Let’s be clear, when I say “spiritual awakening” I am not talking about “higher consciousness” or anything related to that.
“A spiritual awakening, in regards to Christianity, is a period of time characterized by largescale (sic), widespread revival, and the supernatural moving of the Spirit of God in such a way that produces an intense hunger for Christ and Christianity… Typically, hundreds of people, if not thousands, will come to faith in Christ during a spiritual awakening.” (Kristi Walker)
“During a spiritual revival, God supernaturally transforms believers and nonbelievers in a church, locale, region, nation or the world through sudden, intense enthusiasm for Christianity. People sense the presence of God powerfully; conviction, despair, contrition, repentance and prayer come easily; people thirst for God’s word; many authentic conversions occur and backsliders are renewed.” (Patrick Morley)
Greg Laurie differentiates an awakening from a revival: “The words revival and awakening are often used interchangeably, but there is a distinction. An awakening takes place when God sovereignly pours out his Spirit and it impacts a culture… A revival, on the other hand, is what the church must experience. It’s when the church comes back to life, when the church becomes what it was always meant to be.”
In my lifetime, there was almost a spiritual awakening in America. The awakening that almost was. I believe we need to understand what happened because I don’t think we can expect a genuine awakening in America until we deal with what happened.
There have been three genuine spiritual awakenings in America.
GEORGE WHITFIELD PREACHINGThe first dates roughly as 1740 – 1760. It occurred primarily in the New England and Middle Colonies with some impact in the Southern Colonies as well. Historians have estimated that from 25,000 to 50,000 people were added to the membership of New England churches during that time. If a similar awakening happened in America now, that would mean 23 – 46 million new believers. Hundreds of new churches were started.
The second awakening happened in the 1790s and early 1800s. Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, described the period before and during the American Revolution: “The profanation of the Sabbath . . . profaneness of language, drunkenness, gambling, and lewdness, were exceedingly increased; and, what is less commonly remarked, but is not less mischievous, than any of them, a light, vain method of thinking, concerning sacred things, a cold, contemptuous indifference toward every moral and religious subject.” That “light, vain method of thinking” referred primarily to deism which had been propagated by national leaders such as Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. The awakening, which took place in churches and uniquely in the great camp meetings, brought widespread change. Again, thousands were converted to Christ. In addition, societal issues – temperance, vice, world peace, women’s rights, Sabbath observance, prison reform, profanity, education – were met head on by Christians seeking to bring improvement to the nation. And so was slavery. Gilbert H. Barnes, writing in 1933, described how Christians worked to free the slaves, stating:”The conjunction of so many elements of the Great Revival [1831] in the anti-slavery agitation was more than coincidence. . . . In leadership, in method, and in objective, the Great Revival and the American AntiSlavery Society now were one. It is not too much to say that for the moment the antislavery agitation as a whole was what it had long been in larger part, an aspect of the Great Revival in benevolent reform.”
The third spiritual awakening in America began in 1857, in a prayer meeting started by New York businessman Jeremiah Lanphier. Within six months 10,000 people were gathering daily for prayer in numerous places throughout the city (population about 700,000; that percentage today would be about 2.6 million). God worked through the YMCA in Philadelphia and Chicago and in many of the colleges. Amazingly, the awakening continued into the Civil War; both the Union and Confederate armies experienced awakenings in the camps, and early in the war a large awakening occurred in the Army of Northern Virginia, and spread through the southern forces. Historian J. Edwin Orr summed up this third awakening: “The influence of the awakening was felt everywhere in the nation. It first captured great cities, but it also spread through every town and village and country hamlet. It swamped schools and colleges. It affected all classes without respect to condition… It seemed to many that the fruits of Pentecost had been repeated a thousandfold (sic)…the number of conversions reported soon reached the total of fifty thousand weekly…”
There have been other times and places when revival occurred and many people responded in faith and surrender to the gospel, but they were limited in scope and duration, so I wouldn’t consider them a spiritual awakening. One of those happened in the 1960s and 70s. There were two streams in that movement: the civil rights movement and what came to be called the Jesus people movement.
The primary leader of the civil rights movement was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist pastor who proclaimed, “God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men, and brown men, and yellow men; God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.” 
He also said, “Worship at its best is a social experience with people of all levels of life coming together to realize their oneness and unity under God. Whenever the church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class it loses the spiritual force of the ‘whosoever will, let him come’ doctrine and is in danger of becoming little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.” And, “That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.” Many things changed due to this God-directed movement, summed up as a widespread desegregation of society. It was not a spiritual awakening in itself, but it was a great work of the Holy Spirit, a part of the awakening I believe God was bringing.
The Jesus people movement was the turning of thousands (perhaps millions) of young people to Christ. 
