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The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, by Robert William Fogel, University of Chicago Press, 383 pp.; $25
When a Nobel laureate in economics contends that Americans have too many commodities and need to pursue spiritual goods instead, people should take notice. When the same famed expert, usually placed on the conservative side of the political spectrum, has some good things to say about state intervention in the economy and some harsh words for the Industrial Revolution, liberals might take hope. When one of the most famous quantifiers in American history-writing makes religion—specifically, evangelical revival religion—a prime cause of American progress, Clio and Christ alike may look on in interest.
What they will read in this latest treatise from Robert Fogel, a historian for the University of Chicago's free-market school of economics, is mostly good news. American society has achieved material plenty and distributes it fairly enough, Fogel asserts; henceforth ethical and spiritual needs will be paramount in people's lives. Providing equal access to the satisfaction of such needs will be the key challenge for national politics if the United States is to keep faith with its historic commitment to equality. But politics cannot help on this front nearly as much as religion can. Happily, just in time—since the 1960s—the right sort of religion has reemerged to do the work. The resurgence of evangelical Protestantism constitutes nothing less than America's "Fourth Great Awakening," a culture-changing phenomenon so important as to deserve close study by social scientists and full appreciation by political liberals.
Whether evangelicals themselves should join in such delight is an open question, however. Their first warning should come from the complete absence of prayer, worship, meditation, or any other classic spiritual discipline, not to mention theological virtues, from Fogel's list of the "fifteen spiritual resources" vital for the years ahead. His list instead catalogues the classic economic disciplines required for success in this world as defined by the impersonal market. The Fourth Great Awakening misconstrues a lot of American religious history, but it revives one precedent perfectly: Fogel is offering Ben Franklin's seduction of George Whitefield all over again.
Franklin got to know the British evangelist during the Great Itinerant's first visit to Philadelphia in 1739. The printer liked the preacher personally, liked his theatrical sense of self, liked the market savvy and self-promotion that built his audience, liked the profits Whitefield's instant publications brought Franklin's publishing house, and liked the sense of responsibility evangelical religion taught its adherents. All this, of course, without believing one word of Whitefield's theology. No innate depravity for Gentle Ben, no exclusive redemption in Christ, no authority of Scripture, no bliss of church fellowship, certainly no predestination. Religion—even, or perhaps especially, Whitefield's evangelical Calvinism—was good despite the errors it taught because of the virtues it wrought.
Whitefield's Christianity effected individual self-restraint, voluntary benevolence, and a social cohesion all the stronger for being informal—just the ticket for the pragmatic, secular future Franklin saw aborning. Whitefield accepted this bargain because it won Christ attention. His sometime collaborator Jonathan Edwards would dismiss it. So would the Baptists and Franklin's despised Presbyterians who were spreading the faith in the backcountry. Fogel's book raises a similar choice today.
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