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Another Great Awakening?

Well, that was a long strange election night.

After watching election returns from the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco last night, I’m a little tired of horse race politics. Thus, I found this Q & A with Jim Wallis and Brookings Fellow E. J. Dionne Jr. a good balm for my Adventist soul.

Wallis is on a book tour promoting his new work, The Great Awakening. I caught him on Sunday night in Berkeley and I found the argument more compelling than God’s Politics, particularly since he’s moving past what the right and left get wrong or don’t get and is now constructing a compelling positive case for linking social justice to revival. What we should get.

He pointed out that the academic term “revival” doesn’t get applied to religious experience until it actually changes something in the mainstream society. The first and second great awakenings redrew the geographical, denominational and political maps of America. And is happening in some African nations today.

In America, there is a huge shift happening among evangelicals as the next generation — Rick Warren to emergent churches to Westmont College — works to broaden the meaning of saving the world.

In this video, Jim notes that non-U.S. evangelicals (folks who take the Bible pretty literally) were overwhelmingly opposed to the Iraq war, while U.S. evangelicals were among the most pro Iraq war. Why?

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