CULTURAL TIDE GATHERS FOR A PURITAN REVIVAL

WASHINGTON--January 1999 is not just any old January. The Western world is
now in a countdown to the millennium, a 12-month world watch already
freighted with global economic jitters, the potential collapse of Russia,
moral and political crusades and an eerie mix of technology and doomsday
superstition.

Americans, in particular, face the possibility that the continuing upheaval
in Washington could bring about a religious revival and a related
neo-Puritanism. The first-ever impeachment trial of an elected U.S.
president, amid what is already described as a cultural civil war, could be
leading toward a moral and ideological Gettysburg.

Final decades of centuries are often psychologically convulsive.

In the United States, the upheavals of the 1790s--the radicalism of Thomas
Paine and the scoffing at religion so prominent in the French
Revolution--led in the early 1800s to a great religious countertide called
the Second Great Awakening.

The fear is now growing in Manhattan, Martha's Vineyard and Malibu that
President Bill Clinton may be the inadvertent provocateur of another such
reversal. This is not so far-fetched.

New centuries have historically arrived amid a feeling of unrest, but the
millennial uncertainty is doubling or trebling the usual angst. Just ask
Clinton, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Japanese bankers, Internet
investors and U.S. senators about to sit as Clinton's jurors.

Superstition is part of the mood: Look at the mania over the ultimate
disaster movie, "Titanic," and the perverse commercial interest in Megiddo,
the site in northern Israel where some believe Armageddon will take place.
Then there's the Y2K fixation, that computers will crash--and possibly also
jetliners and financial links--at the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31.

The Y2K phobia, of course, is principally technological and economic, as is
the lingering fear of a global financial crisis and the analogies to 1929.
The latter was a convergence of global deflation, shrinking world trade and
a bull-market orgy in new technology not unlike today's--though the bubble
70 years ago was in broadcasting and telephone stocks, not e-commerce. A
Dutch bank, ING Barings, has even reminded us that British and Dutch stock
markets plummeted in 1699 and 1799, and the Dow Jones industrial average
slid in 1899.

Political revolution, in turn, is not confined to the U.S. House of
Representatives. Communist parties around the world have been gaining in
power, muscling into new governing coalitions or even bringing down
governments. Revenues are collapsing in the oil nations. Islam is on the
march.

This brings us to the resurgence of fundamentalism, which in the United
States is already being labeled neo-Puritanism. The moral and legal issues
the U.S. Senate will face when and if it tries Clinton are only one litmus
test. Fundamentalist-type demands for simpler answers amid complexity are
also visible in global politics (Communist gains), economics (trade
nationalism) and culture (ethnic separatism and anti-immigration sentiment).

The moral shift is international. While congressmen in Washington cringe at
the scarlet "A," Pakistan is moving toward a code of Islamic justice in
which rapists are executed within 24 hours. Even nonreligious China has
drafted new laws to crack down on adultery. But in the English-speaking
world, morality and religion have a long history of being intertwined.

In Washington, vulnerable politicians who have called for Clinton's
sex-related impeachment are falling like moral tenpins. Not only Speaker
Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is resigning. So is his briefly chosen successor,
Rep. Bob Livingston (R-Ga.). Outed for adultery by Hustler magazine
publisher Larry Flynt, Livingston used his resignation statement to urge
the president to do the same.

With Hustler paying big money for women willing to tell all, congressmen
are now starting to imitate medical doctors: Don't have a woman in your
office without a) keeping the door open or b) having a nurse, or witness,
present.

Where sexually transmitted diseases didn't stall the sexual revolution, the
Paula Corbin Jones and Monica S. Lewinsky ruckuses could. And there's also
Jane Doe No. 5--the unidentified woman whose comments about an alleged
Clinton sexual assault and coverup are part of the guarded material that
some undecided representatives read before voting for impeachment on Dec.
19. If such a charge enters the Senate trial, the president's foes claim he
could be facing new charges of obstruction of justice.

Equally to the point, neo-Puritanism could take a major step forward.

Current polls show Americans seem to prefer adultery, perjury and a rising
stock market to any sort of neo-Puritan crusade. But will they feel this
way in April or May, if the Dow has dropped by 30% and Senate trial
revelations have Clinton's ratings on a similar curve? At the moment, few
believe either is likely. Yet, a Puritan trend is easy enough to imagine.

Such movements were recurring tides in the United States from the 17th
through the 19th centuries. All three of the major English-speaking civil
wars have been preceded by religious surges: The English Civil War of the
1640s followed the rise of Puritanism; the American Revolution followed the
so-called First Great Awakening; and the U.S.

Civil War followed the Second Great Awakening. Several historians have
called them the three Puritanisms.

By whatever label, this kind of religious politics has been powerful stuff.

And it could be again for the millennium. Despite talk about the rise of
fundamentalism and the emergence of the Christian Right since the 1970s,
the last three decades have seen a far larger counterdevelopment. This is
the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and 1970s with Woodstock, the
Vietnam War and "Oh! Calcutta!" and reached new highs in the 1990s with
Flynt, Internet pornography and 1997's record sale or rental of 600 million
adult videos. Religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
clearly haven't been calling the shots in American culture. Liberals and
centrists have--people who are more secular and generally not very
religious and who, by two or three to one, now support Clinton and oppose
impeachment.

These polarizations of lifestyle, culture and conscience are central to the
way U.S. politics since the 1960s has resembled an intermittent civil war.
These tensions were evident from 1963 to 1974, then again in the late 1980s
and, most recently, since 1994. The fight over Clinton's fate is a vital
campaign for both cultural armies. If one set of moral, sexual, religious
and legal views prevails in the U.S. Senate, the vote could produce a
latter-day Gettysburg--the decade's potentially decisive confrontation
between the "moralists" and the "permissives." Sophisticates can present
anti-impeachment poll data to argue that America has a new anti-Puritan
morality. Perhaps so. It has been well over a century since the last major
American religious revival.

Rightly or wrongly, the bulk of U.S. religious histories deal with the
fundamentalist upsurges of the late 20th century as mere sideshows. The
last of the great waves came in the 19th century, with the Second Great
Awakening, or Third Puritanism. Few have identified any Third Awakening, or
Fourth Puritanism.

To predict a gathering amid the modernity of the 1990s would be to court
mockery. On the other hand, the final decades of centuries tend to
overpredict a moral laxity--the insurgent mood of revolutionary France and
Europe in the 1790s, and then, in the 1890s, the fin de siecle decadence of
Oscar Wilde's London. Chic thinking in the 1990s has been at least kindred:
If not postmoral cosmopolitanism, at least an age in which traditional
morality is displaced.

In the United States of the 1790s, reaction against moral and political
radicalism nurtured a traditionalist counterreaction, beginning in the
small towns of New England, which grew into the Second Great Awakening.
Through the 1850s, a related cultural warfare wracked U.S. politics with
demands for prohibitions of liquor sales and unseemly amusements on the
Sabbath.

Missions and Bible societies proliferated. Puritanism even spread to
cuisine, with the invention of the graham cracker and the organization in
New England cities of Female Retrenchment Societies to defend women against
tea, coffee, rich cake and pastry.

One does not have to see cappuccino, chocolate eclairs and Sunday shopping
in jeopardy to suspect the gathering of another religious or traditionalist
countertide. The three principal civil wars in Britain and the United
States have been great intersections of cultural conflict with a reawakened
and remobilizing religion. Few questions are more important in America's
millennial countdown than whether the current peacetime imitation of civil
war is heading in a similar direction.