The bills that are working their way through the 104th Congress and the tenor of the debates, especially in the House, make it clear that we are witnessing a major shift in American social and economic policy. How should these developments be interpreted? Is this change in policy likely to be ephemeral or long-lasting?

A clue to the answers is contained in the pattern of voting over the past dozen years. Exit polls taken during the mid-term congressional elections of 1982 revealed that about a third of the voters identified themselves as evangelical or other believers in enthusiastic religion which is characterized by spiritual intensity linked to conversions. Such individuals split their vote fairly evenly between Democratic and Republican candidates in 1982, but not in 1994. Not only had their share of the ballots risen between the two elections, but the bulk of believers in enthusiastic religion have shifted from the Democrats to the Republicans. In 1994 only 26 percent continued to vote Democratic while 74 percent voted Republican.

If those who embrace enthusiastic religion turn out in the same proportion in 1996, and if they continue to favor the Republicans over the Democrats by the same margin, there will have been an inter-party shift of about 7.5 million voters. That shift by itself is enough to create a fourteen point spread in the upcoming presidential election in favor of the Republicans. So large a realignment can not be offset easily by seeking compensating shifts in other constituencies.

The election statistics thus reveal that we are in a process of political change that is to a large extent spawned by trends in American religiosity. One can not understand current political and ethical trends, nor properly forecast future economic developments, without understanding the cycles in religiosity in American history and the social, economic, and political reform movements that they have spawned.
Religious enthusiasm in America has tended to run in cycles that last about 100 years. Each cycle has consisted of three phases, each about a generation long.

See Table 1

A cycle begins with a phase of religious revival, which intensifies religious beliefs and ushers in new or reinvigorated ethics and theological principles. The phase of religious revival is followed by a phase in which the new ethics precipitate powerful political programs and movements. The cycle ends with a phase in which the ascendancy of the ethics and politics of the religious awakening come under increasing challenge and the political coalition promoted by that awakening goes into decline. Note that these cycles overlap, so that the end of one cycle coincides with some years of the new cycle.

Those who directly identify with the principles of a revival are usually only a minority of the population, even if a large one, but what they lack in numbers they make up in enthusiasm and in an energy derived from a sense of the righteousness of their cause. In their political activities they have been able to extend their influence far beyond their numbers by building coalitions on single issues.

Historians of religion refer to the periods of religious revival as "Great Awakenings." The United States is currently in its Fourth Great Awakening which began about 1960. The new religious revival is fueled by a revulsion with the corruptions of contemporary society. It is a rebellion against preoccupation with material acquisition and sexual debauchery; against indulgence in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and drugs; against gluttony; against financial greed; and against all other forms of self-indulgence that titillate the senses and destroy the soul. The leaders of the revival are attempting to win their hearers to piety and to an ethic which extols individual responsibility, hard work, a simple life, and dedication to the family. They emphasize that in order to resist the corruptions promoted by Satan and abetted by many persons in business and political life, individuals must dedicate themselves to God by embracing an unrelenting struggle for self-purification. They call on their adherents to strive for a mystical experience that will cleanse them of their earlier sins and lead to their spiritual rebirth. The religious excitement generated by the current revival has energized a number of movements that have a direct and large impact on political and business life.

To fully understand the meaning of the Fourth Great Awakening it is necessary to review briefly the three previous religious-political cycles in American life. America was from its beginning a deeply religious society. Down to 1790 about 80 percent of Americans (90 percent of the free population) were of British descent and were attached primarily to the dissenting British churches: Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and Methodists. Another 5 percent were pietistic Germans or Scandinavians whose religious creeds and ethics were similar to those of the dissenting British churches.

The New England strain of these denominations was particularly strong in America because of favorable demographic conditions that produced unusually high rates of natural increase. By the 1820s Yankees and their descendants, who accounted for hardly five percent of all the immigrants into the U.S. before that year, represented about 80 percent of the northern population and about 20 percent of the population of the southern states.

