Generational Turnings and the Great American Revival

One of the shows that I listen to fairly regularly is Steve Deace, and a couple of days ago he had an interesting discussion about The Fourth Turning and Strauss & Howe’s generational theory. It’s worth giving a listen, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff.

What really interested me, though, is how the theory may (or may not) predict the period of religious revival that we currently appear to be entering. So after listening to the show, I shot Steve an email with my thoughts on the subject. Since this email more or less brings together my recent thoughts on the subject, I thought it was worth sharing on this blog.

Hi Steve. I enjoyed your show today, where you discussed Strauss & Howe’s theory of generational turnings. I’ve been fascinated by this subject for several years now, and have studied The Fourth Turning is Here (published just recently) and Generations (published in the 80s), in addition to The Fourth Turning. Here are some pertinent details that you missed, but may find interesting:

First, of all of Strauss & Howe’s predictions, the optimistic ones always seem laughably wrong in hindsight, whereas the pessimistic predictions are the ones that seem prophetic. I could share examples, but you’re a busy man and I want to keep this email relatively short. Todd will probably back me up on this.

Second, the spiritual foundation of the new societal order which emerges in the first turning is always set by the awakening in the previous second turning. So, for example, the spiritual foundations of the post-Revolutionary War period that gave us the Constitution were set by the First Great Awakening in the first half of the 1700s.

If we follow this pattern to its logical conclusion, then the spiritual foundations of the coming period of national unity in the 2030s and 2040s were set by the counterculture revolution of the 1960s… which is just another way of saying that the woke leftists win and establish their DEI utopia. That is what the “hero” generation of the Millennials will give us, if we follow the pattern.

Third, Howe’s most pessimistic prediction in The Fourth Turning is Here is that our current crisis era spirals so completely out of control that the United States disintegrates into separate waring countries. In other words, we never get a first turning period of national unity because the whole thing breaks apart, and the current “hero” generation never rises to the occasion.

But there is a third option, which Strauss & Howe actually predicted in one of their first books, Generations. This third option is the most pessimistic prediction from that book, but it lines up pretty well with what has actually occured. It is that we skip the first turning altogether and go immediately from a crisis era to an awakening era.

There is a precedent for this. According to the theory, we should have gotten a period of national unity immediately after the Civil War… but of course, we didn’t. Reconstruction was a mess that we muddled through for several decades, giving way to the labor riots, the rise of anarchism, the decadent excesses of the Gilded Age, etc. But we also got things like prohibition, Zionism, premillennial dispensationalism, and movements like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Salvation Army.

Point is, it was a period of spiritual awakening that happened immediately after a major crisis. We never got the peace, unity, or prosperity of a first turning period, but jumped immediately from the Civil War to the next Awakening. And it appears that we are following a very similar path right now.

Put another way, our three possible scenarios are:

1) The left wins, and everyone who listens to your show gets shipped off to the rainbow gulag in order to establish their progressive utopia (Strauss & Howe’s optimistic scenario),

2) The cycle breaks, and the United States disintegrates into separate countries, probably with an accompanying civil and/or global war (Howe’s pessimistic scenario), or

3) We skip straight from the current crisis period to a period of spiritual revival, which ultimately saves the country, but never gives us a period of peace, prosperity, or unity–at least not until the next generational cycle.

If the assassin’s bullet had blown Trump’s head off in Butler Pennsylvania, I think we would already be well on our way to either scenario 1 or scenario 2. I think the reason God saved Trump’s life on that day was to move us into scenario 3, and to give us the sort of spiritual revival that will purge our culture of all (or at least most) of the pernicious evils that took root during the counterculture revolution of the 60s, which in many ways was actually an anti-revival. Fifty years from now, I think the world that the Boomers gave us will seem as foreign and strange to our grandchildren as Medieval Christendom seems to us now.

Anyhow, those are some points that I thought you’d find pertinent. It was an interesting discussion on your show.