Last week, a bunch of evangelical leaders agreed that what their religion needs is a bunch of revivals. Yes, revivals will totally and completely end evangelicals’ increasing right-wing extremism and entanglement with ultraconservative politics! They have no doubts about this startling assertion.
This is far from the very first time evangelicals have floated the idea of revivals fixing their problems. Let’s explore the concept of revivals—and see why they have never and will never fix evangelicalism.
(Today’s title comes from a long-running joke among polyamorous people. Adding more people to a stressed relationship just makes everything worse for everyone.)
(This post went live on Patreon on 9/20/2024. Its audio cast lives there too and is available by the time you see this!)
Christianese 101: Revivals, generally
These are just preaching parties. Kind of like pep rallies at high schools. [Reddit, March 2024]
In Christianese, revivals are large-scale conversion events. Sometimes these events break out spontaneously. Far more often, pastors meticulously plan them ahead of time and hope for the best.
This term does not appear in the Bible at all, incidentally. Though evangelicals freely admit this fact, they don’t worry their pretty li’l heads ’bout it none. Over time, they’ve contorted themselves around various Bible verses they can shoehorn into the concept of revivals. Jesus totally doesn’t mind.
Officially, only Jesus can spark revivals. Generally speaking, Jesus sends revivals to evangelical churches when he’s particularly pleased with how they’re Jesusing. Sometimes, he chooses to send revivals to congregations that are doing their very best to Jesus correctly, but are losing steam over time.
As you might suspect, Jesus refuses to send revivals when he disapproves of the evangelicals involved. His disapproval might be over something most of the congregation doesn’t even know about, like their churchmates’ secret vices and unconfessed sins. It might even concern evangelicals’ own attachments to particular ways of “doing church.” Jesus gets super pissy about the strangest things. Either way, revival will be impossible to achieve until Jesus approves again. Unofficially, church leaders use this belief as an excuse if their pre-planned revivals fizzle.
Also officially, revivals should end with the evangelicals involved gaining new fervor, passion, and dedication forever afterward. Unofficially and in my direct experience, alas, things go back to normal soon after a revival ends.
Weirdly, some evangelical leaders insist that even nonreligious people place great importance on Americans participating in evangelical revivals. (Citation needed, because even if Billy Graham were still alive today, you’d be waiting a long, long time to hear him name that “university professor.”) When revivals happen, America becomes a better place, goes the thinking, because evangelicals think conversions always lead to a marked increase in moral, ethical behavior.
What a revival is like
Pentecostals can get rowdy during church services. (Sunday nights FTW!) But when they think they’re in the smack middle of a revival, they really get down.
If you’ve never experienced anything like a revival, it’s hard to describe. Imagine the most intense pep rally ever. The cheerleaders are screaming rah-rah stuff, the audience in the bleachers is roaring its approval, the band’s volume is set to 11. Lights are shining everywhere, their bright colors flowing across the crowd and magnifying the tension already there. Maybe someone’s even thrown some glitter or shredded paper into the air.
Of course, you must make the music simple-to-sing but very peppy religious stuff.
Then, add pews and people dancing frantically or rolling back and forth around the altar or hopping around or making laps around the sanctuary. Have some guy preach about divine grace, Hell, repentance, and angels/Jesus roaming among these displays.
If everything works as planned, you’ve made a revival.
Most Americans have seen absolutely nothing like it. The closest thing I can imagine to a revival is a mosh pit or a Taylor Swift concert. But those don’t have the added input of supernatural beliefs to make participants even more excited.
No, normies lack any perspective or context that might help them understand how these experiences are engineered. Because oh yes, they very much are engineered. Careful thought goes into every aspect of these curated experiences. In particular, whoever’s hosting the revival is very selective about the music and lighting involved.
I remember the first time I saw a flier advertising an upcoming revival at another Pentecostal church. It blew my mind. See, I’d learned that only Jesus can make revivals happen. But he operated on his own weird schedule. As a result, it made no sense to me to pre-schedule a revival! What if that church literally hadn’t reckoned with its host? What would they do if when no huge number of conversions happened?