Although the Puritan founders of New England were deeply dedicated to their religious principles, their children and grandchildren were more equivocal. Religious enthusiasm waned until the early 1730s when a new surge of religiosity became evident. One of the most inspirational figures was George Whitefield, a Methodist itinerant minister, who from 1738 to 1740 evangelized both northern and southern colonies with an explosive emotional power that deeply moved his hearers. Whitefield inspired other ministers and lay itinerants to take up the task of extending the revival to every corner of the British colonies.

The main theological features of the First Great Awakening were the justification of mass, emotional revival meetings, the emphasis on "new birth" as the central objective of the revivals, the emergence of the ethic of benevolence as an aspect of "new birth," and the weakening of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.

The political phase ran from 1760 through 1790. It was marked by attacks on British moral and political corruption and by charges that this corruption was being foisted on the American colonies where it threatened the struggle for purification. The political product of this ideology was the American Revolution. Considering that the new religiosity provided much of the ideological foundation for the Revolution, it is ironic that many of the political leaders of the Revolution were deists, individuals who believed that although God had set the world into motion, He did not play an active role in human affairs. The third phase of the First Great Awakening extended from 1790 through 1820. During this period the Revolutionary coalition broke apart along ideological and partisan lines and the influence of churches was at its lowest point in American history, due in large measure to the impact of the secular ideology popularized by leaders of the Revolution.

The Second Great Awakening began about 1800 and the revival phase lasted until 1840. It was during this era that the camp meeting was invented. In the North the doctrine of predestination was further weakened and a new theology, reflecting Methodist influence, arose which held that anyone was capable of achieving saving grace through a determined inner and outer struggle against sin. Those who sought a state of grace were told to guide themselves by the principles of disinterested benevolence. They were assured that if they achieved grace they would be healthy and prosperous because God rewarded virtue. Those who were condemned would be visited by economic and other catastrophes, because poverty was the wages of sin.

Hearers were also told that the American mission was to build God's Kingdom on earth. An array of reform movements were launched to make America a fit place for the Second Coming of Christ. These included the temperance movement, which at first sought to convince individuals to cease drinking alcoholic beverages voluntarily, the abolitionist movement which initially hoped to persuade slave owners to voluntarily manumit their slaves, and a nativist movement which aimed either to slow the large number of Catholics who were entering the country or to convert them to Protestantism.

During the political phase of the Second Great Awakening, which began in 1840 and continued until 1870, the temperance movement was successful in getting many state and local governments to license the sale of alcoholic beverages. The high point of this campaign was reached between 1846 and 1855 when thirteen states, led by Maine, prohibited sales of all alcoholic drinks.

The militant abolitionists initially focused their campaign not on the state but on the denominations. They wanted their churches to condemn slavery as an extraordinary sin that infected every aspect of life and created an insurmountable barrier to personal and national salvation. Although that creed gradually gained numerous adherents, it remained a minority doctrine even within the northern churches.

A fraction of these radicals decided to go over the heads of church leaders by shifting the struggle to the political arena. That decision diluted the benevolent content of the antislavery appeal but greatly broadened the antislavery coalition and eventually led to the formation of the Republican party. Republicans urged the northern electorate to vote for them not because it was their Christian duty to free the slaves but in order to prevent slaveowners from seizing land in the territories that rightly belonged to northern whites, to prevent slaveowners from reducing the wages of northern workers by inundating northern labor markets with their slaves, and to prevent the Papal Power in alliance with the Slave Power and operating through the Democratic party, from seizing control of the American government.

The outcome of the slavery issue was settled by the Civil War. Despite the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, however, the deep hostility of southern whites and the ambivalent support of northern whites compromised the struggle for the civil equality of ex-slaves and led to its virtual abandonment in 1877. By the end of the 1880s most of the abolitionist leaders were dead or retired and their places in the northern evangelical movement were taken up by men and women who were preoccupied with a different set of issues.

The Third Great Awakening began about 1890 and the revival phase extended to 1930. It was marked by a major theological split among the principal evangelical churches, with the winning faction rejecting the proposition that poverty was the wages of sin. This split was, to a large extent, precipitated by the urban crisis. Evangelicals were divided on how to reform the cities, which were growing at alarming rates and were viewed as centers of corruption, crime, drunkenness, prostitution, and graft that threatened to infect the entire society.

