American culture rocks back and forth like a pendulum between pragmatic eras and moralistic ones. Sometimes America is a practical country focused on negotiating over interests, policies, and results—concrete things people can horse trade and thereby compromise over. Other times, America is a messianic country obsessed with moral crusades over questions of right and wrong. Sometimes Americans care most about breadbasket issues of stability and prosperity. Other times Americans eagerly sacrifice practical concerns to make America more just and more fair, eager to burn old institutions down in the hope of building better ones from the ashes. Back and forth it goes about once or twice a century. These repeating eruptions of moralism are called great awakenings, and they're one of the most important and least discussed phenomena of American culture and politics.

When the awakening spirit strikes America, it sparks a lightning strike of major reform that affects everything. Americans who once believed the nation's most important task was to uphold good order and provide for everyone's needs suddenly cast off such pragmatic concerns, convinced the nation must be urgently reformed and uplifted. Awakenings trigger great religious revivals. They create bursts of charity and volunteerism. They trigger new interest in spiritualism. Most important, nearly every great cause in American history traces back to an awakening. The abolition of slavery. Women's suffrage. Temperance. Public schooling. The ban of child labor. Antipoverty activism. Anticorruption and good government efforts. Health safety laws. Great awakenings are the hidden driver behind many of the greatest social and cultural reform movements in the history of America. Yet few of us know, or are taught, much about this undisputedly important force running through America's culture and politics. It's a tragedy because we live in an awakening era now, one that has shaken the foundation of the Fifth Party System since the 1960s—and is helping to drive the next realignment to come.

AMERICA'S CYCLE OF GREAT AWAKENINGS

America's great awakenings are wholly uncontroversial textbook history. Many American children learn all about them in school, albeit from a corner of their textbook, tucked in the back, which they study and soon forget. Despite their well-documented importance to the history of America, great awakenings don't really make it into America's national narrative. They're often pigeonholed as simply “religious history” ancillary to the course of national events. America's first three great awakenings did indeed spark important Christian revival movements, ones that transformed the country's religious landscape and brought Christian activists into politics as they swept across the nation. These awakenings were also, however, a great deal more. They were great national moral revivals, ones in which Americans both secular and religious plunged into crusades for reform—a national moral spirit that many Americans naturally channeled through their Christian beliefs. Each time this awakening spirit arose in a new generation, it changed people's priorities. It created new social and political issues. It seeped deeply into every nook of the culture and overwhelmed everything.

The original Great Awakening struck America in the middle of the 1700s and ran through to the American Revolution's dawn. It began when a flood of itinerant preachers like George Whitefield started traveling up and down the colonies spreading a religious revival that directly challenged traditional authority and spread new ideas about the individual's relationship with God. A Second Great Awakening began around the 1820s and ran up through the Civil War. It saw tent revival meetings burn over the landscape, encouraging Christians to reform society to bring about Christ's return and putting fire into a movement to abolish slavery. It helped along the Second Party System's collapse. A Third Great Awakening broke out in the 1880s and ran into the early twentieth century. This one inspired religious reformers, newly drawn back into the church, to reform society according to the ideals of the Social Gospel. They became foot soldiers in the Progressive Movement that fought to, among many other things, ban alcohol, end industrial abuses like child labor, educate poor children through new public schools, extend charity to the poor and to new immigrants crowding into America's booming cities, and grant the vote to women.

In each awakening, Americans who had grown secular and disinterested in spiritual matters suddenly refilled the churches and went on quests for spiritual renewal. Each saw a nationwide revival in enthusiastic religion, particularly among Protestants. These revivals united around a great nondenominational Christian identity and saw religion mix with entertainment and community, whether through itinerant preachers preaching to emotional crowds in fields during the eighteenth century, carnival-like tent revival meetings in the early nineteenth century, or the educational and entertainment chautauqua circuit of the turn-of-the-twentieth century. Each awakening created new religious movements, new religious institutions, and new charitable endeavors, and a corresponding decline in the less-enthusiastic established churches. They also drew some Americans down alternative spiritual paths, inspiring them to search for meaning through beliefs like occultism, transcendentalism, or personal improvement. These religious eruptions, however, were merely the most noticeable part of something greater—national outbursts of crusading moral reform.

