I did not have Christian revival on my dance card for the new millennium, but God in heaven, (literally) that seems to be what is happening across the known world. In every country and state, people are amassing in thousands, tens of thousands in various outpourings of faith. I have dozens of two minute videos to prove it. Of course no one is reporting it. The Olympics Opening Ceremony was another attempt of our vicious leadership to spike violence; instead we have seemingly spontaneous crowds on the streets of every city praising Jesus. The Olympic Village is woken up every morning with this hymn by the team from Figi:

 

 

And in Paris, Seattle, Tennessee, Australia, San Francisco, I could list a score of others, marching, revival, baptisms. Here the largest water baptism in American history (available in full post):

 

I grew up in the Church of England, a more desiccated faith does not exist, the feeling pushed out, and a grim alignment with authority replacing it. And when I entered the work force everyone was atheist, to the point where God was absent because such a being did not exist. In fact, any mention would invite ridicule. For two decades I was firmly enmeshed in the cultural left which dominates near every profession now. The cultural left substitutes a yearning for social justice with any communication with or acknowledgment of the divine.

 

So when I researched my second novel about my early American family (unpublished for reasons that will become clear) I was horrified to discover just how much God had invaded their lives. My four-times great grandfather was one of those Promethean men that every family throws up once every couple hundred years, massive, with sharp penetrating eyes, I’ve seen his portrait alongside his wife, Abigail, who lived to 101, and gave birth to 17 children. I guess she would be called a ‘trad wife’ now. What she did was run about a dozen home based businesses, fed and clothed a few hundred newcomers who needed help on the daily, and in her 90’s ran a rooming house out of the 10 bedroom colossus where she raised her kids.

 

The glitch for me was the God thing. The second sentence of his granddaughter’s memoir read “he never forgot to advise every person he met of his duty to his Maker.” Well, that was almost offensive to someone on the cultural left, and I sat with it for a while, trying to understand. Then I discovered that one of his sons had begun one of those camp meeting places where people summered in quaint cottages around a lake and went to meetings where people spoke in tongues and were seized by the spirit and daily life was anchored by the preacher of the day and the ideas he or she advanced. People spent their summer vacations, apparently willingly, with God.

 

 

 

I was embarrassed by this primitivism five generations back. And that would be the reaction of everyone I had met in my working life in London, New York and Toronto. And certainly of any publisher. Even worse for my novel’s prospects, I could not make a social justice novel out of their stories, because they spent their entire lives doing good; anchored by faith. There is no God allowed in publishing, at least not at the top end of publishing, where I wanted to work. There is no published novel in the literary canon that has God as a character since, I don’t know, Dostoyevsky and that only in The Idiot, whose hero is so good, he is considered an idiot.

Tucker Carlson on what is happening (available in full post):

 

In our larger, dying mainstream culture, there is no acknowledgement that a) God exists and b) that God has anything at all to do with our lives. Questioned, most people think there might be a “higher power” but it probably doesn’t care about us or our fate. This latter is known as Deism, which is the only ‘faith’ allowed by the intelligentsia of the past six generations and which is asserted by current historians, to the extent they mention it, as the ‘faith’ of the men who wrote the four documents of the American founding. This is of course, entirely false. Arguably Jefferson and Adams were Deist but even they insisted on rigorous virtue among a free people. The rest of them were very much of the time and at that time, angels and demons walked among them and God was present, active and his hand was in everything. How do I know that? I have their diaries, letters, wills, various writings.

Why was God so present? Because he was invited. In point of fact, the American Revolution is the only revolution that could be called God-struck. This is borne out by Michael Novak, whose book On Two Wings, Humble Faith and Commonsense at the American Founding is pretty much chapter and verse on the two strands of thought and belief which wove together the American experiment, its exceptionalism. And when he said two strands he meant that faith “stimulates and enlivens the conscience”, and with that self-government and self-control were married.

When asked about a life of freedom, Jefferson replied:

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstance, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, though it can be known only but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.”

Our freedom has been eroded by lack of virtue, of rank immorality, in every profession in every leadership.

Early American theology was pragmatic and earthed, rather than theoretical. My early American family was deeply churched because what they were doing, starting in 1630, was so hard they needed help. That g g g great grandfather started work at 15, and by the age of 30 was building the fourteen locks at Lockport on the Erie Canal, a real trick for someone with a smattering of education. At the time, the furor was over extending slavery to the western settlements, ending it in the South, decades of bitter debate. Up on the hill overlooking his canal works he was visited by an Archangel, and his life changed radically. Instrumental on the Underground Railroad, working with Harriet Tubman – his black housekeeper was their liason – hiding fugitives in his canal tunnels. I’d argue we are at the same place now, when our leadership is demonstrably corrupt, and given the example of the Paris Olympics dissolute and disgusting. The culture is swinging back to faith.

 

There was, however, in 19^th century fiction the Hand of Fate, or the insistence of the universe on virtue both individual and societal, and when transgressed that Hand Came Down and Judged. As if we were allowed to screw things up until the Limits of Patience had been reached.