Darwinism was another issue that promoted splits on ethics and creed. Darwin's theories not only challenged the biblical account of creation. They also challenged the millennial goal of the nation, the building of God's Kingdom on earth, by describing nature as amoral and purposeless.

Increasing labor conflict was a third problem. Because the rural areas were populated by property owners who abhorred any infringements on property rights, it had been relatively easy to make strikes illegal in an agrarian world and to use troops to suppress them under anti-conspiracy laws. But in the new urban world the great majority of the laboring population owned relatively little property and they were thought to be open to anarchistic and syndicalist theories brought over from Europe.

Debates over these issues spawned two camps. The conservatives wanted to stand fast on the basic evangelical principles of the Second Great Awakening. That movement, whose most conspicuous element is now called Fundamentalism, upheld the Puritan belief that God spoke to humankind through the Bible. The fundamentalists were strongest in the rural areas, particularly in the South.

The winning camp of the Third Great Awakening has come to be called "modernist." Modernists applied scientific principles to the study of the Bible, on the assumption that it was an historical document written by men who were trying to understand God's will within the context of their own times and civilizations. Modernists also believed that evolutionary theory was consistent with biblical thought since the world was evolving not only toward human beings as the highest form of life, but toward ever more perfected human beings. In this view the laws of nature were God's laws and scientists were the ones who would discover and explain them. As theologians were needed to interpret the Bible, scientists were needed to interpret nature.

The millennialist dream of the Second Great Awakening thus became transformed by the modernists. Disciples of the Second Great Awakening had the wrong theory of how the millennium would arrive. The new theory switched the emphasis from the Second Coming of Christ to a new optimism about perfecting American society. In the place of divine revelation there now stood the revelations of science. Since most of the problems were not physical or biological but social, a new breed of social scientists was required who understood the problems of the cities and who knew how to reconstruct them in a way that would alleviate the social crises of the age.

A radical wing of the modernist camp came to be called the Social Gospel movement. Its leading figures argued that if America was to revitalize itself it would not only have to change its creed, its theory of man's relationship to God, but also change its ethics. It would have to make poverty not a personal failure but a social failure, and evil would have to be seen not as a personal sin but a sin of society. According to these radicals it was the obligation of the state to improve the economic condition of the poor by favoring labor and redistributing income, since that was necessary to put an end to urban corruption.

During most of the revival phase it was the conservatives who were in control of the church hierarchies and related organizations, and the reforms that they promoted were those left over from the Second Great Awakening, such as the reform of graft-ridden city governments, the protection of children through compulsory education and limits on child labor, the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and the extension of the franchise to women. Indeed, down into the 1920s it was the theological conservatives who were on the offensive, seeking to limit the influence of the modernists and Social Gospelers within denominational circles, if not to bar them entirely.

Champions of the modernist cause were supplied from an unexpected source. During the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century colleges and universities were church institutions and focal points for revivals. Their presidents were usually ordained ministers who taught required courses in moral philosophy or natural theology. However, during the Third Great Awakening modernist and Social Gospel theories were widely embraced by university teachers who taught them to their students. Moreover, for reasons that had more to do with technology than ideology, the student bodies of the colleges and universities began to expand at a remarkable rate. By World War I the universities were producing far more secular than sacred writers. Journalists, essayists, historians, social scientists, novelists and dramatists who embraced modernist ideology were turned out by the tens of thousands. They became entrenched in the new mass media-- low-cost daily newspapers, glossy magazines, inexpensive books, popular theater, vaudeville, and movies--which they used to attack conservative religionists. These attacks were so successful that they drove the fundamentalists out of their denominational offices and into sanctuaries sheltered from such public criticism. The victory of the modernists and Social Gospelers laid the basis for the welfare state, providing both the ideological foundation and the political drive for the labor reforms of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, for the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s, and for the new feminist programs of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I now return to the questions posed at the beginning of this lecture regarding the Fourth Great Awakening and the political realignment of the 1990s. The phase of religious intensification began in the late 1950s and early 1960s when church membership began to grow across all denominations. However, from the mid 1960s on, it was only the enthusiastic religions that showed rapid growth, cutting deeply into the normal membership of the mainline churches, and also drawing many unchurched persons into their fold. Over the past three decades membership in the principal Protestant mainline churches of America has declined by 25 percent, while the membership of enthusiastic churches has nearly doubled. In some cases, as with the Mormons, the membership has quadrupled.

