Dispatches from the present
In 1734, God laid his hand on the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, as “a great and earnest concern about the great things of religion, and the eternal world, became universal in all parts of the town.” That stirring was part of what historians now refer to as the “First Great Awakening.” A Second Great Awakening took place in the early nineteenth century. While there have been many revivals since then, and some scholars even speak of Third and Fourth Great Awakenings, it has been some time now since a Christian revival has been at the center of national consciousness. That all changed this month, as tens of thousands of the faithful and curious flocked to Wilmore, Kentucky, to take part in what is being called the Asbury Revival.
Through some quirk of the inscrutable algorithm, my Instagram feed has long been filled with a particularly grating set of posts from so-called “Christian influencers.” A few weeks ago, I started noticing something different from the typical affirmation and prayer posts in my feed: videos of wooden seats overflowing with people singing a cappella songs of praise, crying and holding each other. As it turns out, such videos were flooding both Instagram and TikTok, producing what is surely the first ever social-media-driven “viral” revival.
The Asbury posts piqued my curiosity. I am not an evangelical, but even through my screen I could feel the power in what I was seeing. I was moved by the testimony of students about their own experience of the revival, who emphasized the struggles of young people to connect and reconciliation as the greatest miracle. “Due to the media today, the Devil has blinded all, but mostly Generation Z, to the truth about community,” one participant wrote on Instagram. Through “the last 12 days at Asbury the Lord has made it known to my generation… that there is still community in the church.” Another Asbury University student interviewed in a short film about the revival said, “I know exactly which people on this campus hate each other. And those are the people that I have seen praying together, singing together, hugging, crying.” The participants tend to say that cancer has been cured and the wheelchair-bound have walked, but this more ordinary wonder of mended relationships is what has seemed most important.
Christian and secular publications alike have been sympathetic toward the surprising work of God at Asbury. Many of the news stories about it report that this revival has eschewed the flashy, politicized schlock of much of contemporary American evangelicalism, and that the movement has been organically led by the student leaders, Gen Zers looking for healing in a moment of hyperpolarization, violence and ideological confusion. Remarkably, much of the skepticism that exists about Asbury has so far come from within the fold of evangelicalism; believers of various stripes questioning whether the gospel is “really” being preached in Wilmore, or if it’s just a feel-good social gathering. (One Twitter poster with a profile picture of John Calvin in sunglasses wrote, “If this ‘revival’ you speak of does not preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ and repentance, and only focuses on singing songs, giving testimonials, and is being promoted by heretical false preachers… It’s not a ‘revival,’ it’s just a glorified music festival.”)
Amid the anxious online back-and-forth about the authenticity of Asbury, however, there are broader questions mostly yet to be posed about spiritual revivals that have relevance well beyond the realm of Protestant religiosity. Are moments of passion and inspiration the goal of life, or should we strive toward something else—a more steady building up of our character, for example? What happens after ecstatic, life-changing moments? How can we integrate the highs of life, which seem so far outside the normal course of events, into the daily routine that inevitably returns to swallow up what seemed so precious and significant? These questions have been debated by generations of American religious thinkers and writers. They should be asked again even by secular Americans.
From the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s advocacy of the pursuit of “peak experiences” to contemporary advice manuals that suggest spending your money on “experiences” rather than items, American culture has long seen joy and meaning as occurring in privileged moments. We want to live intensely. For many of us that means chasing special experiences, whether through chemical, sexual, aesthetic or religious means. In this sense, the person who goes to the Art Institute of Chicago every week in order to have a revelation in front of a Monet painting is no different than the skydiver or the serial philanderer—or the revivalist. But once the great looked-for culmination is achieved, what then?
After the First Great Awakening fizzled, wrote Jonathan Edwards, “it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner.” Edwards’s uncle cut his throat out of despair. After the Second Great Awakening, stirred-up religious emotions with no outlet led to new, experimental forms of religiosity in which hucksterism and fraud abounded.
On Friday, February 24th, Asbury University officially ended the revival. Students and staff wanted to get back to the ordinary rhythms of academic life, and they encouraged participants to go back to their own communities to start new revivals there. And indeed, a slew of Instagram and TikTok posts show nascent revivals springing up on other Christian college campuses. We can reasonably predict that the Asbury Revival will profoundly change individual lives, and it may lead to new, unlooked-for energies springing up in the American religious landscape. But the historical record suggests that disappointment and disillusionment are just as likely an outcome. Life-altering, sacred moments, however conceived, are not so easily integrated into the profane world.