big.

What do you think would be necessary, in terms of social change, to ignite a TGA? We have plenty going on in terms of high wierdness right now, in several categories. Of course, you have the war on terror, but that isn't tooo different from the angst of the cold war, and we're used to that.

The pace of change is famously accelerating. But we're right around the corner from some truly world-historical changes. Biotech, computer/surveillance/privacy issues, nanotech, decentralized ecconomies, information overload, etc. I think that the sense that these changes are on the verge of being overwhelming is growing. When we start becoming able to change the nature of human nature through various types of technology, I think that could apply the kind of social pressure that you describe for the SGA.

Plus, you have immigration and its concommittant effects on the native born and their overall economic and cultural effects, the death of high art and the explosion of commercial art, the rapid growth of fundamentalist sects (40%!), the death of industrial age economic modes and the growth of their information age successors, along with the heating up of the culture wars that you mentioned.

That's a lot of change and potential change in a nation that for a number of reasons (cold war, largely) was forced to remain within one mode of thinking of itself for a long time. That stasis died, and Americans as a whole are having to reinvent a concept for the nation in a world gone wiggy.

A TGA is at least one potential response. (and of course, it wouldn't be universal anymore than the first two, but - it could have a big effect on everything around it.)

IN order:
I don't know what would be necessary, exactly.

The pace of change is accelerating, but try to imagine what it was like to be around for the birth of industrial capitalism itself. The changes that force wrought on the very bedrock of traditional society (family and its place in the world, the role of church, community, etc.) were profound and deep. The inner effects of the biotech revolution are more likely to involve questions like "what is human?" that I'm not sure will reverberate the same way.

Dude, per capita immigration numbers now are NOTHING compared to during the 2GA. High art didn't matter a BIT to the people converted in either the 1GA or the 2GA, and the 2GA was a child of commercial art (popular "sentimental" novels-- practically million-selling potboilers- date from 1790 on).

I'm not convinced that the "death of industrial age economic modes and the growth of their information age successors" is clear enough to put a finger on. At the regional level, this is a factor in people's thinking, but I think you are sophisticating the issue too much.

I will grant you that the "world gone wiggy" problem is a big one, and a likely source of a 3GA. But my gut says "no."

Finally, the point I find most persuasive: the rampant growth of fundamentalist churches, especially among the young. Here we may be on to something. But I honestly don't know enough about what they're preaching to speak to what needs they may be addressing. (I write here as an historian, not some omniscient-pretending asshole).

Of course, I have two caveats. First, I'm almost always wrong about things like this. Second, if my time in the music industry taught me anything, it's that I have NO FRICKING IDEA what "mainstream" America wants. NONE. So in reality we may expect a new Great Awakening within the decade.

Indeed. It seems that much of the opposition to this movie has been overwrought, and coming from people who have not seen the movie.

Well, they did get good lessons from the yahoos who caused the same ruckus over Last Temptation.