Mark Schmitt discusses our current Religion Problem–

We are clearly in the middle of one of the great periods of Christian revival in American history, the third or fourth of the “Great Awakenings” in American Protestantism. Each such period has begun with a change in the nature of worship itself, essentially a private phase, and moved onto a public phase where it engaged with the political process. These have been significant moments of progress for this country. The Second Great Awakening led in it public phase to the Abolitionist movement. What some historians consider the Third Great Awakening beginning in the 1890s led to the Social Gospel movement, settlement houses, and the beginnings of the progressive era idea of a public responsibility to ameliorate poverty.

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.

Let’s look at these questions from a different perspective.

Historically, the original Great Awakening was the Axial Age, approximately 800-200 BCE. This was the golden age of the Greek philosophers. Judaism evolved from devotion to a fearful tribal deity and became genuinely monotheistic. The very awesome Mahabharata of Hinduism was composed. The Buddha, Confucius, and the founders of Taoism were children of the Axial Age. All religions and philosophies ever after were built on Axial Age foundations.

Before the Axial Age, religion was all about appeasement of primitive gods. But during the Axial Age mankind awoke to the importance of individual conscience. Compassion and social justice became more important than sacrificial rites.

Fast forward to the Eighteenth Century. This was the great Age of Reason, also called the Enlightenment. Educated men of Europe swept away centuries of old superstition and metaphysics in favor of logic and science. Last week Garry Wills wrote in the New York Times,

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed “a candid world,” as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”

But human civilization waxes and wanes. Remember, between the Axial Age and the Enlightenment fell the Inquisition.

In the late 19th century, during the Third Great Awakening, another movement was born. Fundamentalism was the name given to a Christian movement that grew out of a backlash to modernism and the various Great Awakenings. Karen Armstrong, in her book The Battle for God, documents that similar backlash movements arose in all the great religions, but especially in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Though their dogmas differ, all of the fundamentalisms share much in common:

They are embattled forms of spiturality, which have emerged as a reponse to a perceived crisis. They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself. Fundamentalists do not regard this battle as a conventional political struggle, but experience it as a cosmic war between good and evil. They fear annihilation, and try to fortifytheir beleaguered identity by means of a selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action. Eventually they fight back and attempt to resacralize an increasingly skeptical world. (Armstrong, p. xiii)

Although what Schmitt calls “the current flourishing of religious faith” may seem to have burst upon the scene recently, in fact it’s been growing, and growing more radical, for over a century. Christian fundamentalism in America in part began as a backlash to the progressive era and has been antagonistic to liberal notions of social justice all along. For example, early in the 20th century fundamentalists opposed child labor laws. If parents wanted to send their eight-year-old children to work in factories, it wasn’t the government’s business to interfere.

It is no coincidence that the Bush Administration and its more radical followers want to roll back all progressive programs going back to the McKinley Administration. Our current religious revival is less an Enlightenment than an Unenlightenment.

It is a huge mistake, therefore, to consider today’s right-wing Christianity as a new Great Awakening. If anything, it’s a new Inquisition.

Beware.