John Fea is a professor of American history at Messiah University in 
Pennsylvania. Professor Fea has an excellent blog called “The Way of Improvement Leads Home” which I follow regularly.
He recently offered a post with this title: “Is a Spiritual Revival Leads to More Christian Trumpism, Is It Really a Spiritual Revival? Or is It Something Else?” I encourage you to read the entire piece, if you haven’t already.
Evangelicals tend to believe that “spiritual revivals” or “Christian awakenings” will provide the ultimate solution to all of society’s problems.
Christian media promotes this story-line regularly:
Protests aren’t the answer. Boycotts aren’t the answer. New laws aren’t the answer. What we need is a spiritual awakening! If everyone will only come to Jesus, then all our problems will begin to solve themselves!
Or so we are told, over and over and over again.
Professor Fea’s important post draws from the story of a great American, Frederick Douglass.
Douglass’ autobiography tells the story of his own conversion to Christianity, and why he did not see “personal conversion” as the cure all for the the sins of slavery.
Douglass was a slave who witnessed his master’s spiritual conversion. And then marveled at how the master’s new-found faith in Christ made him a more abusive master than he had ever been before.
Quoting from a recent biography of Douglass, Fea notes:
“A recent convert himself to Christian faith, although now struggling to
understand whether God intended any justice on earth, Frederick witnessed the spectacle of master Thomas’s wrenching emotional breakdown and confession in that pen. Blacks were not allowed in the pen, nor in front of the preacher’s performances, but Douglass tells us that he imposed his way close enough to hear Auld “groan,” and to see his reddened face, his disheveled hair, and a “stray tear halting on his cheek.” Here festered the dark heart of the moral bankruptcy of slaveholders that the future abolitionist would make his central subject. . .
“Douglass converted this memory into angry condemnations of the religious hypocrisy of the entire Christian slaveholding universe, especially the little microcosm of Auld’s household, where the young slave now had to listen daily to loud praying and testifying by the white family, and to participate in hospitality extended to local preachers who were sometimes housed at Auld’s home, all the while enduring the good Methodist’s verbal and physical cruelty. For Douglass, the proof of any sincerity in Auld’s ‘tear-drop’ manifested in his actions. In his deeds and his glances, wrote Douglass, it was as if the pathetic master had concluded, ‘I will teach you, young man, that, though I have parted with my sins, I have not parted with my sense. I shall hold slaves, and go to heaven too.’”
I am sorry, but the naive, ignorant belief that “spiritual revival” alone will solve all of society’s problems is merely another symptom of our crippling addiction to American Individualism.
More than that, it reveals an extremely simplistic view of both human nature and the work of the Holy Spirit.
All of these intellectual and theological mistakes serve as chains locked around the ankles of American evangelicalism. They prevent us from genuinely following after Jesus as we should.
When the church ought to be in the lead of the Black Lives Matter movement, talking about the Image of God and His new kingdom come, most evangelical leaders sit on the sidelines calling for more prayer and waiting for revival. The exceptions to this hackneyed response are extremely admirable but very, very few.
Sometimes the best way to pray is to get off your butt and march with those who suffer, publicly condemn the “masters” who want to control us, and work for social revolution — all in the name of Christ.
