by Chris Lehmann

Last week President George W. Bush hosted an informal sit-down in the Oval Office with a select audience of friendly conservative journalists. He showcased some more of his reading habits (not just Camus and Shakespeare, he assured them), letting slip that he had recently read three -- three!-- biographies of George Washington, without doubt the dullest of our Founding Fathers. And then there was a spiritual moment, as reported by one of the faithful scribes in attendance, the National Review's editor Rich Lowry. Bush denounced skeptics of his zeal to export "freedom" as apostles of "moral relativism." And he announced his belief that the nation is in the midst of a profound cultural shift: "I'm not giving you a definitive statement," the president cautioned. "But it seems like to me there's a Third Awakening with a cultural change . . . . It feels like it. I'm just giving you a reference point, if this is something you're interested in looking at . . . . I don't have many people coming on the rope line saying, 'I'd like a new bridge' or 'How about some more highway money.' They're coming to say, 'I'm coming to tell you Mr. President, I'm praying for you.' It's pretty remarkable."

That it is -- though not so much for the reasons Bush thinks. After all, many Bush supporters have plenty of worldly, highway-bill style reasons to pray for their man, who remains mired in the 40-percent approval range despite a frantic effort to rebrand the Iraqi Freedom cause yet again amid the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.

No, what's remarkable here is the president's casual recourse to the language of American awakenings, those mass waves of soul-searching--and not incidentally, political reform -- that shaped much of the history of Protestant America. The first Great Awakening occurred under the guidance of British preacher George Whitfield in the mid-18th century; it's widely credited with helping forge a national consciousness in the American colonies that led, in turn, to the onset of the American Revolution. Nearly 100 years later, the Second Great Awakening, under the direction of the great Methodist revivalist Charles Grandison Finney, spurred the wave of reformist agitation that midwifed abolitionistm, Mormonism, and first-wave feminism, among other movements.

There was also, it turns out, an actual Third Great Awakening -- the so-called Business Man's revival of urban charity and uplift on the eve of the Civil War. But, if by Bush's reckoning, American culture is convulsing itself into yet another awakening, what would its character be -- and what broader social changes might it portend? For one thing, says John Corrigan, who wrote Business of the Heart, a cultural history of the original Third Great Awakening -- our religious scene is far too fragmented and diverse to sustain a national awakening. "Sure, among certain people, there's a stronger rhetoric being deployed, some more churchgoing," he says. But the idea of a great awakening "doesn't make much sense" in an America that is far from universally Protestant. The appeal of an awakening in the context of the present, Corrigan says, is a backward-looking one: "It calls to mind all sorts of pleasant images, if you're an American Christian -- about the country's destiny, and about the hand of God in the affairs of men."

But that's the rub, Corrigan points out: In theological terms, awakenings are about the conviction of sin, where the hand of God is on the verge of damning your sorry, vicious, pleasure-loving soul. "There's always a guilt in some part of an American population that plays into an awakening, a revival or a reform movement," he says.

That sense of guilt isn't exactly at a premium in the Bush White House -- Camus and Shakespeare notwithstanding. "One of the interesting things to me about this, is you have a president who has such terrible difficulty to admit wrong, but who is also so quick to claim a kind of moral authority under an awakening," Corrigan says. "Awakenings are about people admitting wrongs, and creating a future that's better. It's so ironic to me that a president would be using the idea of an awakening to keep from admitting mistakes."

Perhaps instead of trumpeting a new awakening, the president should go back to consult the first one. In his 1742 eyewitness account, Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival or Religion in New England, the great Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards famously wrote, "Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil's reach as humility."

Chris Lehmann (lehmannchris@mac.com) is an editor at CQ Weekly and covers Washington for the New York Observer. His wife is Ana Marie Cox but don't hold that against him.

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