Hoofbeats of revival:

...What the religious revival, whose hoofbeats I hear in the distance, will amount to remains, of course, to be seen...

...The presidential candidacies of Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson are further, though admittedly slight, evidence of a religious revival...

...Could it be that the religious revival I seem to see is only a mirage created by my personal revival...

...But we are tired of paying the price...

...The most recent revival took place in the 1950s, an era which, popular myth to the contrary notwithstanding, was not totally devoted to McCarthyism and Elvis Presley...

...At all events the religious revival phenomenon has been going on in this country long enough for some enterprising, though perhaps not quite respectable, historian to have established a law of periodicity for it...

...and many items on my list of current ills are simply the price we have had to pay for these accomplishments...

...But read these features as satire, and you'll see my point...

...But in the past they would no more reveal these commitments publicly than they would go naked in public...

...But some subjects do not permit themselves to be discussed in other than a satirical manner...

...The next time you read a "people" feature, see if the implicit theme is not "the vanity of human wishes"-an ancient religious theme...

...The junior senator from Wisconsin and Elvis the Pelvis were, so to speak, the bookends of the age...

...But I am neither so old nor so religious as to be subject to sacral hallucinations...

...However that may be, my sense is that an era has played itself out and is coming to an end.ing to an end...

...Yet extreme movements in one direction provoke equally extreme movements in the opposite direction: this is the sociological equivalent of Newton's third law of motion...

...Yet the fact that ministers are running for president at all is the sign of something in the wind...

...Thus I hold Joe McCarthy to blame for Elvis...

...Plainly it was McCarthy's worst sin...

...Jesse Jackson is the candidate of the marginalized par excellence: like the charge of the Light Brigade, his candidacy is magnificent, but it is not war-or at least not winning presidential politics...

...This sort of thing has been going on a long time now, at least since 1734, when, in Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards presided over the beginnings of the Great Awakening, a revival that was to sweep through British North America during the next fifteen years...

...And if we often don't get the joke, that doesn't mean there is no joke...

...I fully appreciate how preposterous it sounds to make this claim, since the stock in trade of such newspaper features is the celebration of behavior that stands (or rather runs, since such behavior rarely stands still) at the antipodes of the religious mentality...

...in the space between them a considerable amount of rational and civilized living was possible...

...religion was a private thing, almost an off-color thing...

...I don't know how wicked it may be, but it certainly suffers from a deficiency in loveliness...

...and thoughts of mortality naturally increase one's susceptibility to religious views and sentiments...

...If the writers and editors don't realize they are satirists, they remain satirists all the same, guided by some journalistic over-soul in building better than they know...

...My strongest evidence for a coming religious revival is the expansion of "people" and "lifestyle" features in American newspapers...

...After all, I am growing older...

...One thing the Jackson candidacy is evidence of-if I may be allowed to pat myself on the back both by way of self-gratulation and by way of consoling myself for the misfortunes of my political party-is the accuracy of the analysis I offered in this space seven months ago ["A Party of Outsiders," October 9, 1987], when I suggested that the problem the Democrats have in presidential elections is that they have traditionally constituted the party of outsiders, the party of the socially marginalized-something that won't wash in an age when there are relatively fewer marginalized constituencies than, say, during the years preceding the New Deal...

...and increasing age, at least after a certain point (and I have long since reached that point) brings increasing awareness of one's mortality...

...Lately, it seems, I keep running across otherwise quite secular persons who, without either ostentation or embarrassment, reveal their religious identities...

...Simply from an aesthetic point of view, it is not an attractive picture...

...Never mind moralizing about all this...

...It may well be that they have been religiously committed for years...

...At first I suspected that the signs of religious renewal I seemed to be detecting were merely projections of my own subjectivity...

...It even remains to be seen whether there is enough of a sense of the sacred left in American culture to sustain a genuine religious revival...

...The writers and editors of such features may not intend to be deliberately satirical, though this is no doubt sometimes the case...

...After a binge of secularism that now has extended twenty-five years, we find ourselves living with drugs, AIDS, poverty, homeless-ness, divorce, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, functional illiteracy, cultural illiteracy, etc., while vast numbers of the "more fortunate" are engaged in the indecent exercise of getting and spending as much as they can...

...for there certainly have been such accomplishments, not a few of them...

...None of this is to deny that there have been genuine social and moral accomplishments in the last quarter-century or so...

...My own suggestion, which I merely assert without offering proof, is that revivals have a life of about fifteen years, alternating with secular interregnums that last about twice as long, except that the secular interval may be extended as the result of a major war...

...Let me return to my subject...

...it means the joke is on us...

...Jackson is not perceived as being chiefly a religious figure, while Robertson, who is, has done very poorly in the presidential race...