As it turns out, everyone involved just memory-holes the entire incident! Ideally, they just ignore it and jump ahead to the next ice floe in the river. They call it something else, but only if they must call it anything at all.
That’s basically what happened in Asbury, Kentucky last year.
Christianese 201: When revivals get called something else
Evangelical leaders agree: Revivals must involve conversions. Asbury simply didn’t have many of those.
If the church congregation gets super-hyped up but there are few or no conversions, evangelical leaders rename it. It becomes a blessing, an outpouring, a refreshing, or suchlike.
As one example, the Toronto Blessing was a long period of incredible heights of Jesusing. It swept across evangelicalism worldwide. Participants achieved major heights of rowdiness. However, normies largely had no idea it was even happening. Very, very few people converted to evangelicalism as a result of this movement. So it couldn’t qualify as a revival. Evangelicals called it a blessing instead.
Sometimes, a revival converts just tons of people and brings about huge sea changes in evangelicalism. That kind of revival might get an upgrade and become known as a Great Awakening. America has had a few of these in its history. Historians do argue about the definitions here somewhat, of course, but overall they agree on three. (Some even think there’ve only been two.) The Jesus Movement, which mostly occurred between 1960 and 1980, sometimes gets called the Fourth Great Awakening.
Here today, though, we’re talking about revivals. These will all be movements that result in large numbers of conversions, but not huge numbers, and they don’t really bring about any long-term changes to evangelicalism as a whole. As well, normies in the local area at least will likely know that something strange is happening in XYZ church(es).
Revivals: Evangelicals’ solution to the tribe’s increasing political entanglement and extremism
On September 10, Religion News Service ran a story with this headline:
Evangelicals rally behind statement that hopes to combat polarization with revival
As Donald Trump campaigns for a second term as President, growing numbers of evangelical leaders speak against him and all that he stands for. During his first campaign and term in office, they noticed how their religion’s overall reputation and credibility in America plummeted thanks to the tribe’s idolization of a repulsive, dishonest, hedonistic, unapologetically stupid sex fiend.
This time around, they hope to “reclaim their tradition from the culture wars.”
The story itself concerns their September 9th release of a document they call “Our Confession of Evangelical Conviction.” It seeks to persuade the rest of the tribe to stop idolizing Donald Trump.
Though this document doesn’t name Trump, it asks evangelicals to support political candidates who are more in line with the tribe’s party line, which Trump ignores in every single way:
We affirm that the character of both our political and spiritual leaders matter. Within the Church, we seek to follow spiritual leaders those who display evidence of the Holy Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).
The document itself doesn’t talk about revival, either. But the website itself is titled “A Call to Revival,” and it includes a “Resources for Revival” section. In that section, visitors will find a number of videos (by the guy who made Veggie Tales), Bible studies, links to music albums, and of course a “prayer toolkit” to help evangelicals ask Jesus to send America lots of revivals. Near the end, visitors will read this entreaty to Jesus:
We pray that God’s Spirit will revive our Church and strengthen Christ’s people to be agents of his presence and blessing in this turbulent age.
Among Trump-rejecting denominations and churches, this document has enjoyed wide approval. (Russell Moore, once a Southern Baptist who led that denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), always criticized Trump, so it’s not surprising that he signed the document as well.)
Some evangelicals think they’re already amid a revival that will save America
Unfortunately for those wiser evangelicals, evangelical Donald Trump supporters already think they’re enjoying a revival. Just this past April, a New York Times reporter noted:
Trump rallies have always been something of a cross between a rock concert and a tent revival.
I’m not surprised in the least by that description. Since most of Trump’s fanbase is evangelical, obviously any hype that sounds religious will appeal to them.
Sometimes, that comparison to a “tent revival” becomes far more literal. Some evangelicals are running a “Courage Tour” that looks exactly like advertising for a church revival. Their featured band even looks like a megachurch worship team. Among their listed speakers, we find pseudohistorian David Barton and whackadoo Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Here’s what their front page says:
America’s Awakening Begins Here. Experience revival in 7 key states with The Courage Tour, marking the dawn of our nation’s Third Great Awakening. Embrace transformation and reformation. [. . .]
