Cultural Tide Gathers for a Puritan Revival

January 1999 is not just any old January. The Western world is now in a countdown to the millennium, a 12-month world watch already freighted with global economic jitters, the potential collapse of Russia, moral and political crusades and an eerie mix of technology and doomsday superstition.

Americans, in particular, face the possibility that the continuing upheaval in Washington could bring about a religious revival and a related neo-Puritanism. The first-ever impeachment trial of an elected U.S. president, amid what is already described as a cultural civil war, could be leading toward a moral and ideological Gettysburg.

Final decades of centuries are often psychologically convulsive. In the United States, the upheavals of the 1790s--the radicalism of Thomas Paine and the scoffing at religion so prominent in the French Revolution--led in the early 1800s to a great religious countertide called the Second Great Awakening. The fear is now growing in Manhattan, Martha’s Vineyard and Malibu that President Bill Clinton may be the inadvertent provocateur of another such reversal. This is not so far-fetched.

New centuries have historically arrived amid a feeling of unrest, but the millennial uncertainty is doubling or trebling the usual angst. Just ask Clinton, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Japanese bankers, Internet investors and U.S. senators about to sit as Clinton’s jurors.

Superstition is part of the mood: Look at the mania over the ultimate disaster movie, “Titanic,” and the perverse commercial interest in Megiddo, the site in northern Israel where some believe Armageddon will take place. Then there’s the Y2K fixation, that computers will crash--and possibly also jetliners and financial links--at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31.

The Y2K phobia, of course, is principally technological and economic, as is the lingering fear of a global financial crisis and the analogies to 1929. The latter was a convergence of global deflation, shrinking world trade and a bull-market orgy in new technology not unlike today’s--though the bubble 70 years ago was in broadcasting and telephone stocks, not e-commerce. A Dutch bank, ING Barings, has even reminded us that British and Dutch stock markets plummeted in 1699 and 1799, and the Dow Jones industrial average slid in 1899.

Political revolution, in turn, is not confined to the U.S. House of Representatives. Communist parties around the world have been gaining in power, muscling into new governing coalitions or even bringing down governments. Revenues are collapsing in the oil nations. Islam is on the march.

This brings us to the resurgence of fundamentalism, which in the United States is already being labeled neo-Puritanism. The moral and legal issues the U.S. Senate will face when and if it tries Clinton are only one litmus test. Fundamentalist-type demands for simpler answers amid complexity are also visible in global politics (Communist gains), economics (trade nationalism) and culture (ethnic separatism and anti-immigration sentiment).

The moral shift is international. While congressmen in Washington cringe at the scarlet “A,” Pakistan is moving toward a code of Islamic justice in which rapists are executed within 24 hours. Even nonreligious China has drafted new laws to crack down on adultery. But in the English-speaking world, morality and religion have a long history of being intertwined.

In Washington, vulnerable politicians who have called for Clinton’s sex-related impeachment are falling like moral tenpins. Not only Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is resigning. So is his briefly chosen successor, Rep. Bob Livingston (R-Ga.). Outed for adultery by Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, Livingston used his resignation statement to urge the president to do the same. With Hustler paying big money for women willing to tell all, congressmen are now starting to imitate medical doctors: Don’t have a woman in your office without a) keeping the door open or b) having a nurse, or witness, present.

Where sexually transmitted diseases didn’t stall the sexual revolution, the Paula Corbin Jones and Monica S. Lewinsky ruckuses could. And there’s also Jane Doe No. 5--the unidentified woman whose comments about an alleged Clinton sexual assault and coverup are part of the guarded material that some undecided representatives read before voting for impeachment on Dec. 19. If such a charge enters the Senate trial, the president’s foes claim he could be facing new charges of obstruction of justice. Equally to the point, neo-Puritanism could take a major step forward.

Current polls show Americans seem to prefer adultery, perjury and a rising stock market to any sort of neo-Puritan crusade. But will they feel this way in April or May, if the Dow has dropped by 30% and Senate trial revelations have Clinton’s ratings on a similar curve?

At the moment, few believe either is likely. Yet, a Puritan trend is easy enough to imagine. Such movements were recurring tides in the United States from the 17th through the 19th centuries. All three of the major English-speaking civil wars have been preceded by religious surges: The English Civil War of the 1640s followed the rise of Puritanism; the American Revolution followed the so-called First Great Awakening; and the U.S. Civil War followed the Second Great Awakening. Several historians have called them the three Puritanisms. By whatever label, this kind of religious politics has been powerful stuff.

And it could be again for the millennium. Despite talk about the rise of fundamentalism and the emergence of the Christian Right since the 1970s, the last three decades have seen a far larger counterdevelopment. This is the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and 1970s with Woodstock, the Vietnam War and “Oh! Calcutta!” and reached new highs in the 1990s with Flynt, Internet pornography and 1997’s record sale or rental of 600 million adult videos. Religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson clearly haven’t been calling the shots in American culture. Liberals and centrists have--people who are more secular and generally not very religious and who, by two or three to one, now support Clinton and oppose impeachment.

These polarizations of lifestyle, culture and conscience are central to the way U.S. politics since the 1960s has resembled an intermittent civil war. These tensions were evident from 1963 to 1974, then again in the late 1980s and, most recently, since 1994. The fight over Clinton’s fate is a vital campaign for both cultural armies. If one set of moral, sexual, religious and legal views prevails in the U.S. Senate, the vote could produce a latter-day Gettysburg--the decade’s potentially decisive confrontation between the “moralists” and the “permissives.”

Sophisticates can present anti-impeachment poll data to argue that America has a new anti-Puritan morality. Perhaps so. It has been well over a century since the last major American religious revival. Rightly or wrongly, the bulk of U.S. religious histories deal with the fundamentalist upsurges of the late 20th century as mere sideshows. The last of the great waves came in the 19th century, with the Second Great Awakening, or Third Puritanism. Few have identified any Third Awakening, or Fourth Puritanism.

To predict a gathering amid the modernity of the 1990s would be to court mockery. On the other hand, the final decades of centuries tend to overpredict a moral laxity--the insurgent mood of revolutionary France and Europe in the 1790s, and then, in the 1890s, the fin de siecle decadence of Oscar Wilde’s London. Chic thinking in the 1990s has been at least kindred: If not postmoral cosmopolitanism, at least an age in which traditional morality is displaced.

In the United States of the 1790s, reaction against moral and political radicalism nurtured a traditionalist counterreaction, beginning in the small towns of New England, which grew into the Second Great Awakening. Through the 1850s, a related cultural warfare wracked U.S. politics with demands for prohibitions of liquor sales and unseemly amusements on the Sabbath. Missions and Bible societies proliferated. Puritanism even spread to cuisine, with the invention of the graham cracker and the organization in New England cities of Female Retrenchment Societies to defend women against tea, coffee, rich cake and pastry.

One does not have to see cappuccino, chocolate eclairs and Sunday shopping in jeopardy to suspect the gathering of another religious or traditionalist countertide. The three principal civil wars in Britain and the United States have been great intersections of cultural conflict with a reawakened and remobilizing religion. Few questions are more important in America’s millennial countdown than whether the current peacetime imitation of civil war is heading in a similar direction.