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

Reason, April, 2008 by Ronald Bailey

The Third Awakening

The revival period of the Third Great Awakening began in the 1870s. Crusades by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago drew tens of thousands of worshipers. Moody, sometimes described as the first Christian fundamentalist, preached a literal interpretation of the Bible and rejected any accommodation with the new evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

A theological split gradually opened within the evangelical movement. On one side stood the modernists: mainstream Protestants who no longer believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and who accepted Darwinian evolution. Their New Theology argued that God worked through natural laws and revealed Himself through the progress of history. Moody's spiritual heirs, calling themselves fundamentalists, rejected the New Theology and asserted that a believer's personal salvation was ultimately more important than social action. They insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, bodily resurrection, and salvation only through Christ. A series of 12 booklets, titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, set out and defended these principles between 1910 and 1915. The two evangelical groups' political agendas did not overlap significantly, although there were figures--most notably the three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan--who straddled the divide, combining fundamentalist religious views with a modernist economic agenda.

It was the modernists who dominated the Third Awakening. In his 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel, the Baptist modernist Walter Rauschenbusch warned of "the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it." We couldn't end personal sin, Rauschenbusch argued, without ending social sin; collective sin required collective redemption. Equality of opportunity as preached in the First and Second Awakenings was not enough for Third Awakening evangelicals, who called on the government to redistribute wealth. This, they believed, would enable the lower orders to rise above their spiritual poverty and amend their moral faults. Equality of condition became a prerequisite for moral improvement.

The reform stage of the Third Great Awakening flowered in the first two decades of the 20th century, known as the Progressive Era. This period saw both new interventions in the economy and new restrictions on private and public pleasures, from boxing to the movies. Prohibition advanced with breathtaking speed. By 1900 every state required mandatory "temperance education" in public schools. Under pressure from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, the number of dry states increased from three in 1903 to 32 in 1916. The 18th Amendment, which established Prohibition nationally, was ratified in 1919. Many advocates of the Social Gospel-were also prominent Progressives. Lyman Abbott, for example, was both the pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Congregational Church and a confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt.