IN THEORY:Age of awakenings?

President Bush recently told a group of conservative journalists that he envisions a “third awakening” of religious devotion in the country that parallels the struggle with international terrorists. The First Great Awakening was a wave of Christian enthusiasm in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760. Many historians put the Second Great Awakening during 1800 to 1830. Do you also sense a third wave of religious devotion?

The parallels between our age and the fall of the Roman Empire that plunged western Europe into the dark ages are interesting.

Three things were characteristic of those times.

The first was the failure of education. Education lost its priority and it became a punishment rather than a privilege. The people lost their hunger to learn. Part of the reason was that the empire was losing its power. The Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) was fading, and resources had to be funneled into fighting the attacks on its borders.

The second similarity is that the attacks on the Roman Empire were coming from a new religion — militant Islam. It was these attacks that were being referenced to in our question a few weeks ago in our topic about the pope quoting a medieval emperor.

The third comparison was a rise in religious affections. In the chaos, people began returning to witchcraft, and the occult as well as the traditional religions. It was not an awakening but a revival of spiritualism.

What seems ominous to me is that it is not a new awakening that appears to be brewing on the horizon, but a new dark ages. The Pax Americana that had been a topic of discussion just 10 years ago has all but vanished. We find ourselves under increasing attack as is obvious as some find it necessary to build a fence on our border with Mexico. The American educational system has become a mockery of the world, and yet all we have the will power to do is to bicker about it, fighting over who should have power over it. In the meantime, our kids aren’t learning how to read, they are dropping out of school, they are killing each other and the ones who survive are increasingly obese.

With psychic hotlines and palm readers in so many neighborhoods, it is obvious that religious affections are on the rise. It is true that people are turning to higher powers and ritual to sooth their need for some solace in unsettling time, but that is not equivalent to the Great Awakenings.

The Great Awakenings were Christian events that brought people to a new relationship with Jesus that changed their lives and our culture. It was not just a neo-patriotic religious fanaticism that was politicized for election purposes. The difference is a work of God, rather than the work of men.

We are not seeing a revival spiritual dimensions but a failure of culture — that instead of leading to the third great awakening may lead to the second dark ages.

LEAD PASTOR RIC OLSEN

The Beacon

Anaheim

This sort of rhetoric is very dangerous and should not be uttered by the leader of a country that is founded on secular principles and who is supposed to represent all his citizens.

Just as the president is anticipating the coming of a third awakening so too are the terrorists with their radical religious views — and both are wrong.

Such a view by the president asserts the notion that there is a clash of civilization — the West versus Islam. Thus the president should be extremely sensitive when he refers to the War On Terrorism.

The president should also refrain from using words such as “crusades,” “Islamic fascist” and “religious awakening.” Our War On Terrorism should not be under the disguise of “religion.”

People who are sincere followers of their faith would look upon a religious awakening as an opportunity to build bridges of understanding and mutual respect with people of other faiths, not more divisions and hostility, since Judaism, Christianity and Islam all stem from one another.

IMAM SAYED MOUSTAFA AL-QAZWINI

Islamic Educational Center of Orange County

Costa Mesa

Religion has always exerted a potent force in America, as waves of fervor have swept over our land until spent by their sheer intensity. But that we today experience a resurgence akin to the Great Awakenings is more hopeful than real.

Pollster George Barna discloses that, “More than ever, Americans are profoundly secular in their decision-making and outlook. Only half of all adults (54%) claim their moral choices are based on principles or standards they believe in. Just one out of every six adults (16%) claim they make their moral choices based on Scripture. Just 5% of adults possess a biblical worldview. The younger a person is the less likely he is to turn to the Bible as a source of truth or to believe that absolute moral truth exists. Despite strong levels of spiritual activity during the teen years, most twentysomethings disengage from active participation in the Christian faith during their young adult years — and often beyond that. In total, six out of ten twentysomethings were involved in a church during their teen years, but have failed to translate that into active spirituality during their early adulthood.”

Hardly the stuff of religious revival!

Even those who claim to be among the faithful find themselves on the receiving end of quick solutions and simplistic answers.

