The new age of reason: is the Fourth Great Awakening finally coming to a close?

Reason, April, 2008 by Ronald Bailey

One of the most reliable constituency groups of the Republican Party has been born-again Christians. In 2004, 62 percent of born-agains voted for George Bush. In February, the Christian marketing consultancy, the Barna Group, released a striking poll which found that 40 percent of all born-agains say that if the 2008 election were today they would vote for the Democratic presidential candidate and just 29 percent would choose the Republican candidate. Even more stunning is the shift among self-described evangelicals. In 2004, 85 percent voted for Bush, but now 51 percent are either leaning Democratic or are undecided.

The Other Scenario

Then again, the Fourth Great Awakening might simply be taking a left turn. While the fundamentalists have dominated this awakening for the last quarter century, the intellectual descendants of the Social Gospel movement also have been busy, particularly in the movements for healthy living and environmental reform. Some of these activists have an overtly religious outlook, while others continue the secularization of the Social Gospel that began in the Progressive Era.

Environmentalism arose as a movement just a few years before the Moral Majority, with an end-of-the-world undercurrent that harked back to the millenarian sects of the Second Great Awakening. Green millenarians do not expect a wrathful God to end the corrupt world in a rain of fire; instead, humanity will die by its own gluttonous, polluting hand.

Such apocalyptic visions were limned in Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, which predicted massive cancer epidemics as a result of chemical contamination of the environment. Paul Ehrlich asserted in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that in the 1970s "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." And the Club of Rome's 1972 report The Limits to Growth announced the imminent, catastrophic depletion of nonrenewable resources. In the run-up to the first Earth Day in 1970, the ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, "We have about five more years at the outside to do something." The Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." Even the staid New York Times editorial page warned of the human species' "possible extinction." It wasn't so far from the evangelists' fears of a literal Armageddon, embodied in books like Hal Lindsey's best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).

Although all those predictions failed, environmentalism still exhibits millenarian tendencies. Former Vice President Al Gore has warned that man-made global warming is producing a climate crisis that might "make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization." For Gore, global warming is not merely a technical question of how to produce the energy humanity needs without emitting greenhouse gases. It is "a moral issue."

It is possible that environmental revivalism may supplant the fundamentalist aspect of the Fourth Great Awakening. If so, we may be in for a period in which campaigns for green reform programs dominate American politics. And it's worth noting that some evangelical churches recently have embraced environmental issues. In 2004 the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an "Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility" affirming that "because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation." Huckabee, the evangelical candidate, says plainly that he wants to be "a good steward of the earth"--and, to that end, favors an economy-wide "cap-and-trade" system to control greenhouse gases.