With each awakening, a pragmatic America suddenly threw off material obsessions over jobs, opportunity, and security, for questions of morality, spiritual renewal, and reform. In America's pragmatic ages—like the early republic, the Civil War's aftershock, or the 1920s through World War II—Americans wanted stability, peace, and prosperity. During awakenings, they were willing to tear everything down to rebuild something better. From the First Awakening's challenge to traditional authority, to the Second's abolitionists and temperance crusaders, to the Third's progressive reformers, every awakening has sparked significant movements to uplift and improve America. Awakenings are crusading and rowdy eras of powerful reform movements and energetic politics. They're eras of conflict, where compromise becomes impossible over stark and urgent matters of right and wrong. They're eras of turmoil as zealous crusaders burst into the center of the national debate demanding radical change, willing if necessary to see the world burn down. When the awakening spirit washes over America, it seeps into every pore of society, touching not just religion and politics but also culture and entertainment, spilling over everyone and everything.

There's little agreement about why awakenings come and go. Historians have theories to explain each individual awakening—changes in religious theology, changes in the economy, the ideas and campaigns of different people, and so on. Yet there's little consensus around why awakenings happen at all, what causes them to fade, or why they keep coming back again and again. The best explanation is they're simply the result of the inevitable shifts between prosperous and stable eras and harder times. Generations who live through difficult times value peace, prosperity, and strong institutions because they know the wolves of war, economic panic, depression, or the collapse of safety and order are never far from the door. Americans who grow up in stable and comfortable times worry less about how bad things can get, dreaming more about how much better they might be. When they look at stable, sturdy institutions, they don't see bulwarks against danger but imperfect systems locking in injustices and wrongs. As America moves between bad times to good ones, and back again, it leaves the ripples of awakenings in its wake. When danger and chaos loom, awakenings disappear and the culture turns pragmatic. When the danger ends and good times resume, awakenings come roaring back.

Awakenings are wholly separate phenomena from realignments, yet the two powerfully interact. Awakenings supercharge society with moral fervor. They cause people to see politics not in terms of disagreements but in terms of good and evil or right and wrong. They make it harder for people to split the difference or compromise. They also change people's priorities, making issues that weren't important during a party system suddenly the most important questions to resolve. When America is immersed in the spirit of an awakening, Americans charge into crisis with the moral certainty of crusaders, demanding immediate and sweeping changes that rip old alliances down. Although independent forces driven by completely different factors, awakenings inevitably interact with politics, parties, and party systems. America's continual shifting back and forth between a pragmatic culture and a moralistic one is an important part of the story of how party systems come to be and why they then break down.

As the Fifth Party System now prepares to break as America heads into its next realignment, awakening fervor seems poised to play an important role again—because a Fourth Great Awakening is almost certainly already underway.

THE GREAT AWAKENING

People often think of the American colonies as a hotbed of enthusiastic religion. The famous European settlers of New England, after all, were religious pilgrims who fled the Old World due to their zealous and nonconforming brand of Protestant Christianity. When we remember colonial America, we remember the world of the Scarlet Letter, preachers in town hall meetings, and the witch trials of Salem. Yet, by the 1740s, that fervent colonial religion had long since cooled.1 When colonists went to church, reverends read their bored congregations dry and pedantic sermons more like academic lectures on theology.² Most colonists continued to profess religious belief, but that religion now played merely a perfunctory role in their lives. American religion, from the Congregationalist churches in New England to the Church of England further south, and all the other diverse denominations of colonial America scattered among them, had become mainly a formal enterprise of ritual and rote. Amid all this formal religion, however, were the early rumblings of revival. Many colonists yearned for a more meaningful and personal religious message, one not based in cerebral theology but in salvation. A few preachers were already stirring up new religious passion and trigging small passionate revivals, the most famous of which was Jonathan Edwards, author of the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”3 The American colonies were dry tinder waiting for the right torch. Then, in 1739, a young preacher arrived in the colonies from England and he set this timber of revival alight.⁴

While few Americans today have heard of George Whitefield, in the decades before the American Revolution he was without doubt the greatest celebrity of the American colonies. Whitefield first found religion as a poor student at Oxford—a “servitor” who paid for his education in exchange for often humiliating personal service to higher-status students—where he fell in with Charles and John Wesley, who ran an organization they called the “Holy Club.” Believing mankind ought to submit every hour to God, they drew up a strict regime of religious rituals carving out specific time for prayer, Bible study, meetings, and spiritual reflection. Other students, who found it all absurd, labeled them “methodists.”⁵ Whitefield so threw himself into religious devotion and the Holy Club—failing to eat and sleep—he made himself gravely ill. When he recovered, he believed it had been a miracle in which he was spiritually reborn.⁶ As he declared it, it was a “new birth.” After his ordination in the Church of England and graduation from Oxford, and while waiting for a ship to join the Wesleys as missionaries to the then remote American colony of Georgia, Whitefield began preaching locally and something remarkable happened.⁷ Word began to spread about his extraordinary sermons about spiritual rebirth and a conversion experience to God. Crowds started to pack into the churches to hear him. Whitefield wrote that at one of his appearances “people clung onto the rails of the organ-loft, climbed upon [the] roof of the church, and made the church itself so hot with their breath, that the steam would fall from the pillars like drops of rain.”⁸ By the time he left for Georgia, still in his early twenties, Whitefield was famous.

