Jill Lepore walking back and forth on a dark stage, after purring through images America’s real history, mentions as an aside, in an answer to an audience question, that she expects a new religious revival in America, soon.
The Great Awakening was one of the only big strokes of history that was new for me in APUSH, a cultural phenomenon separate from the home island, a crucible of American identity in the mid-18th century. The Second Great Awakening was in the early 1800s, less a thing than the first, still well-noted. My impression: religious awakenings are of the time of bonnets and horse carts and muddy roads and letters that may or may not arrive because you’re counting on some guy you met in an tavern to deliver them. We have other kinds of mass culture now; revivals are for the weirdos who don’t watch TV, who think flying is a sin. Certainly, today’s irony-besotted sinking drain of feeling about the world that would be bitterness and misanthropy if it wasn’t so squishy and apathetic, is not fertile for spiritual passion. Lepore’s was a hot take.
So what did she mean? I read her entire book (for other reasons, too), and found no such prediction. But in an obscure interview, she explained. Read all of this:
“...I would have expected a big religious revival to explode any minute now. Because religious revivals tend to happen in the aftermath of a very significant, like, essentially, a sea-change in the body of knowledge. And, you know, or received notions of the, how we understand the natural world. So, I think the kind of, you know, the accelerating, the sort of knowledge-vault[?] metaphor of the Internet and the kind of revolution of machine learning and artificial intelligence and all the anxiety about a world of knowing that most people don't understand, at all, is just the kind of thing to set off a religious revival.”
Interesting. Plausible. What a left turn it would be in a history that loves left turns to have America or the world be swept across by some kind of spiritual fervor. Terrifying, if it's the same brand of grotesque predestinarianism that heated up the first Great Awakening’s famous sermons. Hope-ifying if it popularizes increased belief in human dignity and equality, as the second Great Awakening did by emotionally underwriting abolition. Too-good-to-be-true if it’s not Christian at all, but Buddhist-ish, some kind of popularable evolution of today’s elite mindfulness hype that makes stillness, introspection, and self knowledge a part of our inherited cultural philosophy and practice. Allow me to dream.
Or maybe it’s already happening, in quiet, warmly-lit offices, gentle paintings on the walls, kind professionals staring patiently across from a well-stuffed armchair. And Millennials and Gen Xers, reliving their most intimately painful moments in an atmosphere of kind benevolence.
Because maybe religion was just socially acceptable therapy, providing quiet and connection that are now best delivered professionally. In discussing low fertility rates in his new book, Ross Douthat mentioned a religious revival in late 1940s. GIs coming home from war; the sudden relief of tension after 16 years of constant crisis. I can imagine some kind of regular church, maybe Methodist, and musty. Dim lights and dark wood. A scattering of 20 or 30 somethings scattered about the available pews seating. And there’s an ex-soldier, a year or two home from the Pacific, in my minds’ eye still in uniform, with a crew cut, though of course neither probably would be true; he’s swaying slightly as hymns are sung, eyes closed during prayers. And maybe, just for those few minutes, he could see in his mind in the mud and the fear; the arms and legs and heads and bones; while feeling that, maybe here in church is a culturally acceptable place to turn inward, forgive himself, and be forgiven.
Now there are options for my imagined soldier. In 2004, 27% of American adults had sought mental health treatment in the previous two years, many of whom sought medication alone. In 2018, a survey found that 13% of adults were in talk therapy at the time, and 28% used to be. It’s not data, but the WSJ brands Millennials “the therapy generation.” Seems like we might not need to recite creeds to find that safe space; seems like church might be outdated for reliving trauma.
Of course church is free, while therapy is expensive. That should probably change. Fuck, who am I to compromise? That should definitely change.
But if Jill Lepore’s promised turn towards some kind of seeking peace in the universe, takes shape as the mass of people realizing it’s ok to slow down, experience, and heal their deep and unique wounds, which inspire all manner of jealous partners and shitty bosses – well, that could be the greatest awakening of all.