Central to The Courage Tour is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s courage and triumph, providing powerful teachings to inspire attendees to boldly live out their faith.
On their website, we also learn that various attendees of this extended church service have experienced actual real live miracles:
After years of struggling with breathing issues, Nancy’s encounter with faith and divine healing led her to a moment of miraculous recovery. No longer bound to an oxygen machine, she celebrates the gift of deep, unlabored breaths, a testament to the healing power of faith and prayer.
Babies born with defective hearts and lungs can suck rocks. Jesus doesn’t care about them. He only magically heals white, retirement-aged Republican gals who attend Donald Trump Worship Events.
This whole website is eye-opening in just how overtly evangelical it is. Its organizers are absolutely shameless in their overt pandering. Promising evangelicals potential magic healings if they show up at a political rally sounds heartless to me, but it’s just part of the grift by now. Trumpist evangelicals gravitate around miracle-claim hotspots for the same reason that sketchy lawyers gravitate around car accidents.
As with revivals, I must add, Jesus doesn’t heal people he doesn’t like. He only heals people who are Jesusing correctly. So believers will think this campaign must be something Jesus really likes.
But revivals will not change evangelicals at heart, and most of them know it
Back in 2018, Gerardo Martí noted in a journal article for Sociology of Religion that revivals have always been prized by evangelicals as a way to get Americans to clean up our collective act:
Based on many years as an observer of Evangelicalism in America, I believe that today’s Evangelical conservatives have given up on spiritual revival as a means of change. Even in the recent past, conversion—a change of heart and mind that is the fruit of repentance and spiritual regeneration—was thought to be the means by which America would become a morally upright nation: change enough individuals, and the change on a personal level would result in broad change on a collective level.
However, he also observes that evangelicals might be in the process of changing what they think revivals mean:
However, the accumulated frustrations of not being able to ease their sense of religious decline, their continued legal struggles against abortion and gay marriage, and the overwhelming shifts in popular culture promoting much less religiously restrictive understandings of personal identity have prompted politically active religious actors to take a far more pragmatic stance. Their goal is no longer to morally persuade the public of their religious convictions; rather, their goal has become to authoritatively enforce behavioral guidelines through elected and nonelected officials who will shape policies and interpret laws such that they cannot be so easily altered or dismissed through the vagaries of popular elections.
I completely agree.
The scary side of evangelicals discarding their longing for revivals
As a commenter mentioned last time we met up, debates against atheists lost their luster once evangelicals realized they were well and truly in a huge decline. Faced with their own impending irrelevance, evangelicals changed gears.
Now evangelicals seek to control America in a far more direct way through legislation, court stacking, and control of the President.
Yes, Donald Trump might be an incoherent, social-media-addicted, dishonest and bloviating idiot whose opinions change to match those of whoever talked to him most recently. But all of that makes him a very good puppet for evangelicals with a little more political wisdom. If evangelicals can control him plus the other branches of American government, it hardly matters if individual citizens reject their evangelism attempts.
In fact, it almost makes no sense to waste time and money evangelizing normies at all.
It’s so funny to me that both sides of this evangelical squabble want revivals for the same reason. Anti-Trump evangelicals think revivals will sway pro-Trump evangelicals away from their literal golden idol. But pro-Trump evangelicals think revivals will totally win Trump the election, which will in turn do even more to enshrine evangelicalism and its rules into law.
Why revivals don’t change anything anyway
When I was Pentecostal, my church prayed for revival many times. The only time we saw great numbers of converts, however, was during Endtimes hysteria. Even then, though, nothing much changed. If the congregation got super-hyped and fervent, great, but it would die down on its own soon enough. Once it had, things would be back to the way they were.
It didn’t take me all that long to notice that people didn’t change much after conversion. Liars and cheaters would still lie and cheat after conversion. Those who had anger problems, addictions, and the like didn’t magically shed them. Nor would Jesus lift a finger to change anyone’s sexual orientation or libido levels—no matter how earnestly they asked. Whatever perceived problems someone had prior to conversion might lift in the general euphoria of conversion, but once that high wore off those problems returned with a vengeance.