Pious platitudes are not passwords to God’s kingdom. Attendance at services is not a viable indicator of true conviction. Ecstatic prayer, fervent song, frenetic dance and exaggerated behavior are not substitutes for knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Shutting the eyes, lifting the face and swaying to the rhythm does not signify mature religious conviction. Railing against the “homosexual agenda,” decrying the “moral freefall” of America, politicizing a so-called culture war, and advocating for posting the Ten Commandments in our courts, classrooms and legislatures do not correspond to a sustainable faith. Pitting the first sentence of the Nicene Creed against the last sentence of Darwin’s Origin of the Species is not a valid intellectual enterprise. Claiming the earth to be but a few thousand years old does not qualify a person as religious, just ignorant.

As the traditional underpinnings that secured society withered under technological onslaught and withdrew before scientific assault; as people possess more freedom than they can handle responsibly; as boundaries are trespassed and limits erased, people feel the times to be out of joint. The present is so perplexing and the future so frightening that retreat into a “simpler,” “idyllic,” “safer” time is headlong.

Confronting the upheavals of modernization, the complexities of globalization, the terrors of nuclearization and the illusions of secularization, people hunt for verities, absolutes and universals that address the human condition. But what is dished out to their hungry spirits is often childish, diluted and self-serving, packaged in the context of a once-a-week “experience” verging on spectacle. Spiritual enthusiasm, so passionately expressed in the sanctuary, is rarely transformative and barely survives the walk to the parking lot.

A great awakening? In Princeton Cemetery, Jonathan Edwards is spinning in his grave.

RABBI MARK S. MILLER

Temple Bat Yahm

Newport Beach

No, I think President Bush is trying to use religion to justify the war and his simplistic worldview. I think that with the aging of boomers, there will be a renewed interest in spirituality, but it will not be like the Protestant revivals of the past.

The question might also be interpreted, “How do you see the future of religion in the United States?” Many historians already identify four great awakenings or revivals in American history, so the next one would be the fifth, not the third. Some people view the Vatican II years as a renaissance in the Catholic Church, one which had great influence in the United States, which is presently 25% Catholic. The Consciousness Movement from 1964 to 1984 is another significant development that has not yet run its course. The religious roots and choices of immigrants from Central and South America will also play an important role.

Many people are dissatisfied with traditional options and are struggling to find or create more meaningful alternatives. California is on the cutting edge of this exploration. We directly experience increased religious diversity, are open to experimentation, and appreciate personal and religious freedoms. It is inevitable that Protestant Christianity will not be able to dominate the public sphere, however persistently some insist upon it.

Terrorism is but one of the many serious threats facing our world, and Evangelical Christianity is only one choice of possible responses. People will continue to try to discover, create, adapt and develop spiritual resources to cope with suffering and to help them take steps to make a positive contribution to the world. Of course, we consider Zen meditation to be one of these, and a way for a different kind of awakening.

REV. DR. DEBORAH BARRETT

Zen Center of Orange County

Costa Mesa

With the probable exceptions of most of Europe and all of Antarctica, all continents are currently experiencing important religious revivals. For many years scholars such as Robert Bellah and Henry May at the University of California and David Watt at Temple University have talked about such revivals possibly occurring in many decades. Wikipedia identifies “generally accepted Great Awakenings in American history” as 1730s through 1740s, 1820s through 1830s, 1880s through 1900s, and 1960s through 1970s.

Great Awakenings have been marked by the rise of new religions and existing belief systems gaining new popularity. Since, by its nature, religion is traditional and hard to change, new beliefs often attempt end-runs around tradition; they may appeal to more ancient (and sometimes fabricated, or at least distorted) tradition, dismissing current beliefs as having become corrupted or irrelevant over time.

Since religion is often used to dictate or justify morality, the Great Awakenings and the politics of the United States have exerted influence on each other. Joseph Tracy, the minister and historian who gave this religious phenomenon its name in his influential 1842 book, “The Great Awakening,” saw the First Great Awakening as a precursor to our revolution for independence.

Other scholars have seen the Second Great Awakening deeply influencing both the Confederacy and the Union in our Civil War. Contemporaries too easily make the case for terrorists like those of Sept. 11, 2001, as deeply influenced by “religious devotion,” while I see such terrorism as spitting white hot fire into the midst of the innocent in the name of a strange sense of justice distorted beyond recognition. Religious “awakenings” can mean slavery or abolition, creating parks or parking lots, real security or a sense of safety based on fear, going to the moon or going to heaven.