Whitefield spent less than a year as a missionary before returning to England. Back home, his powerful sermons continued to attract attention. And then bigger crowds. Whitefield's sermons were unlike anything anyone had heard. He was a small man with crossed eyes, but his booming voice carried across the fields. He had an actor's skills and expressive voice that the famous actor David Garrick famously said could make a crowd convulse simply by saying the word “Mesopotamia.”9 To accommodate more listeners—and because church officials uncomfortable with his unorthodox message and style closed the doors of their churches to him—Whitefield began preaching outdoors in the open air.¹⁰ He preached to high and low alike, preaching in the prisons and to coal miners outdoors.¹¹ As he preached, Whitefield would shake and cry as his roaring voice told of the joys of salvation and the pains of damnation. His crowds would, like him, experience his religion as a deep emotional and personal experience, and they, like him, would shout out and moan and cry as he preached.¹² The crowds grew to the tens of thousands.¹³ It wasn't just his dramatic and impassionate style. Whitefield offered an astounding message of personal redemption unlike anything anyone had ever heard. Like most of the preachers who followed in his wake, Whitefield was formally a Calvinist who believed in an elect predestined for salvation. Yet his Calvinism was highly unorthodox, emphasizing the possibility of salvation through a conversion experience from God's grace.¹⁴ According to Whitefield, all men and women, rich or poor, were equal in pursuit of salvation because they could all connect directly to God and experience His grace for themselves. It was a direct challenge to privilege, nobility, and authority, leveling social class and rejecting established religious authority as the key to salvation. As Whitefield traveled around England, he stirred up controversy and enthusiastic religious revival everywhere he went.

In 1739, Whitefield made his first tour of the American colonies, sparking a colonywide religious revival.¹⁵ His first trip began in Philadelphia, where Whitefield's remarkable preaching brought out unheard of crowds who clustered to hear him speak. Benjamin Franklin, a deist and not a particularly religious man who nonetheless became one of Whitefield's greatest supporters, wrote this about Whitefield's arrival:

In 1739 arriv'd among us from England the Rev. Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant Preacher. He was at first permitted to preach in some of our Churches; but the Clergy taking a Dislike to him, soon refus'd him their Pulpits and he was oblig'd to preach in the Fields. The Multitudes of all Sects and Denominations that attended his Sermons were enormous and it was matter of Speculation to me who was one of the Number, to observe the extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers, and how much they admir'd and respected him, notwithstanding his common Abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half Beasts and half Devils. It was wonderful to see the Change soon made in the Manners of our Inhabitants; from being thoughtless or indifferent about Religion, it seem'd as if all the World were growing Religious; so that one could not walk thro' the Town in an Evening without Hearing Psalms sung in different Families of every Street.16

Franklin sought to calculate how many actually came out to hear Whitefield. As he wrote, “Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the Curiosity to learn how far he could be heard…. I computed that he might well be heard by more than Thirty Thousand. This reconcil'd me to the Newspaper Accounts of his having preach'd to 25,000 People in the Fields.”¹⁷

As Whitefield traveled across the American colonies north and south, his sermons became great events where tens of thousands gathered to experience his unique message of redemption. He sparked new interest in religion everywhere he went. After Whitefield's first visit to America, an army of similar preachers soon appeared modeling themselves on him bearing similar messages.¹⁸ Like Whitefield, they preached in the open air to passionate crowds, offering a similar message that anyone could experience God and be saved. They, too, preached to rich and poor alike, unwilling to subordinate themselves to the local religious authorities of the communities in which they traveled.¹⁹ In fact, they made little distinction between religious denominations at all, preaching to mixed groups of Congregationalists, Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, and anyone else alike. Established religious authorities or “Old Lights” across the colonies panicked at this outbreak of “enthusiastic” religion among these “New Lights.”²⁰ They didn't like open-air preaching, the emotionalism, or the shaking and sobbing and groaning. They feared the dismissal of their authority and the careless mixing of denomination. They didn't like the social leveling of the Awakening message and loathed the splitting of their churches as the inspired broke away to form their own churches and sects.

