It’s easy to poke fun at American Christians right now, what with their missed raptures, pyrotechnic memorials to Potemkin martyrs, and ultra-cringeworthy social media presence. However they are getting at least one thing right. There is a religious revival in the making, a “Third Great Awakening” of sorts, happening across America, and it would be a mistake to reckon otherwise.
(Yes, some historians claim a “Third Great Awakening” already happened in the late 1850s, but whether it truly deserves that title is debated. The so-called “Fourth Great Awakening” of the 1960s to 1980s is even more uncertain. These, and all “awakenings” are scholarly labels rather than universally accepted historical periods. I use “Third” here because most people’s historical frame stops with the First and Second, since those are the only ones typically taught in high school history.)
This Third Great Awakening now underway bears a striking resemblance to the First Great Awakening of the late 18th century, a movement famously led by George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, and less famously (but far more theatrically) by figures like James Davenport, who went so far as to condemn clothing itself as a snare of the Devil. The Great Awakening rejected dusty ol’ book learning in favor of a more personal, revelatory relationship with God. Its adherents were called to remake society around a new moral vision rooted in the idea of American exceptionalism.
While American elites often paid lip service to the religious fervor of the time, as they did with democracy in general, they themselves, and the political, economic, and societal seats they held were maintained largely void of both. Men like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson were products of the Enlightenment and viewed this type of religious sentimentality as fine for the rubes but having no place in high society. That is where this Third Great Awakening greatly diverges.
Where the First and Second were bottom up affairs, the Third is more of an insider versus outsider, top-down endeavor. That is to say, the Christian Nationalists have a firm grip on the levers of power and are using them to force their revival upon the rest of society. It’s an awakening that marries state power to the heritage built by the first two awakenings. It is an awakening of an ascending group that, up to now, was restrained by institutional structures, feeling those fetters being lifted. It is the awakening any group feels when it is no longer bound by anything but its whimsy.
Once it is clear that only the out-group has to follow the rules, some of that out-group quickly convert: some of the once religiously and politically ambivalent suddenly find themselves in the pews and reposting Prager U videos. The ranks of the “faithful” swell. The revival looks self-validating. As with every American religious revival and awakening, a return to the original message of the scriptures is loudly proclaimed. Like grinding tectonic plates, Christianity’s new signs, signifiers, and roles in public life slip and tear past their old constraints and interpretations, erupting in an entirely new horst.
While it is marketed as closer to the original than anything that came before, the Christianity emerging from this Third Great Awakening is altogether new—a novel faith that rejects traditional Christian principles like empathy and compassion as traps laid by postmodern Marxists aimed to ensnare lukewarm Christians. Forgiveness, like that declared by Charlie Kirk’s widow, will be praised, but only when offered by the lady folk. The best Christians demand righteous, violent justice as God did with the Amalekites, Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and Midianites. Christ did not come to bring peace, the verse goes. He came to bring the sword.
A shift away from the fruits of the spirit isn’t the only theological change taking place. For most of the twentieth century, premillennial pessimism dominated. The understanding was that the world would get worse and worse until Christ returned to set it right. That belief kept a certain check on grand Christian projects of social control because what good was trying to establish a truly godly society when it is foretold that any such endeavor would ultimately fail?
Now, with a movement that sees the state as a tool placed in its hand by Providence, postmillennialism is reemerging, in which the church will build the age of righteousness. Christ will return only after the church has done its work. The millennium is not something to wait for. It is something to build with executive orders, gerrymandered maps, school boards, and police powers.
What we are seeing emerge is theology of rule.
