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

Reason, April, 2008 by Ronald Bailey

In hindsight, this reading misinterpreted the turmoil of the period, which is better understood as a continuation of the arc of cultural liberation that began in the 1920s. But while McLoughlin was getting the period wrong, Dean Kelley was getting it fight. Kelley, a United Methodist minister and an adviser to the National Council of Churches, presciently and controversially recognized a coming fundamentalist surge in his 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Membership in ecumenically minded mainline Protestant denominations was declining, he noted, while the doctrinal strictness and discipline of conservative denominations were attracting many Americans. Evangelical Protestant affiliation has grown from 17 percent to 20 percent of the American population in the early 1970s to between 25 percent and 28 percent today. Largely outside the purview of liberal intellectuals who were celebrating the counterculture, a social force was incubating that would eventually power the Fourth Great Awakening. These modern evangelicals were the direct descendants of Moody's fundamentalists.

Proponents of conservative interpretations of Christianity felt themselves under attack by policies aimed at limiting public expressions of religious belief. In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any requirement that prayers and Bible verses be read in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In 1968 the Court declared that a state cannot ban the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. And in 1973 the Court found in Roe v. Wade that women had a constitutionally protected fight to privacy that allowed them to end their pregnancies in the first trimester.

Initially most Protestant denominations did not react strongly to Roe, viewing abortion as a "Catholic issue." In 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution reflecting the "middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder." That moderation was not to last. Just six years later, the same group called for "appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother." The shift on abortion was part of a strong negative reaction to what the Southern Baptists saw as counter-cultural excesses undermining the Christian moral order.

Although McLoughlin dismisses President Jimmy carter's neo-evangelicalism as a dead end, Carter's professed religious faith awakened his fellow evangelicals to the potential for political action. Carter wore his born-again Christianity on his sleeve, declaring that his religious convictions were "the most important thing in my life." Although it is not much appreciated now, Carter used the abortion issue to mobilize his fellow evangelicals. He declared during the 1976 presidential campaign that "abortion is wrong," and he signaled his support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal Medicaid funding for abortions. As president he eliminated funding for abortions for women in the military. Carter was no conservative, but he helped America's 60 million self-described evangelicals find their way out of the political wilderness. He functioned as a Moses pointing his co-religionists to the promised land of political potency, although it would be another man who would lead them there.