I hope President Bush envisions more than an awakening in which people simply congratulate themselves on how just their cause is; this would certainly not be genuine religious revival.

I pray that he includes a deep sense of both one’s own sinfulness and God’s love, since these are consistent characteristics of genuine religious revival and “great awakenings.”

(THE VERY REV’D CANON) PETER D. HAYNES

Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church

Corona del Mar

So President Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he envisions a third awakening of religious devotion, somewhat as a reaction to the current world struggles, which he depicted as a confrontation between good and evil. Maybe yes or maybe no.

Over the years there have been gradual ebbs and flows of religious beliefs. Periods of religious awakenings have been followed by periods of enlightenment in which the populace grasps and appreciates the science and actual knowledge that becomes available through reason, logic, sound facts, research and study. Then, again, when people become frightened, worried about the future and emotional, they are more apt to fall back on religious belief while reason gets shoved aside. Other factors are involved, of course. Young children can be taught to believe practically anything without any evidence as proof if intensively indoctrinated early enough.

So what the country becomes depends partly on what the children are taught. Hence the great push for taxpayer support of church schools by those who want to assure that their beliefs become the country’s beliefs and that their religious laws become the country’s laws. Note how thoroughly the Muslims indoctrinate their children in the religion of Islam (and the hatred of the United States) while ignoring education that would help them to analyze problems for themselves. Do we need to copy that?

Bush also stated that a lot of people in America, including himself, see the current world problems as a confrontation between good and evil. But then Bush never seems to consider any possible shades of gray, apparently always being able to determine, through ideology or gut feelings or direct advice from God, whether something is purely good or entirely evil.

The fact that Bush also stated that some of Abraham Lincoln’s strongest supporters were religious people who saw life in terms of good and evil is rather ironic since Lincoln himself never joined a church, stating that when someone showed him a church whose only creed was the golden rule, then he would unite with it!

So whether the United States is now entering a period of religious awakening because everyone is sufficiently scared, or is in for another period of enlightenment, is for the future to make clear.

The one thing that is clear is that the world is now in the early stage of the Sixth Great Extinction of plant and animal life as a result of global warming and other environmental factors, which should be of much greater concern because, unlike previous extinction events that were caused by natural phenomena, this one is of human origin. And thus it should be possible, under some enlightened leadership, to help correct the situation. But Bush probably is not concerned about that.

JERRY PARKS

Member, Humanist Assn. of Orange County

I am not convinced that President Bush is the best spokesperson for religious devotion or that he has any particular insight into anything called an awakening. Fear, however, is the primary tool of politicians and terrorists alike, and we cannot allow fear to rule our lives.

It’s not easy living free from fear, but you can do it if you have a solid spiritual philosophy that draws you closer to God’s love and further from hate, prejudice and suspicion. When it comes to fear, the tool that most politicians and propagandists use is “objectification.”

By referring to terrorists, using terms that limit our perception of them as people, it’s easier to kill or hurt them. Objectification blurs our moral perception and forces us to see the threat and not the person. It takes a huge amount of maturity to look past the label and find the person, his or her story, and the reasons why they behave the way they do.

Such maturity does not condone bad behavior, but it never stops seeking ways to break the cycles of violence caused by those who cultivate such behavior. An example of such maturity is many of the Protestant and Catholic mothers in Northern Ireland who got tired of losing their children to a culture of hatred, prejudice and fear and banded together to break the cycle of violence. Now that was a wave of devotion, courage and love not caused by politicians or religious leaders but by people who finally said enough is enough.

Peace is not easy. Peace requires a proactive commitment to break the cycles of silence and violence through tough love and a willingness to confront our own fears.

I pray daily that our leaders will seek ways to break the cycles of violence and devote themselves to the kind of courage it takes to resist the impulse to react in fear and learn how to be more proactive in creating a culture of peace, prosperity and purpose.

SENIOR PASTOR JIM TURRELL

Center for Spiritual Discovery

Costa Mesa