The Great Awakening burned for years, with outbreaks hotter at some times and places. Before his death in 1770, Whitefield made seven similar trips to preach in the American colonies, each a major event like a concert tour by a rock star. By the eve of the American Revolution, the Awakening had profoundly transformed colonial culture. American religion was no longer dry and academic but passionate and emotional, putting personal experience and conversion over scripture and hierarchy. The churches refilled with a surge of new attendance. The splintering of churches, new denominations, and pan-denominational preaching inspired for the first time a new spirit of pan-Christian religious tolerance under an umbrella of evangelical identity.21 Enslaved Africans, who previously mainly still followed the religious traditions of their homelands, converted to Christianity in large numbers in response to Awakening preachers who preached to them that all men were equal before God.²² Most important, the Awakening's social leveling and challenge to church authority created a new democratic spirit among the colonists of America.²³

The Great Awakening is usually discussed today as a major religious movement. It was, but it was also more. As the Awakening swept across the colonies, it elevated questions of morality, righteousness, and reform above pragmatic concerns. When Awakening preachers challenged church authorities, leveled social class, and preached about the individual's personal relationships to God, they openly challenged fundamental social structures in the name of righteousness and morality. This assault sent a shiver of social and political activism throughout American society, one that took decades to fade away. Historians still debate the extent to which the Great Awakening brought about the American Revolution. To be sure, many of the revolution's leaders were stridently secular Enlightenment liberals or deists who prized rationalism, rejected religious authority, and embraced overt secularism. Many of the revolution's foot soldiers, however, were deeply religious, and many preachers in the model of Whitefield inspired their flocks to challenge King George's authority from the pulpit just as they had his bishops.24 Most important, the Great Awakening sent a new national spirit swirling about the air, one that shifted the nation's focus from what was wise toward what was right and wrong, moralizing everything.

The Great Awakening inspired a generation of Americans to ponder how they might help make their society better, more fair, and more just. It created a national culture that encouraged public passion and emotion, that encouraged Americans to be more strident and uncompromising against immorality and injustice. The Awakening's open defiance of state-sanctioned bishops and pastors inevitably led to people questioning other traditional authorities, like nobles and kings.²⁵ Perhaps most important, the Awakening imparted to Americans across the colonies the motivation and resolve to risk their safety and livelihoods to fight for what they believed was moral and right. It thereby transformed a political dispute between mother country and its colonies into a moral war in which Britain wasn't just wrong but corrupt and immoral, and the colonies' pursuit of liberty not just beneficial but sacred and just—the sort of fight that could never be negotiated or compromised, only won.²⁶ The American republic, it's fair to say, was forged in the fire of an awakening.

THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENING

In the years after the American Revolution, America settled down into the hard work of building its new republic. By then, the moral fires of the Great Awakening had long burned out. The churches that filled to bursting emptied again. Americans were no longer crusading over utopias and dreams because they had already seized their revolution and won it. People who had just fought a hard and often terrible war now wanted to restore what that revolution cost—stability, order, opportunity, and prosperity—as they built a new nation from scratch.²⁷ America once again became a pragmatic country, one wrapped up in the concerns of building a new nation in hope of peace, prosperity, and stability.²⁸ The spiritual landscape of America thus turned back to something like it had been before the Great Awakening, more dutiful and formal than passionate.

As America moved deeper into the nineteenth century, however, a thirst for meaning and morality started to creep back into the culture, especially among younger Americans who had grown up long after the smoke and fire of revolution had cleared. This rising generation of Americans, having lived their entire lives in the newly stable and prosperous republic, looked at their imperfect society with its flawed institutions, compromises, injustices, and immoralities, and wondered how much better things might become. A few religious revivals broke out around the turn of the nineteenth century in the newly settled hinterlands—what we now call the Midwest and Appalachia—such as the explosive Kentucky camp revivals of preacher James McGready.29 As America headed into the 1820s, similar camp revival meetings began to spring up across rural America as if some great moral bubble suddenly burst. Soon, these revivals broke out everywhere, with epicenters in places like what was then rural western New York state, earning it the name of the “Burned-Over District” because the fire of religious revival had swept through so powerfully and so often there was no fuel left to burn.³⁰ Passionate traveling preachers “rode the circuit” from little town to little town, spreading the revival spirit. These multiday affairs mixed religion, community, and entertainment. Preachers took turns delivering sermons and then everyone would sing hymns. People would gather from all the local homesteads—normally isolated and starved for activity—to socialize, celebrate, and newly embrace their religion.

