Tag: The Great American Revival

Generational Turnings and the Great American Revival

One of the shows that I listen to fairly regularly is Steve Deace, and a couple of days ago he had an interesting discussion about The Fourth Turning and Strauss & Howe’s generational theory. It’s worth giving a listen, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

What really interested me, though, is how the theory may (or may not) predict the period of religious revival that we currently appear to be entering. So after listening to the show, I shot Steve an email with my thoughts on the subject. Since this email more or less brings together my recent thoughts on the subject, I thought it was worth sharing on this blog.

Hi Steve. I enjoyed your show today, where you discussed Strauss & Howe’s theory of generational turnings. I’ve been fascinated by this subject for several years now, and have studied The Fourth Turning is Here (published just recently) and Generations (published in the 80s), in addition to The Fourth Turning. Here are some pertinent details that you missed, but may find interesting:

First, of all of Strauss & Howe’s predictions, the optimistic ones always seem laughably wrong in hindsight, whereas the pessimistic predictions are the ones that seem prophetic. I could share examples, but you’re a busy man and I want to keep this email relatively short. Todd will probably back me up on this.

Second, the spiritual foundation of the new societal order which emerges in the first turning is always set by the awakening in the previous second turning. So, for example, the spiritual foundations of the post-Revolutionary War period that gave us the Constitution were set by the First Great Awakening in the first half of the 1700s.

If we follow this pattern to its logical conclusion, then the spiritual foundations of the coming period of national unity in the 2030s and 2040s were set by the counterculture revolution of the 1960s… which is just another way of saying that the woke leftists win and establish their DEI utopia. That is what the “hero” generation of the Millennials will give us, if we follow the pattern.

Third, Howe’s most pessimistic prediction in The Fourth Turning is Here is that our current crisis era spirals so completely out of control that the United States disintegrates into separate waring countries. In other words, we never get a first turning period of national unity because the whole thing breaks apart, and the current “hero” generation never rises to the occasion.

But there is a third option, which Strauss & Howe actually predicted in one of their first books, Generations. This third option is the most pessimistic prediction from that book, but it lines up pretty well with what has actually occured. It is that we skip the first turning altogether and go immediately from a crisis era to an awakening era.

There is a precedent for this. According to the theory, we should have gotten a period of national unity immediately after the Civil War… but of course, we didn’t. Reconstruction was a mess that we muddled through for several decades, giving way to the labor riots, the rise of anarchism, the decadent excesses of the Gilded Age, etc. But we also got things like prohibition, Zionism, premillennial dispensationalism, and movements like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Salvation Army.

Point is, it was a period of spiritual awakening that happened immediately after a major crisis. We never got the peace, unity, or prosperity of a first turning period, but jumped immediately from the Civil War to the next Awakening. And it appears that we are following a very similar path right now.

Put another way, our three possible scenarios are:

1) The left wins, and everyone who listens to your show gets shipped off to the rainbow gulag in order to establish their progressive utopia (Strauss & Howe’s optimistic scenario),

2) The cycle breaks, and the United States disintegrates into separate countries, probably with an accompanying civil and/or global war (Howe’s pessimistic scenario), or

3) We skip straight from the current crisis period to a period of spiritual revival, which ultimately saves the country, but never gives us a period of peace, prosperity, or unity–at least not until the next generational cycle.

If the assassin’s bullet had blown Trump’s head off in Butler Pennsylvania, I think we would already be well on our way to either scenario 1 or scenario 2. I think the reason God saved Trump’s life on that day was to move us into scenario 3, and to give us the sort of spiritual revival that will purge our culture of all (or at least most) of the pernicious evils that took root during the counterculture revolution of the 60s, which in many ways was actually an anti-revival. Fifty years from now, I think the world that the Boomers gave us will seem as foreign and strange to our grandchildren as Medieval Christendom seems to us now.

Anyhow, those are some points that I thought you’d find pertinent. It was an interesting discussion on your show.

The Great American Revival is beginning

Saw this in a news article, thought it was worth posting, especially as it has more than 10k likes only 24 hours after it was posted. I will share more signs of the brewing revival as I encounter them.

For more of my thoughts, check out this post here.

What is coming

I think we are in the opening phase of a massive Christian revival, the likes of which we haven’t seen for more than a hundred years. It is going to sweep the entire country and catch a lot of people by surprise. After it has completed its course two or three decades from now, the culture we had from the 1960s through the 2010s will seem as strange and as alien to us as the culture of pre-Civil War America seems to us today.

This revival is going to be the thing that ultimately holds our country together. It will not unite all Americans, though, and many will feel like they don’t have a place in it. Conservatism will dominate our politics and our culture for the next generation, but it will take a hybrid form unlike anything that it has had before. It will blend some things that feel conservative to us now and other things that don’t seem conservative at all.

We will not get a period of unity or prosperity after this crisis period. Wars will expand, economies will collapse, natural disasters will devastate millions more lives. At least one more global pandemic will bring us to our knees. But even after these crises run their course, we will not come together for a new golden age, though one will always seem to be just over the horizon.

We will not experience a first turning of the next secular cycle, but will skip right past it into the second turning, just as we did after the Civil War. It’s going to be messy—so messy, in fact, that our grandchildren won’t even consider 2020 to be a historically significant year. But the United States will hold together, even if she never experiences the same level of prosperity again. And the utter collapse of her money and her economy will only serve to fan the flames of revival that will sweep her land.

Culturally, it will be a period of incredible dynamism. After the arts are no longer enthralled to postmodernism and cultural Marxism, we will see an explosion of creative expression in every field, including in literature. It’s going to be a wild ride. Things that are cultural mainstays now will be totally forgotten within a couple of decades, and things that are popular now will feel dated and out of touch in the space of just a few years.

The authors and artists who will do the most to shape this new culture are today almost completely unknown, but they will become household names in surprisingly short order. Others will take decades to become known, but they will write their most important works in just the next few years.

The country will hold together. There will be no civil war, though there may be a global one. And there will almost certainly be an economic collapse, like the Great Depression, except much deeper and much longer. But all of this will only serve to fuel the religious revival, and the revival in turn will fuel the cultural dynamism, until the country and ultimately the world have been entirely transformed.