I read Robert Remini's excellent little bio of Mormon founder Joseph Smith yesterday, and it got me thinking about Great Awakenings. Specifically, there are some signs that the United States might be in the midst or at the beginning of a Third Great Awakening right now. Figuring I was behind the eight-ball on this one, I did a search and found this article on the subject. (As a side note, the theology professor's comment about The Passion, "Here we have Christianity reduced to 12 hours, the least interesting 12 hours of Jesus' life, religiously speaking...," is just plain silly, but that's another post.) In any case, the I think the article just scratches the surface of what we're seeing in the U.S. in regards to religion.

It is actually quite fascinating. Think about it. Beyond the huge success of The Passion and the WWJD? crowd, there are plenty of other examples of the exploration of religion. For example, I had no idea that the Left Behind series was such a hit (note the tone of the NY Times review). But the key to this idea of a Third Great Awakening is that it expands beyond just traditional evangelical Christian beliefs to take on very experimental aspects with religion. The Da Vinci Code is ahistorical and anti-Catholic, but there is something of faith to it, of the central importance of Jesus in history. Many people saw the Lord of the Rings as a profoundly religious phenomenon, and indeed Tolkien was strongly religious. I have not seen it, but one of the new shows on TV, "Joan of Arcadia" involves God speaking to a teenage girl through bizarre devices.

What does all of this mean? How widespread are these phenomena? How far do the analogies with earlier Great Awakening go? I don't know, but it is something to keep an eye on.