The Fourth Great Awakening Or Apostasy: Is American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards Or Spiraling Downwards? -- By: John B. Carpenter

Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 44:4 (Dec 2001)
Article: The Fourth Great Awakening Or Apostasy: Is American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards Or Spiraling Downwards?
Author: John B. Carpenter


The Fourth Great Awakening Or Apostasy:
Is American Evangelicalism Cycling Upwards
Or Spiraling Downwards?

John B. Carpenter*

[* John Carpenter lives at 478, #11–387, Sembawang Dr., Singapore 750478.]

In his 1999 presidential speech to the Evangelical Theological Society, Professor Wayne Grudem, in an otherwise excellent address, suggested that evangelicalism has been evolving toward a more mature sense of the essentials of the faith over its history. University of Chicago Nobel laureate Robert W. Fogel argued for a similarly rosy picture of the trajectory of American evangelicalism in his recently published The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. Professor Fogel believes that beginning with the “First Great Awakening” evangelical Christianity has been on the vanguard of social renewal in America pushing forward the progress of “egalitarianism.” Professor Grudem gives us the view of someone very much on the inside while Fogel’s perspective is that of an outsider. Robert Fogel is a self-confessed secular Jew and a world-renowned empirical historian, a founder of the scientific economic history school known as cliometrics. As such, Professor Fogel’s work is a valuable source for diagnosing the moral health of America and the evangelicalism with it.

Fogel’s paradigm is drawn from what he believes are cycles of ethical challenges America has undergone provoked by technological innovations that create moral crises that, in turn, are resolved by evangelical awakenings. 1 In its own way this is another expression of “the Enlightenment faith in progress.” 2 In a Hegelian-like dialectic, egalitarian movements pose a thesis that has excesses that are corrected by an “antithesis”; the synthesis leaves us better off than before, but soon another “awakening” poses another thesis, and onward and upward we go. There may be lags between technological transformations and the human ability to cope with them in Fogel’s theory, but eventually, with the impetus of religious institutions, America adjusts to the new ethical complexities.

Fogel’s cycles begin with the “First Great Awakening.” In harmony with recent scholarship, Fogel believes the Awakening was crucial in developing

the sentiments and concepts that led to the American Revolution. New Lights, both close to the people and reflective of their values, had the most to do with preparing the ground for the Revolution. 3 After the cultural influences of the Puritan awakening helped pr...

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