I have been sounding the klaxon on this threat for years. In 2021 I wrote this passage in my book, Youth Group: Coming of Age in the Church of Christian Nationalism, foretelling this exact revival:
America’s civic religion has managed to obfuscate the immense threat posed by Christian nationalists. If the men and women who stormed the Capitol building, resulting in at least 5 deaths, were carrying Islamic flags while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” everyone would know exactly what to call them. But when rioters hold their open palms up to heaven praising God in the evacuated chambers as a giant cross rests outside the breached gates, then suddenly everyone is confused. Ignore the countless cardboard placards with Bible verses scrawled on them. Ignore the Christian flags being waved by praying looters. Ignore that both historically and in the minds of the bearers, the Confederate battle flag stands for a Christian nation. Ignore the signs reading “Jesus saves,” or “only God and Donald Trump can save America.” Ignore the self-professed religious zeal of the rioters. Ignore everything and pretend those people were “just mad they lost.” But know this, ignoring too many uncomfortable truths is exactly what got us here.
It’s a dangerous feedback loop. Trump, like every despot before him, did not materialize out of thin air. The MAGA hats didn’t grow the heads underneath them. Christian nationalists saw themselves reflected in Trump and put him in the White House. Trump then fed them everything they wanted, causing their influence to grow. Trump could not have come to power without Christian nationalists, but the inverse is not exactly true. The underlying current in American polity that demanded a Trump-like figure has been swelling for years. To look at the people who amassed in DC the first week of 2021 as dupes or merely fanatical Trump supporters is to commit us to a never-ending game of whack-a-mole with wannabe Christian nationalist tyrants.
Religious freedom and democracy are not Biblical principles, and only enjoy the protection of Christian nationalists as long as they can be manipulated in their favor.
California mega-church pastor and best selling author John F. MacArthur made this abundantly clear in a series of sermons he delivered in January, 2021. After claiming on Sunday the 17th that the nation had “permanently” voted out integrity, truth, and righteousness when it voted out Donald Trump, he had this to say about the Biden administration:
The new administration will uphold religious freedom? I don’t even support religious freedom. Religious freedom is what sends people to hell. To say I support religious freedom is to say I support idolatry, it’s to say I support lies, I support hell, I support the kingdom of darkness. You can’t say that. No Christian with half a brain would say, ‘We support religious freedom.’ We support the truth!
Turns out the Danbury Baptists might have another letter to write. MacArthur chased this “quiet part out loud” sermon with an equally dismal one the following week:
Now it may shock you. The Bible doesn’t advocate democracy. The Bible doesn’t mention democracy. The Bible doesn’t comment on democracy. The Bible doesn’t define democracy. There is no place in all of the Bible where you even find democracy. There is no country revealed in Scripture where it existed; it is never affirmed by God.
He is right of course. The Bible says nothing about democracy, or germ theory for that matter. What he is getting at is that democracy is unlikely to be God’s ideal system of governance. After all, heaven is not governed by the will of the people and, if you believe as MacArthur does, that an omniscient personal God gave us his perfect Word, it would stand to reason that God would have at least mentioned democracy if it were worth mentioning at all. MacArthur goes on to seemingly endorse theocracy while simultaneously drubbing the Vatican for having one. I wish I could tell you that MacArthur is some fringe lunatic, however, he is easily considered one of the most influential pastors alive.
When I listen to the paranoid ramblings of Christian nationalists or QAnon acolytes, I hear echoes of my time in Youth Group. The relentless pressure to be appreciative of, and obsequious to biblical hierarchies. The constant fear of spiritual warfare, which has now found a home in the deep state and demonic Democratic pedophiles. The unbending faith in vague prophecy, the distrust of “the world,” the nativism, and the praise of inflexible thinking all smack of Evangelical flavor. I was a number in their ranks. As diligent a believer as they come. More than once I formed a prayer chain around the nearest abortion clinic, ambushed acquaintances for Jesus, and belittled dire injustices with the tagline “we’re in a fallen world”.
I fear my time in Youth Group pales in light of what’s to come.
Excerpt From
Youth Group
Lance Aksamit This material may be protected by copyright.
Note to the history nerds: Yes, there was a Third Great Awakening already posited to have taken place in the 1850s but whether or not it was really a "Great Awakening" at all is highly contested amongst historians. Even more so is the "Fourth Great Awakening" of the 1960s to 1980s. I bypassed both because neither are taught in high school history which is where common historical knowledge ends.
Shouldn’t Christian Nationalists instead be called Nationalist Christians? Or NatCs for short?