The religion of the Second Awakening was a lot like the first. Itinerant preachers, many without formal theological qualifications, toured the nation spreading awakening religion.³¹ They embraced an emotional Protestant evangelicalism, shaking and crying out and emphasizing one's personal and emotional connection to God. Listeners sometimes acted out in spasms and ecstasies as they felt this new spiritual connection.³² The revival was again multidenominational,³³ and it again flourished and swelled the ranks of more enthusiastic denominations like the Methodists and Baptists at the expense of more traditional ones like the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. New religious denominations sprang up such as the Latter-day Saints, the Shakers (named because they would shake in moments of religious ecstasy), the Seventh Day Adventists, and the communal and free-love Oneida Community.34 A flurry of organizations like the American Bible Society sprang up, placing themselves above sectarian divisions to serve Christians as one common faith.³⁵ Preachers once again made great efforts to preach to the enslaved in the belief that every soul belonged to God, further spreading Christianity among enslaved Americans. As this national spirit washed over America, others threw themselves into alternative spiritual quests for meaning. The Unitarians transformed from a minor movement into a large, established, powerful church.³⁶ The philosophical and spiritual movement of transcendentalism flourished, seeking to merge rationalism with spirituality and romantic emotionalism.³⁷ Interest in the occult exploded as Americans began to experiment in séances.³⁸

The Second Awakening, however, was also an important theological evolution. While the First Great Awakening was heavily Calvinist in its theology, the Second emphasized perfectionism and millennialism.³⁹ Second Awakening preachers spread the idea across America that if mankind continued to perfect human society to establish God's Kingdom on Earth, they could trigger Christ's return and thousand-year reign. In other words, if Americans transformed America into a nation sufficiently just, good, and moral to serve as God's Kingdom, they could bring about the Second Coming.⁴⁰ Second Awakening Christians therefore believed they had a special duty to create a moral nation through a combination of saving souls, moral citizenship, and political efforts for national reform.⁴¹ Newly energized Christians, eager to earn their place in heaven or bring about the Millennium, threw themselves into charitable projects such as campaigns for education and charitable work in prisons, among the mentally ill, and with the poor, intended to help those in need and morally reform those they believed farthest from God.⁴² They decried the immorality of public figures and the lack of virtue in a party politics fighting over mere offices and ambition—they often found party politics itself inherently immoral.⁴³ Most important, they launched three great crusades for national reform that changed the face of America—the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women's suffrage.

When popular history tells the story of America's road to civil war, it rarely mentions the role of the Second Awakening. It's usually noted that many abolitionists and activists were preachers or devout, but it's then presumed everyone was “just more religious back then.” The religious enthusiasm that bathed America in the decades before the Civil War was in fact new and disruptive, a burst of revival that convinced a new generation of passionate Christians that slavery wasn't just wrong but a moral sin that had to be urgently rooted out to bring about the Millennium.44 The abolition movement that flourished before the Civil War was mainly a religiously driven crusade and outgrowth of the Second Awakening. Most of the critical figures in the abolition movement were either awakening-driven Christians or in some way intertwined in the revival. The abolitionist Charles Grandison Finney, perhaps the most important abolitionist, was the preacher whose religious revivals were most responsible for creating the Burned-Over District in New York.⁴⁵ Abolitionist Lyman Beecher was another major preacher of the revival. His son, preacher Henry Ward Beecher, also became a major figure in the abolition movement from his activism against the Compromise of 1850, his raising funds to purchase freedom for slaves, and his financing weapons and supporting arms for antislavery forces in Bleeding Kansas—the rifles called “Beecher's Bibles” since some supposedly arrived in boxes marked “books.” Beecher's daughter, Harriett Beecher Stowe, wrote the book that helped galvanize opposition to slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin.⁴⁶ William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist (and later women's suffrage) Liberator newspaper, had deep ties to the revival movement and spoke and wrote of the issue through the lens of morality and God. The early antislavery Liberty Party was so overwhelmingly evangelical it was described as “a religious brotherhood.”⁴⁷ The Free Soil Party, too, drew heavily from evangelical support.⁴⁸ John Brown, the abolition warfighter who fought in Bleeding Kansas and led a raid on the federal armory in Harper's Ferry to arm a slave revolt, was a zealous Christian activist.

