The Right Question About Religion...Maybe. Mark Schmitt asks it:
We are clearly in the middle of one of the great periods of Christian
revival in American history, the third or fourth of the “Great
Awakenings” in American Protestantism. Each such period has begun with
a change in the nature of worship itself, essentially a private phase,
and moved onto a public phase where it engaged with the political
process. These have been significant moments of progress for this
country. The Second Great Awakening led in its public phase to the
Abolitionist movement. What some historians consider the Third Great
Awakening beginning in the 1890s led to the Social Gospel movement,
settlement houses, and the beginnings of the progressive era idea of a
public responsibility to ameliorate poverty.
The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue
influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious
faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social
justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of
private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature
of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social
pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it
to change?
I have been baffled by the public theology of the politically active
evangelical movement. I keep asking why as well. Why does the "culture
of life" refer only to abortion and not to war or the death penalty?
Why does returning traditional mores to marriage refer only to
homosexuality and not to divorce? Most pressing to me, did the
evangelicals forget that what distinguishes them from Jews is the New
Testament, the contents of which I cannot find anywhere in their
politics?
Nobody has been able to answer me, but I am not sure that there is
an answer. It would not be the first time that religious expression
took an unpredictable, inexplicable path. And some of it is that religion has stopped "afflicting the comfortable
and comforting the afflicted". We are all too comfortable now, and much
of the current revival is to give certainty rather than doubt.
