Roots of the Great Awokening in the supposed anti-intellectualism of the Great Awakening?

Americas quarterly

      "For all of its supposed virtues, the Puritan clergy proved itself pusillanimous before the onslaught of the Great Awakening—the 'first moment of militant success' for American anti-intellectualism.  Hofstadter quotes Timothy Cutler, 'a rather prejudiced Anglican witness' to the ranting of a barnstorming preacher:

[Then] came one Tennent—a monster! impudent and noisy—and told them all they were damned, damned, damned!  This charmed them; and in the most dreadful winter I ever saw, people wallowed in snow, night and day, for the benefit of his beastly braying.

The contemporary inheritors of the legacy of the Puritan clergy—old-guard Ivy League-educated professors and Beltway courtiers—have put up even less of a fight for their brand of liberalism against insurgent moral movements emanating from the university.  The new dispensation ascendant in American political culture has sometimes been tagged with an epithet derived from the religious revival of the eighteenth century:  the 'Great Awokening.'  But today’s movement has no preachers, only consultants—the Elmer Gantrys de nos jours—of the likes of Robin D’Angelo, author of White Fragility.  Americans have clearly not changed much in the interim.  Many continue to take a slightly perverse enjoyment in being told they are damned or—through a kind of secularization of religious categories Hofstadter was always so perspicacious in tracking—racist."

     Nick Burns, “The tragedy of the American political tradition,” The hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 24, no. 2 (Summer 2022):  52 (46-55).  I am of course well aware of the fact that Hofstadter is today somewhat controversial among professional Americanists (as, indeed, Burns himself soon points out), and that it might well be possible to absolve at least some representatives of the Great Awakening of anti-intellectualism.

A relic of a bygone era

Public Diplomacy Council

"these autocracies[, China and Russia,] are advancing in the methods of coercion, combining newfangled digital surveillance with old-fashioned terror and brutality.  Some of these methods require a strong stomach, but these regimes are convinced that with the proper 'narratives,' they will not have to deploy them, except in certain extreme cases.  This confidence rests firmly on the assumption that the narratives are state of the art, persuasive not as propaganda but as 'truth,' because as the world now understands, there is nothing much out there to challenge their 'leadership in the ideological sphere.'  Even the West, with its sentimental attachment to Reason and the Enlightenment, considers objective truth a relic of that bygone era."

Martha Bayles, "Vladimir and Volodymyr:  a pivotal moment in history," The hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 24, no. 2 (Summer 2022):  44 (38-45).