It was this religious and moral energy that transformed the fight against slavery from one America sought to avoid to one it was now eager to wage. At the height of the Second Great Awakening, over 90 percent of American Protestants had become evangelical, making it the most significant cultural force in the country before the Civil War.49 Nor did the Second Awakening's influence stay only on one side of the fight over slavery. As the abolition cause grew, slavery's defenders increasingly invoked religious arguments in support of slavery as well to fend off the powerful religious arguments against it. Slavery's defenders stopped claiming slavery was simply an unfortunate institution justified by necessity that would eventually fade away; they started making religious arguments that slavery was a positive good and a scripturally sound institution ordained by God.⁵⁰ On both sides, slavery increasingly became an urgent moral battle.

Out of the activism over abolition sprang the other two great moral crusades of nineteenth-century America, temperance and women's suffrage. During the Second Awakening, women in particular flocked to the church, and from there into social activism, often becoming leaders in the movement.⁵¹ Revivalist preachers spread the message that alcohol was a moral evil, which resonated strongly with many women who believed alcohol abuse a serious threat to women and families as working-class men (particularly Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Southern Germany) squandered the little money they had drinking in saloons, coming home to their families late, drunk, and sometimes violent.⁵² Christian women organized to eliminate alcohol from America, not only to morally uplift individuals but also to encourage men to support their wives and children. The abolitionist crusade also attracted a large number of evangelical activists like Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, who built networks, learned to organize politically, and developed a language to articulate the desire for political liberation.⁵³ Women like the Grimke sisters began speaking to mixed groups of men and women in public, sparking a contentious debate within the abolition movement about the propriety of women directly participating in the public arena.⁵⁴ As the influence of women in the abolition movement grew, it eventually began accepting women as more than simply axillaries, with the Anti-Slavery Society accepting women as full members in 1840. It wasn't far for abolitionist women to extend their agenda of demands into more rights for women, most importantly suffrage, with the support of some (although not all), of their awakening and abolition allies.55 In 1848, a group of abolitionist and temperance activists finally made their demands for suffrage at Seneca Falls.⁵⁶ Abolition, temperance, women's suffrage, and awakening religion were thus tied together as related and overlapping movements with overlapping participation, each outgrowths of the same religious awakening. It's no accident the Seneca Falls Convention took place in the heart of the Burned-Over District.⁵⁷

The Second Great Awakening transformed a pragmatic America into a nation of moral crusaders and reformers eager to feed their souls, discover meaning, and transform society. They sincerely believed their religious beliefs, morality, and public action were intricately linked—as Charles Finney argued, “Politics are a part of religion in such a country as this.”⁵⁸ As America became more moralistic and zealous, political debate became more confrontational and heated, and disputes became urgent moral crusades over justice, sin, and righteousness. Political violence in the cause of morality ironically became a new norm, such as the religious abolitionists like John Brown who poured into Kansas in the 1850s to stop the spread of slavery and got caught up in a bloody frontier war. Without question, this national moral fervor was the major force turning slavery from a question America wanted to bury to a battle of moral urgency demanding resolution now. Americans marched into the Civil War on a holy crusade for righteousness, as the Civil War mainstay “Battle Hymn of the Republic” put it, “He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on!”⁵⁹ More than any other influence, the Second Awakening helped tear America's Second Party System down.

THE THIRD GREAT AWAKENING

The Second Awakening died out amid the carnage of America's Civil War. The war ripped America apart, decimated families, and left hundreds of thousands of bodies shredded on the battlefield. Exhausted, many Americans lost their fervor for religion and the nation turned its attention back to practical questions—how to pull a nation back together after it had been so violently severed, and how to restore prosperity in the aftermath of such destruction.60 As America gave up on Reconstruction and entered the new prosperity of the Gilded Age, the nation mainly focused on pragmatic things like making fortunes. Politics was no longer moral but transactional, not a place to change the world but one where political machines sent candidates to bring back spoils. There were no more causes. Graft and corruption flourished.

