Many people believe that in America today we are witnessing a religious resurgence, much like those America has experienced before. There is, however, an important and disturbing difference: whereas past religious revivals have led to Christian action in areas of social justice (abolition, for example), today it leads to a focus on private sexual morality to the exclusion of almost all else.

Mark Schmitt asks some hard and interesting questions about this:

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 it 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 don't have any answers, but I do have a couple of thoughts. For one thing, the Christian Right today is closely aligned with the Republican Party and was, in fact, originally financed by wealthy corporate figures. So long as conservative evangelical groups are financially beholden to those who represent the interests of capitalism, wealth, and the status quo, then it seems unlikely that they will start making a big push for social justice that might challenge those interests. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Another factor is the intense nationalism of the Christian Right today. I'm not sure that this existed in past movements where evangelicals seemed to revel in worldwide Christian brotherhood. Today, groups like the Southern Baptist Convention are withdrawing from international organizations that don't pass narrow tests of orthodoxy — an "orthodoxy" that is as much a product of American culture as it is of Christianity. Evangelicals, even conservative evangelicals, elsewhere in the world exhibit far more interest in social justice than conservative evangelicals in America. It would be appropriate, then, to look to a very American and even nationalist American source for the disconnect here.

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