By the end of the 1980s enthusiastic religion had about 60 million adherents representing about one-third of the electorate. Although often identified with the rapidly growing Fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and Protestant charismatic denominations, the movement is far wider. It includes about 20 million persons in the churches of the mainline Protestant denominations, 6 million Catholics who reported a "born again" experience and nearly 5 million Mormons. Some mainline churches have responded to the demand for a more passionate religion by embracing pentecostalism, including the Roman Catholic Church which has launched its own charismatic movement.

Single-issue movements began to emerge about half way through the religious phase: the right-to-life movement emerged during the mid 1970s, tax revolts exploded in the late 1970s, and the movement against drunk driving (MADD) followed early in the 1980s. These developments are comparable to the temperance, nativist, and abolitionist movements of the 1830s and early 1840s, which despite considerable successes were viewed as zealous minority efforts far from the mainstream of political life.

In 1979 the Moral Majority came into being with a bid to become the vehicle through which believers in enthusiastic religion could unite on a national program of political restructuring which included anti-abortion, prayer in the schools, and the elimination of pornography. Although it had significant success in shifting intensely religious voters from the Democratic to the Republican column during the 1984 elections, the Moral Majority was, like the branch of abolitionist movement of the 1840s led by William Lloyd Garrison, too rigid theologically, undecided whether the denominational churches or the broader political electorate was its main concern, and too focused on the abortion issue. Tarred by the televangelist scandals of the mid 1980s, the Moral Majority collapsed in 1989, its place taken by a broader movement called the Christian Coalition that was formed a year earlier.

The Christian Coalition has more clearly focused on politics, is more willing to make compromises on key issues in the interest of extending their coalition, is theologically more flexible, with better connections among enthusiastic religionists in the mainline churches, than was true of the Moral Majority. Thus promoting the traditional family has superseded abortion as a coalition issue. The Christian Coalition has also reached out to economic conservatives by integrating tax reductions and smaller government into their social program, linking them to their principles regarding individual responsibility. This move to a less dogmatic, more issue-oriented, more minimalist basis for institutional change recalls the compromises made by such politically skillful abolitionists as Salmon P. Chase, senator and later governor from Ohio, when he joined with former adversaries in creating the Free Soil party and then the Republican party on a minimalist antislavery program.

It is too soon to know whether the coalition that swept the Republicans into power in 1994 has been consolidated. It may be possible for President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and other Democratic strategist to devise an appeal that will win back those intensely religious voters who have only recently deserted them. By now it is probably clear to at least the Democratic moderates that their party committed a major political blunder when they pilloried believers in enthusiastic religion. As Baptists from Arkansas and Tennessee, Clinton and Gore understand and speak the language of evangelicals and know how to fashion an effective appeal. The real issue is whether there is enough flexibility among the more secular leaders of the Democratic party to accept such a strategy.

If the Republicans retain or increase their control of Congress in 1996 and also capture the presidency, it will probably mean that the religious voters who deserted the Democrats are permanently disaffected. In that case the Republicans will probably be the dominant party for a generation, for it may take that long to rear a new generation of believers in enthusiastic religion who are again comfortable with the Democratic party.

I now want to discuss briefly how governmental policy is likely to be affected by the new coalition. First, even though the rhetoric is different there are many issues stemming from the ethics of the Fourth Great Awakening that are also embraced in the ethics of the Third Great Awakening. For example, "sexual harassment" may have originated as a radical slogan of the feminist movement but its content is quite Victorian and it is an aid to those who wish to see a return to traditional family values. Other reforms that unite both ethical camps include protection of the environment, promotion of education, reversal of the growth of pornography and violence in the media, reversal of state-sponsored gambling, and control or suppression of illegal drug trafficking and use.