It wasn't long, however, before the awakening spirit came roaring back, making the practical years of Reconstruction appear a temporary lull as Americans caught their breath. At first, revivalists like Dwight Moody, a Massachusetts preacher who settled in Chicago, began organizing great revivals that looked a lot like the revivals of the Second Awakening. These revivalists preached a similar brand of religion as that of the Second Awakening, with a millennialism that encouraged Americans to do good works for the destitute and championed the great causes the Second Awakening left undone, like temperance.⁶¹ As America moved into the 1880s, however, a new wave of revivalists emerged with an altogether different focus. America was becoming an industrial power, and its rapidly swelling cities brought staggering new social problems that a prior generation of independent farmers couldn't have imagined, such as rampant child labor; overcrowded tenement housing; and poor women, many of them immigrants, working brutal hours in horrific conditions. Focusing on the social problems of the booming cities, these reformers weren't interested in tent revivals. They adopted a new theology about what a good Christian should to do to bring about God's Kingdom on Earth—the Social Gospel.

According to the Social Gospel, the only true way to bring about God's Kingdom on Earth was to re-engineer the social institutions of society so they collectively produced just and moral results.⁶² Social Gospel reformers thereby hoped to engineer away the evils and abuses of nineteenth-century industrialization, ushering in God's Kingdom whether or not they could personally redeem every American. We most closely associate this Social Gospel Christianity with pastor Walter Rauschenbusch and his bestselling 1907 book, Christianity and the Social Crisis,63 but the ideas Rauschenbusch put into words were dominant long before his book.⁶⁴ Social Gospel Christianity was deeply influenced by modernity and the new tools of social science, which it sought to harness to remake America into a more godly nation. With new knowledge from social science, reformers believed they could, through moral social policy, override the natural tendencies of people toward depravity in a fallen world of imperfect souls. They could plan and design a more just and moral society whether or not individuals were themselves just or moral, reversing the ills and evils of the new industrializing world. Social Gospel Christians became a driving force behind the Progressive Movement.

As the Third Awakening gained steam by the end of the nineteenth century, Americans turned back toward religion and the Social Gospel boomed. Energized Christians, many of them middle-class women for whom social activism provided both a social activity and an opportunity to assume leadership in the public square, flooded into cities to take up charitable projects, particularly among the working poor, immigrants, and the mentally ill. They joined forces with more secular reformers caught up in the same national spirit, merging the Social Gospel's desire to usher in God's Kingdom with the drive of secular reformers who wanted to remake America for reasons of good government, decency, and efficiency. A new generation that mainly came of age in prosperous homes amid national stability after the trauma of the Civil War became a new political force, the Progressive Movement.⁶⁵ Whether or not they were caught up in the religious revival, these progressives were all caught up in the same moral revival, one channeling the same national spirit through different means.

The progressive reformers of the Third Awakening built parks in cities so children had healthy green places to play. They promoted the conservation of nature and created the National Parks. They mobilized to pass laws that eliminated child labor, eradicated abusive sweatshops preying on working women and children, imposed maximum work hours, and implemented minimum wages. They won “blue laws” requiring businesses close on Sunday. They created and expanded public schools to give poor and immigrant children access to a modern education. They fought back against fly-by-night schemers harming people with scam products, creating the Food and Drug Administration to ensure contaminants didn't enter the industrial food supply and to eliminate quack remedies from medicine. They pushed antitrust laws to stop Gilded Age anticompetitive behavior like price fixing, which unfairly drove smaller competitors out of business to seize monopoly profits. To break up patronage and machine boss politics, they fought against corruption and graft, pushed parties to pick candidates through primary elections, and passed a constitutional amendment to allow citizens to directly elect their senators to break up political machines. Most notably, they pushed into the mainstream the two great uncompleted crusades of the Second Awakening, temperance and women's suffrage, winning constitutional amendments for both.

The Third Awakening, just like the First and Second, saw a new national enthusiasm for religion and the churches filled once more. More enthusiastic Protestant denominations like the Pentecostals and the Holiness Movement grew in significance.66 New religious denominations sprang up, like Christian Science and the Jehovah's Witnesses; new religious concepts took root, like dispensationalism; and new interest in alternative forms of spiritual exploration such as occult spiritualism flourished once more.⁶⁷ Christian activists founded or greatly expanded institutions like Bible colleges, the YMCA (which grew and took on prominence), and the Salvation Army (which arrived in America from England and flourished). In other ways, however, the Third Awakening was again an evolution. Preachers proclaiming religion to their flocks drove the moral agendas of the First and Second Awakenings. Progressive reformers of the Third quoted social science and reason, with religion now mostly serving as their motivator and support. In place of religious tent revivals, Third Awakening reformers created standing retreats called chautauquas—educational and entertaining gatherings to which people would travel to hear speakers give lectures and tell stories on a mixture of religious messages, politics, entertainment, and comedy, combining cultural improvement with a revival camp meeting.⁶⁸ Enthusiastic Christians entranced by the Social Gospel flooded into missions of charity and reform out of religious and moral duty, but then justified their missions not through scripture but reason and expertise.

