A Coronavirus Great Awakening?
Sometimes the most important ingredient for spiritual
renewal is a cataclysmic event.
By Robert Nicholson
March 26, 2020
Could a plague of biblical proportions be the best
American hope for a religious renewal? As we approach
the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World
War, there is reason to think so.
Three-quarters of a century has obscured the memory of
this horrific conflict and its terrible consequences:
tens of millions of dead, large cities bombed with
rubble, Europe and Asia hit by hunger and poverty.
Those who survived the war had to face the kinds of
deep questions that arise only in the aftermath of
calamities. Contemplating the ruins from his window at
the University of Cambridge, British historian Herbert
Butterfield chose to make sense of it by turning to
the Hebrew Bible.
“The power of the Old Testament teaching of history –
perhaps the point where the ancient Jews were most
original, breaking with the religious thinking of the
other peoples around them – lay precisely in the
region of truths that arose from thinking about the
disaster. and the cataclysm, ”wrote Butterfield in“
Christianity and History ”(1949). “It is almost
impossible to appreciate properly the higher
developments of the Old Testament historical thinking,
except in another age which experienced (or was faced
with) a colossal cataclysm. ”
The Americans, chastised by the horrors of war, turned
to faith in search of truth and meaning. In the late
1940s, Gallup surveys showed that more than three-
quarters of Americans were members of a place of
worship, up from about half today. Congress added the
words “under God” to the oath of allegiance in 1954.
Some would later call it a third great awakening.
Today, the world faces another moment of cataclysm.
Although less devastating than the Second World War,
the pandemic has revived everyday life and destroyed
the world economy in a way that seems apocalyptic.
The experience is new and disorienting. Life had been
deceptively easy so far. The lives of our ancestors,
on the other hand, were guaranteed to be short and
painful. The lucky ones survived birth. The luckiest
have gone beyond childhood. It is only in the past 200
years that humanity has truly taken off. We are now
floating through an abnormal world of air
conditioning, 911 call centers, acetaminophen and
handheld computers containing almost the bulk of human
knowledge. We reduced nature to “the chained form of a
conquered monster”, as Joseph Conrad put it, and took
control of our destiny. God has become irrelevant.
Who will save us now that the monster has been
released?
“Men can live at a very advanced age in days of
relative calm and peaceful progress, without ever
having mastered the universe, without ever being
acutely aware of the problems and paradoxes with which
human history confronts us so often, “wrote
Butterfield. “We in the twentieth century were
particularly spoiled; for men of the Old Testament,
the ancient Greeks and all of our ancestors up to the
17th century betray in their philosophy and their
perspectives a terrible awareness of the hazard of
human life and of the precarious nature of human
existence in this risky universe. ”
The past four years have been among the most
controversial and embarrassing in American history.
The quarrels over the trivialities left the audience
frantic and divided, oblivious to the transcendent.
But the pandemic has humiliated the country and opened
millions of eyes to this risky world once again.
“The sheer gravity of suffering sometimes leads men to
a deeper understanding of human destiny,” wrote
Butterfield. Sometimes “it is only through a
cataclysm,” he continued, “that man can escape from
the net that he has taken so much trouble to weave
around him.”
For societies based on biblical tradition, cataclysms
need not mark the end. They are a call to repentance
and to awakening. While the coronavirus pandemic
subjects American hospitals to a formidable test,
Americans can find comfort in the same place as
Butterfield. A great struggle can produce great
clarity.
“The ancient Hebrews, by virtue of inner resources and
unprecedented leadership, turned their tragedy, their
very helplessness, into one of half a dozen creative
moments in world history,” wrote Butterfield. “It
would seem that one of the clearest and most concrete
facts in history is that men with spiritual resources
can not only redeem the disaster, but transform it
into a great creative moment. ”
Could a rogue virus lead to a great creative moment in
American history? Will the Americans, shaken by the
reality of a risky universe, find the God who
proclaimed himself sovereign at each disaster?
Mr. Nicholson is President of the Philos Project.
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