Teens and young adults searching for peace and love through “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” found them in Jesus. Various methods and venues were used to share “One Way Jesus”: coffeehouses, underground newspapers, street evangelism, crusades (like SPIRENO – Spiritual Revolution Now), conferences and rallies (like Explo ’72). Some colleges were locations of revival (Asbury College experienced a revival during a chapel service on February 3, 1970, that lasted 185 hours). And the music, the Jesus Music, communicated the gospel and Biblical teaching with a rock or folk sound that traditional hymns could not pull off. In church youth groups and ministries many more teens who were not part of the counterculture (myself included) were impacted by the Spirit and made life commitments to Jesus.
An awakening was coming in America, but it didn’t last. It didn’t spread throughout the nation. I don’t intend to diminish the great things that happened, and I know there were some lasting effects, but I don’t believe the full intentions of God were realized. What happened through the civil rights movement and the Jesus people movement was limited in scope and duration. The reviving essentially came to an end after only a few years.
Now today, Jesus-followers want America to experience an awakening. Things have been done to try to help bring it about, for example: the movie Woodlawn in 2015, based on true events in the 60s and 70s. Some have put this desire in the form of “prophecy” that it will happen, for example: Dutch Sheets in 2018. Fairly frequently there have been large prayer gatherings for the purpose of “repentance” and for the nation “to look up and see the Lord,” for example: “The Return: National and Global Day of Prayer and Repentance” in September, 2020. I am sure some good things have happened through these ministries, but a real spiritual awakening has not.
Why not? I think we have to look back at what happened with the civil rights and Jesus people movements in the 1970s to understand the spiritual condition we are now in. This is my interpretation of why there was almost an awakening. It’s probably going to sound kind of harsh and maybe “judgmental” to some. I’m not trying to be either, but I think we need to be real about it.
When the awakening was happening, in the words of someone else, “the conservative church stuffed it.” Yes, I think that’s what happened. Most (not all) of the American churches did not accept what God was doing in the civil rights and Jesus people movements.
Racial division was left to governments and schools and businesses to deal with. Most churches did not put racial equality and unity into concrete practice. It’s obvious in things that are happening today that true unity has not been achieved in America.
With the Jesus people movement, churches (not all) resisted the influx and the influence of youth (bare feet, long hair, rock music, less restrictions for being Christian, etc.). In time, of course, churches were affected by those young people, as they aged and became involved in church procedures. Hence, we had the “worship wars” over the kind of music used in church services – do you get how corrupt it is for us to war over worship? In more time, the new style of Christianity became distorted. Faith in Christ was emotionalized and sentimentalized (“Precious Moments”). The gospel was changed from one way Jesus for peace with God to believing and giving is the way to be prosperous (see this article). The life Jesus described as being “deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow me” was severely trivialized and commercialized: book stores changed from being sources for serious study material to boutiques for trinkets, t-shirts, and “Testamints”
; music that communicated truth in the language and sound of the people became a major, lucrative industry (CCM). Another twist in the Christian faith was the mission to develop a national legalism through politics and government; lobbying and political action to push for moral values in society became as important as evangelism to the lost and ministry to the needy (the Moral Majority being the prime example); along with that a ubiquitous Christian nationalism has evolved.
So, the awakening did not happen, and Christianity in America went (further) off the rails. (I sadly admit that I participated in some of the distortions I just described.) Consequently, the nation moved further into spiritual darkness.
Much of the current calls for change and renewal make it sound like it’s up to unbelievers to repent and return to God in order for an awakening to happen. An organizer of “The Return: National and Global Day of Prayer and Repentance,” declared, “We drove God out of our hearts, out of our government, out of our ways, out of laws, out of the education of our children, out of the public squares. Out of our businesses, out of our media, out of our culture, out of our lives. And as we drove Him out, we opened up a vacuum into which came a flood of other gods.” He says “we” but obviously he means unbelievers; I doubt he would say he “drove God out.” But this isn’t the responsibility of unbelievers. Jesus-followers are “the light of the world.” If the light isn’t shining, it’s not up to the darkness to make light. We don’t need to confess and repent of what unbelievers have done. It’s up to us Jesus-followers to confess to God our rejection of his works and ways, to repent (turn from and change) the distortions and corruptions we have caused in the life of faith in Jesus, and to join with God’s Spirit in the true work of his Kingdom.
Honestly, I’m not very hopeful. I’m afraid it’s going to take real persecution for the church in America to be refined and renewed. But let each of us look back through our lives and see what we are responsible for, what we are guilty of, and bow ourselves to the mercy of God, trusting in his love for us all and in his power to renew us. If enough of us will do that, maybe we’ll be ready for and contributing to the next spiritual awakening in America.
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