The Social Gospel, however, wasn't the only Christian movement of the Third Awakening. As America moved into the twentieth century, an alternative Christian theology also arose, one challenging the Social Gospel as a wrong turn. This vision, personified by the former professional baseball player turned preacher Billy Sunday, believed religion's purpose wasn't restructuring society but saving individual souls. Sunday called himself a “rube” committed to the fiery “old-time religion” as he preached to massive crowds in the old camp-revival style, violently rejecting well-to-do progressives and Social Gospel innovations.69 Sunday supported many progressive reforms—temperance, ending child labor, helping the poor, and women's suffrage, among others—but rejected the idea that Christians had a duty to remake America instead of simply reforming themselves. After a wealthy California businessman published a widely successful set of essays that echoed a similar back-to-basics religious philosophy called The Fundamentals, this alternative movement got a name—fundamentalism.⁷⁰ These fundamentalists emphasized new ideas like biblical inerrancy and fought against the teaching of evolution, inciting the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial.”⁷¹

The spirit of this Third Awakening, however, began to fade as America entered the Jazz Age world of the 1920s. Most of the progressive agenda was now in place, and Americans began turning their attention back to more practical concerns. Then, in 1929, the economy crashed and an economic catastrophe began—the Great Depression—and thoughts of great nationwide moral and social reforms vanished.

THE FOURTH GREAT AWAKENING

Throughout its history, America has repeatedly plunged into these eras of moral reform called awakenings. Each time, these awakenings wrought profound changes to America's parties, its culture, and its politics. Some awakenings supercharged new ideas with manic energy to build new parties better suited to constructing a better future, like the Third Awakening that helped build the Fourth Party System's parties of the Populist and Progressive Era. Other awakenings drove new conflicts that ripped party systems down, such as the moral crusades of the Second Awakening that helped destroy the Whigs and America's Second Party System. American party systems rise and fall through cyclical realignments independent of awakenings. Yet the moral fervor awakenings create when they occur still profoundly affect the course of party systems and realignments. The role awakenings can play in the evolution of party systems is particularly important today, since we're almost certainly living in the middle of America's Fourth Great Awakening.

When America emerged from the Second World War, the country was again mainly secular and pragmatic, concerned with restoring prosperity and stability. Americans were naturally in a pragmatic state of mind. Around the middle of the 1960s, however, something burst and Americans suddenly threw themselves into national projects of moral reform and renewal once more. Across culture and politics, Americans shifted their priorities from pragmatic matters like jobs, labor, and national regulation to moral issues like social equality, environmental purity, personal morality, and abortion. As the baby boom generation, which grew up amid great stability and wealth, came of age, they enthusiastically embraced these new crusades. Some young Americans embraced a new counterculture and joined a New Left, one interested in moral questions like fairness and justice and taking up causes like the end of racial discrimination, the advancement of civil rights, the equal treatment of women, the end of war, and the purification of the natural environment. Others headed back to church, leading to another revival that energized the modern evangelical movement, taking up causes like the defense of traditional morality and culture. A new crusading moral spirit seeped into America's culture, launching a great national culture war.

We're not in the habit of describing our own era as an awakening, but it bears every hallmark of one. With good times restored, a new generation arose dreaming of how much better America might be. A mix of clashing social activists, both secular and religious, rushed into public debate, embarking on crusades to transform America into a more just and moral nation. America began another national era trading a pragmatic politics and culture for one of crusading reform—a Fourth Great Awakening.72 As William McLoughlin, a professor of history and religion who studied great awakenings wrote:

Great awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are the results, not of depressions, wars, or epidemics, but of critical disjunctions in our self-understanding. They are not brief outbursts of mass emotionalism by one group or another but profound cultural transformations affecting all Americans and extending over a generation or more. Awakenings begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state. They eventuate in basic restructurings of our institutions and redefinitions of our social goals.

Great awakenings are not periods of social neurosis (though they begin in times of cultural confusion). They are times of revitalization…. Without them our social order would cease to be dynamic; our culture would wither, fragment, and dissolve in confusion, as many civilizations have done before.⁷³

Like in every awakening, a new generation of reformers uprooted America's political debates, substituting the old pragmatic politics of consensus for fresh moral crusades. The Fourth Great Awakening they launched has burned across American politics ever since.⁷⁴ It's certain to play a key role in the next realignment to come.