Second, although the new Republican coalition may pursue different tactics and have a different set of priorities, it is unlikely that it will turn back the clock on race relations, universal education, equal opportunity for women, religious freedom, and the other great social reforms of the twentieth century. I base this assessment partly on the fact that professional women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are already an important part of the movement for enthusiastic religion and will become an increasingly large presence in the electorate over the next generation. Moreover, the recent collaboration of black and white Pentecostal churches in forming a common umbrella organization suggests that unlike the past, enthusiastic religion may serve to promote racial and ethnic unity rather than to thwart it.

Third, although the political focus of the current revival is primarily on social and cultural issues, these concerns often lead to conservative economic positions. Adherents of enthusiastic religion embrace the ethic of benevolence, but they also draw a distinction between the worthy and the unworthy poor. They believe that vicious habits, which are found at every level of the income distribution, are due to personal depravity. Such depravity can only be conquered by intense introspection and unrelenting commitment to resist Satanic temptations. Bureaucratic welfare programs are deemed counterproductive whenever they fail to distinguish between the worthy and unworthy poor. Moreover, the high taxes needed to sustain government bureaucracies undermine the traditional family by forcing both parents into the workplace and creating a "time deficit" in the rearing of children.

Such an outlook is bound to put some of the economic reforms of the Third Great Awakening at risk. Among existing programs most likely to be cut back are those that aim at bringing about equality of income rather than equality of economic opportunity. The theory that cultural crises can be resolved by raising incomes has been given a long trial and has turned out to be incorrect. Over the past century the real income of the bottom fifth of the population has increased thirteen-fold, which is more than twice the gain of the balance of the population, the upper four-fifths. The poor of the 1990s are relatively rich by 1890 standards, since only households in the top 10 percent of the 1890 income distribution had real incomes that exceed the current poverty line.

Yet despite these economic accomplishments we have still not solved the national cultural crisis that precipitated the Social Gospel movement. Such problems as drug addiction, births to single teenage women, rape, batteries of women and children, broken families, and violent teenage deaths are far more severe today than they were a century ago. As a consequence not only members of enthusiastic churches but many in the mainline churches have become convinced that cultural reform must be pursued primarily at this individual level, with an empathy and warmth better achieved by churches and organizations such as Alcoholics Anonymous than by government bureaucracies. This re-emergence of confidence in the power of personal compassion is a major factor in the new populism with its demand to return power to the people.

Fourth, whatever the reservations of some Senate Republicans, I believe that the tax revolt is too broad and too deep to be thwarted. This revolt is broadly based, partly because of the new emphasis on personal responsibility, and partly because of the changes that have taken place in the households that are represented in the upper part of the income distribution. The top decile used to be dominated by those that Thorstein Veblen labelled "the leisure class," because they derived most of their income not through labor but through the ownership of land and other physical or financial assets.

By 1980, however, before the explosion in professional salaries, about 54 percent of the households in the top decile were there only because there were two or more earners in such households. Another 12 percent consisted of single-earner households which were in the top decile only because the breadwinners were at the age of peak earnings for their occupations. They were not in the top decile ten years earlier or ten years later. A typical family in the top decile consisted of an accountant or a college professor earning about $50,000 who was married to a secretary or a school teacher earning $25,000. The couples in such families were typically fiftyish and had been working for twenty to thirty years.

Resistance to tax increases is strong not only among the top 10 percent at whom the tax act of 1993 was aimed, but among others who are younger and earn less but who are on the same occupational track as those in the top 10 percent. An entry-level accountant typically takes home about half the earnings of an accountant in his fifties, and falls into the seventh decile from the top. The average income of starting secretaries falls near the bottom of the eighth decile. If a young accountant and secretary were married, their joint income would place them near the bottom of the fourth decile or at the top of the fifth.

