Ross Douthat: Religious history is shaped as much by sudden irruptions as long trajectories.
A worshipper outside the chapel that became the center of a multi-week religious revival, on the campus of Asbury University in Wilmore, Ky. on Feb. 18, 2023.In an 1822 letter to the physician Benjamin Waterhouse, Thomas Jefferson expressed his confidence that traditional Christianity in the young United States was giving way to a more enlightened faith, much like Jefferson’s own in its rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
That history is worth mentioning for a specific reason and a general one. The specific reason is that a Christian college in rural Kentucky, Asbury University, has just experienced an old-school revival — a multiweek outpouring that has kept students praying and singing in the school chapel from morning to night, drawn ten of thousands of pilgrims from around the country, captured the imagination of the internet and even drawn the attention of The New York Times.
These analytical tools are always important; the sociological doesn’t disappear just because the mystical has suddenly arrived. In, for instance, I suggested a link between the apparent crisis in teenage mental health and the decline of organized Christianity, and this past week my Times colleague Ruth Graham, reporting from Asbury, notes that accounts of healing at the revival are “overwhelmingly about mental health, trauma and disillusionment.
Whether these experiences correspond to ultimate reality will not be argued here. My points are about observation and expectation.
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