CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Enough Protests: The Case for an American Réveil

The International Red Cross in action, 1864. Public Domain.

The United States is going through a period of gloom and doom. Confidence in its institutions has fallen, politics is deeply polarized, and talk of decline has now become mainstream. The American Dream has turned into a global nightmare. But most importantly, the question is not simply whether the United States is declining; it is whether there can be a national renewal.

The United States has renewed itself before as part of broader social awakenings. During the nineteenth century, revival movements helped generate the moral energy behind some of America’s most important reforms. Beginning in French-speaking Switzerland and spreading across Europe and the U.S., the specific Réveil Movement was a moral and institutional amplifier that transformed discontent into civic action.

Why is the Réveil relevant today? This is not to suggest that Christian evangelism will necessarily produce a revival in the United States. On the contrary, the Réveil was not confined to a particular church orientation. Rather, it represented a broader spiritual awakening that challenged the dominant rationalism of the Enlightenment and reasserted the importance of emotion, personal faith, and civil activism.

The significance of the Réveil therefore lies less in its specific religious expressions than in the conditions that gave rise to it and its response. The nineteenth-century Enlightenment placed its faith in reason. We place ours in algorithms, AI and influencers. Then, people believed that scientific progress would solve social problems. Today, many assume that better technology, more data, social media, and smarter markets will do the same. If a revival is possible in the present era, the key question is whether there exists a comparable hunger for meaning, community, and civil activism to that which fueled the Réveil.

This is not an argument about China’s rise,........

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