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

Reason, April, 2008 by Ronald Bailey

There was a concurrent surge in concern about hygiene, pure foods, and sexual self-control. The scientific cooking movement trained women in "domestic science," showing them how to use precise recipes to produce uniform dishes in the home. One of the more prominent pieces of Progressive legislation was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which empowered the federal government to ensure foods and drugs were not adulterated. The authorities also launched campaigns against opium, cocaine, and heroin. A campaign against "self-abuse" had another lasting effect: The Seventh-Day Adventist doctor John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, a bland breakfast cereal intended to suppress the urge to masturbate.

Resistance to the Third Great Awakening took off after World War I. Millions of troops returning from European battlefields wanted more than drudgery on the family farm or factory floor. Women who had flocked to wartime workplaces resisted being consigned again to the dull routines of homemaking. Wider access to new technologies such as automobiles and movies helped push traditional values into the background. The fact that by 1920 more than half of all Americans were living in urban areas also eroded traditional social bonds and hierarchies, since cities have always been refuges for people seeking greater autonomy and self-expression. The 1920s became the era of hot jazz, speakeasies, bathtub gin, and flappers. Novels, movies, and magazine stories became more sexually explicit. While mild by comparison to contemporary American mores, a new sexual freedom flowered.

The Fourth Awakening

After World War II, American economic expansion resumed. Often described as the era of the "organization man," the 1950s also gave us books like Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), which exalted drugging, drinking, and sexual libertinism. In 1960 the anarchist sociologist Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, highlighted "the disaffection of the growing generation" with "the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc." The sexy rhythms of rock and roll became popular, and Playboy magazine, founded in 1953, both reflected and amplified a new wave of sexual liberation. The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women much greater control over reproduction, putting them more on a par with men in the workplace. These liberating cultural and technological developments fueled the social and political eruptions of the 1960s and '70s.

McLoughlin and Fogel both argue that the upheavals of the 1950s and '60s were the beginning of the Fourth Great Awakening. Writing in 1978, McLoughlin argued that the Beats, the rise of interest in Asian religions such as Zen Buddhism, the growth of environmental consciousness, and the spread of "experimental life-styles" would "produce a new shift in our belief value system, a transformation of our world view that may be the most drastic in our history as a nation." He even compared rock concerts to old-fashioned revivalist camp meetings.