The image of Christians in America as a “City on a Hill” is as old, I suppose, as the Rev. John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon that used that phrase to shed light on the difference between Christians and Christianity in the British Americas and Christians in the old world. Christians in New England were in the throws of the first of four spiritual awakenings, where so-called “new lights,” moved by God’s Spirit, rejected the institutions, beliefs, and practices of “old lights” and fashioned new institutions, beliefs, and practices more fitting to their new experience of God, themselves, and the world. American religious scholars have found it difficult to break free from the awakening narrative. Every generation or two, awakened Christians feel moved to throw off the surface forms that inspired earlier generations. In no time they find themselves caught up in still another spiritual awakening.
Diana Butler Bass (2012) is not the first American religious scholar to interpret awakenings as evidence of God’s work in history. Just read John Winthrop’s sermon. Nor is she the first to articulate the basic contours of a fourth spiritual awakening. Butler Bass credits William McLoughlin (1978) with that breakthrough. Since 1978 many American religious scholars have joined the throng, among them Robert William Fogel (2000), the economic historian, and Robert E. Putnam and David E. Campbell (2010), political scientists. All argue that popular religion plays a key role helping traumatized communities deal with social, political, cultural, and economic transformation. Awakenings are the means through which Christian communities confront and move on through these traumas.
Butler Bass, Fogel, Putnam and Campbell all pay tribute in their own research to the seminal research of Anthony F.C. Wallace. In 1956, Wallace published his highly influential study of the Seneca and of Handsome Lake, the prophet and leader who helped restore Seneca spiritual vitality in early nineteenth century America. Wallace interpreted the experience of the Seneca through the categories of structuralist social psychology: a community encounters severe trauma that challenges its fundamental beliefs and practices; a prophet appears who interprets their experiences in a new light; this new interpretation helps the community survive the trauma and build new institutions, beliefs, and practices better suited to the new circumstances. Wallace argued that his social psychological interpretation of revitalization movements could be used to better understand
the Handsome Lake case (Seneca, 1799-1815), the Delaware Prophet (associated with Pontiac, 1762-1765), the Shawnee Prophet (associated with Tecumseh, 1805-1814), the Ghost Dance (1888-1896), and Peyote; in Europe, John Wesley and early Methodism (1738-1800); in Africa, Ikhnaton’s new religion (ancient Egypt), the Sudanese Mahdi (the Sudan, 1880-1898), and the Xosa Revival (South Africa, 1856-1857); in Asia, the origin of Christianity, the origin of Mohammedanism (c610-650), the early development of Sikkhism (India, c1500-c1700), and the Taiping Rebellion (China, 1843-1864); in Melanesia, the Vailala Madness (New Guinea, c1919-c1930) ; in South America, a series of terre sans mal movements among the forest tribes, from early contact to recent times.
“Revitalization Movements,” American Anthropologist, p. 264.
It is of considerable importance that, with the notable exceptions of the origins of ancient Egyptian religious reform, and Christian and Islam origins, all of the instances mentioned by Wallace can be traced directly to the expansion of commodity production and exchange. But the trauma introduced by commodity production and exchange is not comparable to the traumas brought on by imperial decline, Roman occupation, or tribal warfare. Commodity production and exchange compels the communities it invades to abandon their sustainable relationships with other human and non-human members of their community. It demands that they embrace and set a premium on abstract value at the expense of substantive value. The “awakening pattern” that Wallace describes could therefore only have been born with the emergence of communities dominated by commodity production and exchange. Far from being a universal anthropological principle, it needs instead to be grasped as a socially and historically specific condition for the expansion of abstract value. This helps to explain why the so-called “awakening pattern” invariably calls for the mortification of the flesh.
Yet at least initially what American religious scholars call “awakenings” was understood as an effect brought on whenever eternity enters time. Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant called it the “sublime” (das Erhabene). It was regarded as a terror to which we are attracted because of its threatening nature. The sublime abstract value form of the commodity threatens to destroy — and does destroy — the commodity’s surface form of appearance. Only gradually did scholars come to feel that Burke’s and Kant’s isolation of surface forms from their abstract value forms failed to adequately grasp the dynamic, mutually constitutive relationship between the two.
Kant was brought up in a strict Pietist home. His isolation of surface form from abstract immaterial value form perfectly conveyed the Pietist rejection of outward forms of faith and piety. Hegel faulted Kant for failing to recognize that the divine was always already material. In his phenomenology of the spirit, Hegel invited his readers to recognize the spirit in things, driving things to their ultimate goal, God’s second creation. The violence introduced by God’s entry into time had the goal not of destroying flesh, but of bringing it to its completion.
This Hegel is still visible in Karl Marx’s early works, particularly in his Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and his and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. Since the beginning of time Gattungswesen, species being, has been straining to “realize itself” in time, struggling, dialectically, to reach completion. Embodied in the industrial working class, species being is on the verge of realizing itself.
By the late 1850s however Marx detected something else in Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian sublime. The phenomenology of the spirit was embodied less in class struggle than in the tension immanent to the commodity form itself, a tension between the commodity’s surface form of appearance and its underlying value form. The violence and destruction of the modern age was a feature of the form of the commodity, a hostility immanent to the commodity itself. It therefore could not, and should not, be considered a feature of general anthropology and certainly not of Gattungswesen. The directional dynamic that Hegel attributed to the unfolding the spirit, and that the young Marx had attributed to class struggle, would be better understood as a consequence of how value reproduces itself and expands: by means of and at the expense of surface forms of appearance.
What American religious scholars call “awakenings” and Wallace identified as the awakening pattern illustrates how an abstract social form, the value form of the commodity, destroys its own surface forms of appearance. For while the value form requires bodies in order to reproduce itself, it requires their destruction for its expansion. No surface form — no liturgy, no hymn, no form of worship, no confession, no creed, no body at all — is sufficient to contain or transmit the value form of the commodity. This was Karl Marx’s awakening:
In the circulation M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney] both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization [Selbstverwertung]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself.
Capital, vol. 1, chap. 4.
Each of the cases Wallace referenced displays its own socially and historically specific set of characteristics. The Taiping Rebellion, for example, breaks out after decades of unremitting violations of human and non-human networks of dependence and interdependence. In a manner not unlike enclosure and industrialization in the United Kingdom, the multiple depredations of kith and kin in China brought communities to fight back. But as was so for the UK, their rebellion itself assumed the two-fold form of the commodity: abstract immaterial inspiration driving it forward to a new synthesis. In a similar manner, the current “fourth great awakening” (Fogel 2000) understands itself as a new synthesis, a rejection of the polarizations of the past. In fact it is simply a new product line, a new and expanded bearer of abstract value.
Karl Marx’s awakening was that Hegel’s “self-moving substance that is subject” was neither God nor Gattungswesen, but was the abstract value form of the commodity. It still is.
Marx-Marks 