The meaning and purpose of life changed from becoming more fully human, that is, acquiring virtue by exercising natural rights (live, liberty, and private property) and practicing the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice viii), to attaining or providing a good material life as efficiently as possible. vi Complicating matters further was the existing confusion between American personalist liberal democracy and English individualist liberal democracy. Politically, the Second Great Awakening resulted in a gradual transference in American political theory from sovereignty of the human person under God, v to the French or European concept of sovereignty of the collective under itself. Given the perceived need to justify human chattel slavery, iii enthusiastic sects and movements such as the New Christianity, Neo-Catholicism, and Theosophy in many cases rationalized racism instead of condemning it.

ii In consequence, many people rejected organized religion for its presumed inherent irrationality. Creeds consisted of adaptations of the “New Things” ( rerum novarum) of socialism, modernism, and the New Age wreaking havoc in Church, State and Family in Europe at the time.Īs in the First Great Awakening of the 1730s, religious belief became fideist, more emotional and less intellectual, often discarding “man’s miserable intellect” i altogether as irrelevant or dangerous. Religiously, it consisted of slightly modified, often sanitized versions of “the Democratic Religion,” le démocratie religieuse. Ronald Knox sense, the Second Great Awakening signaled a far more profound change than many people today realize.

Usually characterized as an enthusiastic religious revival in the Msgr.

Take, for example, the “Second Great Awakening” in the United States that lasted from about 1795 to around 1840. Most of these have not aged well and were never very palatable to begin with. It comes as no surprise, then, that in common with modernism (an amalgam of two millennia of failed ideas repackaged for current consumption), today’s “wokeness” consists of warmed-over notions from the past. Progressives and forward-looking elites pride themselves on being or becoming “woke.” In common with other advocates of supposedly new and improved products and ideas, however, contempt for anything other than their own opinions often leads the Awokened to reject and utterly ignore events prior to their own incarnation or outside their respective frames of reference.

The great ephemeral skin online