As a result, I can honestly say that I knew only one person who seemed radically changed over the long term as a result of conversion: My ethereally-Jesusy friend Angela. That’s it. That’s the one leopard that ever changed her spots. I didn’t know her before her conversion, but my high school friends talked about her pre-conversion life sometimes—always with longing, because she’d been a blast to hang out with. I just could not reconcile anything they said with my best friend.
Over time, though, even Angela admitted that she struggled to stay Jesusy. She herself didn’t feel that she’d really changed much.
That’s it for people changed after conversion.
Incidentally, that number includes me. My own parents thought I’d started wearing a weird mask, one which finally fell away after I deconverted. But I can tell you truly that deep down I wanted to change, but couldn’t and didn’t. All Pentecostalism did for me was start me up on a scorching case of PTSD and worsen an existing anger-management problem.
So when mass numbers of people convert in a revival, they will have that euphoria for a bit, yes. But they still have all their same problems afterward.
America doesn’t improve after revival. It just gets a lot of new converts to churches. Those converts will almost all be hypocrites who will continue sinning their euphoria subsides. All that’s changed is them posturing more, sinning in secret, and perhaps feeling ashamed afterward—but that last bit is not a given.
Relationship broken: Just add more people
Back in the 1990s, I heard polyamorous people jokingly saying: “Relationship broken: Just add more people!” They joked like that because adding more people to a romantic relationship, be it through a baby or a few more sex partners, doesn’t change the heart of the relationship. If at heart that relationship is fraying apart, adding more people only stresses it more and hurts those who joined it.
In the same way, adding more people to evangelical churches won’t fix evangelicalism—any more than it fixes relationships to have a(nother) baby or bring in new partners.
So even if either side here got its way and Jesus totally sent them a huge, sweeping revival, it wouldn’t change anything. In my opinion, that entire end of Christianity is corrupted and broken. Even those who recognize the worst aspects of it still yearn for a basically dysfunctional-authoritarian system—just one that somehow avoids sex abuse, scandals, or narcissists in positions of power.
There’s no way for even the nicest evangelical group to square that circle. Only real-world management methods can prevent those problems, but evangelicals get grossed out by the idea of running groups according to real-world management methods. They want to let Jesus do the protecting and management. But he very obviously isn’t holding up his end of the equation, which is what leads directly to those problems!
That’s why a group of people fresh off a revival outbreak will seem incredibly Jesusy for a while, but eventually things always go back to normal. To change personal or group dynamics requires real-world cooperation and hard work to retrain behavior.
Revivals don’t do that. They never have. Indeed, they can’t. They’re a temporary burst of euphoria—nothing more and nothing less. When someone turns on the light in a messy room, then turns it off again, the room is still messy afterward. The light can’t magically clean the room. That’s on us—human beings—to do.
Revivals won’t fix evangelicalism
Incidentally, today’s topic surprised me into realizing that I haven’t really heard much in the past five years or so about revivals. Perhaps that’s why Asbury’s outbreak of euphoria got so much attention. A lot of evangelicals predicted it’d be a major revival or even another Great Awakening, but of course it wasn’t.
And it didn’t need to be.
Evangelicals have begun to think in terms of real-world, temporal sources of power. Their tribe is slowly becoming a secularized hard-right political faction with a very greasy coat of Jesus frosting. And I don’t think any number of revivals will ever change that, especially when the loudest of that faction are running political campaigns that look as if revival has already arrived for them.
I just wish seeing revival language and settings in a purely political, secular context like a Trump campaign rally could awaken evangelicals to the reality of revivals. It won’t, of course. As evangelicals like to say, the ways of a man always seem right to him. But I really wish it could.
Revivals just have a strong hold on evangelicals’ hearts. I suspect they always will. They’re the magic fix-it pill to deal with problems that are so deeply entrenched in evangelicalism that nobody—not even a god—can do anything about them.
NEXT UP: When all Christians have is a nail gun, everything they see looks like drywall. Their solutions flow very naturally from their own particular viewpoint. We’ll check out this mindset next time as it applies to sex scandals! See you soon!
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