Asking the right question

Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden

The Decembrist asks a serious question about the current religious revival in the United States.

We are clearly in the middle of one of the great periods of Christian revival in American history, the third or fourth of the "Great Awakenings" in American Protestantism. Each such period has begun with a change in the nature of worship itself, essentially a private phase, and moved onto a public phase where it engaged with the political process. These have been significant moments of progress for this country. The Second Great Awakening led in it public phase to the Abolitionist movement. What some historians consider the Third Great Awakening beginning in the 1890s led to the Social Gospel movement, settlement houses, and the beginnings of the progressive era idea of a public responsibility to ameliorate poverty.

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.

Mark would like us to think about this, the answer is important.

Update

Matt Yglesias chimes in on this but to be perfectly honest he just rambles on and I'm not sure what his point is. There are some interesting comments.

Note
I somehow dropped Mark Schmitt's Decembrist from my links when I switched over to Blogrolling. He is a valuable resource and the mistake has been corrected.