So hitting the top 10 percent of the income distribution hard is not hitting the idle rich, but hitting people toward the end of their careers who, after decades of scrimping, and hours of work much longer than average, are finally enjoying a modicum of comfort. Their complaints at being overtaxed resonates throughout the middle and even the lower deciles of the income distribution where not only their children, but their parents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, cousins, and others in their extended families are located.

Those who populate the middle ranks of the income distribution can even identify with the majority of those in the richest two percent of households. Even that lofty pinnacle is no longer occupied primarily by plantation aristocrats, land barons, merchant princes, and other robber barons but by professionals whose skills and services warrant their compensation. The mythical Huxtables, made famous by Bill Cosby, are typical of these super rich, since a fifty-five-year-old gynecologist married to a fifty-year-old lawyer would probably have a joint income quite close to the mean income of the top one percent of households.

Finally, an extended reign by the new coalition does not necessarily mean that the great egalitarian gains of the past century will be reversed. These gains were not primarily the result of redistributive fiscal policies. They were due mainly to changes in productive technology and consumer demand that made human capital (i.e., the capitalized value of income attributable to occupational skills) more important than land and physical capital in the productive process.

Agriculture was and is the sector of the economy that makes the greatest use of land and physical capital. Great advances in productivity combined with limited increases in demand have reduced agriculture from the largest sector of the economy to one that accounts for barely 2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. On the other hand the service sector, which depends far more on labor than on land or physical capital, has increased its share in national product from 10 percent to over 60 percent. So changes in technology and in demand rather than an egalitarian fiscal policy explain why human capital has become more important than physical capital in the productive processes.

One should not leap from the last point to the conclusion that the egalitarian state played a minor role in the equalization of pre-tax incomes. Quite the contrary, the state did much to equalize incomes through the subsidization of education. By making primary and secondary education compulsory and free, the state endowed poor and middle class children with large amounts of highly valuable human capital. This endowment of the relatively poor was further extended by the establishment of free state and city universities, and by the G.I. Bill (1944) which enabled more than eight million veterans of World War II to obtain vocational and college educations. After World War II private universities also enhanced the endowment of lower and middle-class children by greatly expanding scholarship programs. Although some of the expansion of higher education was supported by private philanthropy rather than by federal, state, or local taxes, private philanthropy was encouraged by the tax laws. Tax exemptions for contributions to educational institutions were another way of transforming the income produced by the land and physical capital of the rich into the human capital accumulated by children from middle and lower classes. Because of school segregation and similar barriers to entry into apprenticeship programs, blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities were often barred from these opportunities, creating a gap that has only been partially closed in recent years.

It is likely that new coalition will sooner or later enact substantial new legislation designed to increase the share of the population that completes high school and goes on to college. There are not only strong ethical and social grounds for such legislation, but economic and technological factors are also at work. The competitive pressures of globalization and the substitution of computers for labor in many lower-level service occupations means that full employment and high rates of U.S. economic growth will require a further expansion of the share of the labor force in technical and professional occupations. Since nothing has done more to redistribute income in favor of the poor and middle classes over the past century than the subsidization of higher education, and given the long record of evangelicals in promoting education at all levels, this issue offers the best promise of maintaining and extending egalitarianism by developing legislative coalitions that cut across the camps of the Third and Fourth Great Awakenings. Moreover, there is a well-established tradition in education, accepted by believers in enthusiastic religion as passionately as by secular liberals, that scholarships should be awarded not equally but on the basis of need. That principle allows a concentration on the most disadvantaged sections of the population.

It should not be overlooked that some of the staunchest opponents of socialism have also been the most ardent supporters of free education for all. If these individuals had been asked to join in confiscating the land and industrial capital of the rich and redistributing it to the poor, they would have fiercely opposed such blatant socialist schemes. Yet they participated in what may have been the largest socialist enterprise in history: the transfer from the rich to the poor and the middle classes of a form of capital that now greatly exceeds the value of all privately held land and industrial capital: human capital. Very often it is the form of a reform, rather than its content or ultimate effect, that is the barrier to its adoption.

Robert W. Fogel is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.