Now this is true in every life I have observed. Fate intervenes, only now it is called Karma. But in this new millennium, even this has been shoved overboard as useless nonsense. There is no retribution, there is only not being clever or brutal or hard-core enough as you climb the ladder. Which today at the top of the heap, involves rituals so unseemly I cannot look at them without suffering. Satanism is rising, it is laced through all our arts, all popular culture. I hate writing this, but the evidence is clear, a significant part of our leadership has been corrupted by Luciferian cults, wherein they use children as blood sacrifice to increase their power. I read into this stuff, books, testimonies, watch videos and after a few hours of it, I can’t sleep at night – it is so horrific and we do nothing, nothing about it. It is dangerous to write about it, dangerous to research it. A few thousand give evidence, accrete more evidence, they are ignored. Every police force is polluted by one or more member participants in these atrocities, they are laced through government and they protect their own. Many of us sense this evil lying beneath us, we know. We know. Six hundred thousand people go missing every year in the U.S.; 450,000 of them are children. There is evidence and testimony that many of them used as sex slaves or sacrificed in ritual or used as organ donors, usually all three. According to former ritual practitioners, you can summon powerful demonic spirits by brutalizing and killing a child. Those spirits are thought to confer power and wealth. Terrifying a child then drinking the adrenochrome-laced blood confers strength and youth. There are reports of breeding farms in Thailand and Singapore, of lost women whose children are taken and sacrificed for their blood. I am sorry to write this, but I cannot not write this, it is happening and it is a monumental moral catastrophe, worse even than the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

 

 

After my g g g g grandfather’s visitation and no doubt his participation in Charles’ Finney’s Third Great Awakening, he became a whirlwind of charitable activity, as did his family. They were Officers on the Underground Railroad, founded schools, hospitals, churches, and that imprint carried forward in all their descendants. Oliver would go round the farms in a buckboard in the mornings paying for the labor of the farm’s daughters, so they too could go to school. One of them had married the daughter of a chief of the Five Nations and became such a fervent activist for the tribes, he had to be smuggled out of the country because his hanging was scheduled for the next day. Their faith was profoundly active.

This is why the culture has tried to smother American Christianity, it is activist, practical. It cannot keep still when hell reigns on the earth.

To understand the ecstatic Christian faith of my early American family, I started going to revivals where I was living at the time, Bermuda. The revivals were held by black preachers from the mainland, from Atlanta or Raleigh and I was almost always the only white face among five hundred people. The music was fantastic, you could hear the root of the blues, R&B in the altar calls. I fell in love with the faith. Out of that revival would come thousands of actions, great and small that would improve life on the island and in the families who attended. I had never been not-converted, but I had never been in a congregation where so much love, enlivenment, spirit and community was expressed. Never, not even close. All of us in those fields loved each other. That is what happens when people become ‘churched’ properly. And that feeling, that passion can change the world.

Our culture of death? It is itself dying. Literature has been reduced to mumbling about identities and the last literary novel I tried to read was so sexualized it was porn. The “arts” are consumed by the disgusting rich alone, no one but those in the cult of the left even pretends to care, it carries no profound meaning, it is shrieking social justice and blaming others. It is meaningless status-seeking nonsense. Hollywood is dying fast, reports from producers and technicians are numerous, no one is green-lighting anything, they’ve lost their audience. Most people spend their evenings with TikTok now, where real people express themselves and it is original, fun and hopeful. A WGA screenwriter explains:

 

The New York Times reported this week that Hollywood has finally figured out that “red state’ people have turned them off and there are so many red state people, their absence is cutting into Hollywood’s bottom line.

 

 

God is very very present on TikTok. If you want it, if you show any interest, you can get a firehose of people (not groomed by Hollywood or PR) talking about the various, indeed infinite aspects of the divine, from someone channeling archangels, to small but thorny theological questions argued by the high-minded, to personal testimonies, up and down the intellectual scale. It is very much how colloquials used to be in the late 18^th century, where the primary discussion in civil society was broadly informed by Christianity and right moral action.

America has experienced three Great Awakenings and is now in the midst of the Fourth. After each, enormous strides forward were made. The first triggered the Revolution, the Second brought the Civil War, emancipation, the end of slavery as acceptable practice anywhere. The Third brought the social gospel, public education, labour reforms—including the abolition of child labour, a shorter workweek, a living wage, and factory regulation.

So it is that the crowds in every corner and square holding crosses, and singing hymns are standing on sacred ground with angels all around and asserting that nobility of action and being. It grows apace, and in every profession now we can see individuals with some power standing their ground and again, insisting on expressed virtue, not grotesque exercises of power.

The Paris Olympics has failed. The city is empty, the hotels, the stadiums and restaurants are empty, the only tourists are invited celebrities and influencers. Beset by one problem or catastrophe after another, it is a perfect representation of our hopeless, hapless, corrupt, destructive leadership, our thankfully dying corrupt culture.

Meanwhile, last weekend in Paris:

 

Absurdistan’s comments are filled with people despairing. We live in participatory democracies across Western Civ., which means if you show up you can change things. I watched green activists show up, shut down everything, ruin local economies, turn the entire western U.S. into a tinderbox. No one else was in those meetings. By not showing up we approved it. That is, of course, changing. Parents are showing up, there are gatherings for democracy for saving our culture everywhere. But we, the people, have been the missing link. The history of America’s Great Awakenings tells us that after the revivals faded, people did show up and the world did change for the better. This may greet Democrats at their convention this month.

 

I can’t wait to see what’s going to come out of this one.