Journal Time With Ray Waddle

Driving around the other day, I spotted a halfdozen Christian fish symbols on cars in front of me. There seem to be more than ever. Then I saw a huge "Jesus Loves You" sign at the oil-and-lube station down the street. Never noticed that before. I turned on National Public Radio, which featured the latest analysis on the church-going voters who delivered four more years to a born-again President. Are these trivial impressions - or signs of a new Great Awakening, the next major revival of traditional Christianity in American history? Some observers say we're on the verge of religious renewal, or even in the middle of a spiritual revolution, especially after the fervor and fury of 2004.

A Religion Newswriters Association newsletter calls the possibility of a "Fourth Great Awakening" one of the big questions of the new year. It's not an idle matter. The first three Awakenings in U.S. history had vast political impact beyond a surge in church-going.

The First Great Awakening, roughly 1730-60, established evangelical Christianity as an American style of belief. It fed the colonies' egalitarian spirit, promoted religious toleration (also a lot of church splits) and gave momentum to the American Revolution itself.

The Second Great Awakening, 1800-1830, intensified born-again enthusiasm and energized antislavery sentiment, preparing the way for the Civil War. A lesserknown Third Great Awakening, 1890-1930, brought a Social Gospel message, using the example of Jesus to stir social reform, workers' rights and housing for the poor.

Is a Fourth Awakening upon us? It's possible to find every sort of opinion.

The rise of nondenominational megachurches points to organized spiritual rebirth. Many supporters of President Bush believe he is guided by the providential hand of God, inspiring millions to reclaim the old biblical faith in public life.

On the consumer front, traditional Christians are asserting themselves as a market force as never before, putting religious fiction on the best-seller lists and making The Passion of the Christ movie a box-office phenomenon. The result: Christianity appears to have a higher profile, with more public influence for the conservative evangelical wing, than any time since the 1950s, or perhaps the 1850s. Or is it all a false impression? Is the media merely giving Christians, and religion generally, more coverage than in past decades? The recent rise of conservative media voices - oped columnists, talk radio, Fox News - serves up a viewpoint that had gone undetected, but it's unclear if that proves the existence of a surging new religious fervor.

Probably the best-known case for a rising spiritual tide is made by Nobel economist Robert William Fogel in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (2000). He thinks a Fourth Great Awakening has indeed been gaining steam since 1960. This revival is a reaction against the Social Gospel liberalism of a century ago. It reasserts experiential worship, traditional esteem for the Bible and a vivid belief in personal sin.

Fogel goes further. He contends that all previous Great Awakenings had an inevitable political phase that gave the nation a deeper sense of equality and greater social benefits. He thinks the Fourth Awakening will too: Now in its fifth decade, it is leading the nation in a pro-life, pro-family, anti-tax direction, and awakening more people to issues of spirituality (not just Christianity) and ethics.

Liberals will scoff at this. To them, "pro-family" and "anti-tax" are just code words for a secular Republican agenda, not religion. Others complain that religious intensity has done little to stop widespread tax cheating and fraud in a stressed-out bottomline economy. If statistics are a measurement, it's not easy to make the figures add up to a massive pack-the-pews Awakening. The number of Americans who identify with a religion (now around 80 per cent) declined from 1990 to 2001, according to a national study by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. During the same period, the number of Americans identifying as Christian declined from 86 percent to 77 percent, the study said. The number of people preferring "No Religion" rose from 8 percent to 14 percent.

It will take historians to sort it all out — historians not yet born. Only a century from now will our picture start looking clear. That doesn't much help us, who are smack in the middle of these interesting times and looking for clues. But we ought to raise the question, in Sunday school, newspapers and the public square: What would a real Great Awakening look like today? What should it look like? Until there's an outbreak of the Golden Rule, public decency and peaceful relations abroad, I will keep looking.

Ray Waddle, a writer in Nashville, is author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time (Upper Room Books).