Helen Andrews writes: Leftism has become a religion, and what we are seeing now is a revival. The revivalists testify from behind megaphones instead of pulpits and in “safe spaces” instead of country churches, but they stand squarely within the American tradition of converts who spread their gospel by bearing their witness. The way they keep bursting into tears is a clue. The Yale chalkers cried when they confronted the dean, the ranting girl cried when she confronted Christakis, audience members cried during a perfectly ordinary Yale Political Union debate on affirmative action. Ferguson was the same way. “There were a lot of people who were angry, a lot of people crying,” one protester recalled of Michael Brown’s funeral week. “There were a lot of people with backpacks and books saying the revolution is starting.” (That final dash of millennialism is entirely appropriate.) This is not a sign of fragility; this is part of the attraction.
Like the First and Second Great Awakenings, this revival spreads like a contagion on the strength of remarkable stories. In the days of Jonathan Edwards, a preacher could set the Connecticut River valley aflame by telling of mass conversions up in Northampton or a miraculous healing in Plainfield or a notorious free-thinker who had suddenly arrived at salvation over in Braintree. Edwards himself got a lot of mileage out of the incredible conversion story of his youngest congregant, Phebe Bartlet, age four. Some of these stories omitted certain deflating details (the mass conversions had been prompted by an outbreak of disease, say), and some are hard to credit. But there is not a single story in the annals of either Great Awakening, not a blind man restored to sight or a cripple made to dance the Highland jig, that strains credulity as much as the idea that on October 24, 2015, the Ku Klux Klan snuck into the third-floor bathroom of a Mizzou dormitory in order to paint a poop swastika on the wall. The enthusiasm for personal denunciation that sets the present eruption apart from the usual PC background noise is a trademark of American revivals, too.
When colonial congregations invited George Whitefield to preach for them, they quickly learned to ask in advance that he not sow dissension by denouncing local worthies by name. No one bothered asking Charles Grandison Finney to stick to generalities. One reason Finney was the most popular revivalist of the Second Great Awakening was that his audiences derived a certain frisson from knowing he would call out by name any deacon he’d heard was an adulterer and any shopkeeper he’d heard saying “dammit” in the street. An ordinary preacher who noticed an overdressed woman in the pews might pointedly take the day’s reading from Proverbs 31 and leave it at that. Finney glared at the unfortunate woman and asked her, in front of everyone, “Did you come in here to divide the worship of God’s house, to make people worship you?” Recounting the story in his memoir, he notes, “This made her writhe.”
