2020 election, Dona;ld Trump, Millennials, Religion, Uncategorized

Part III, Our Next Great Awakening

The ingredients for historical Great Awakenings have been described in Parts I and II and we know those ingredients had already revealed themselves as early as 2010. Remember, the awakened people found Donald Trump in 2015, he did not shape us.

So understand this, the Great Awakenings in history didn’t necessarily cause things to happen as much as they settle them. They didn’t cause either the American Revolution or the Civil War to happen, but they were outcome determinative to the degree that they did set our national jaw and the American mood for fighting those wars.

And the moving parts of those early awakenings were the churches and the “revival” preaching that reached out past the regular congregations to the “lost” that could be encouraged to come in. As I mentioned in Part II, Billy Sunday personified this revival spirit in the early 20th Century with live audiences, just as Billy Graham was able to do the middle years of that same century, only with the benefit of mass communications. Sunday’s sermons were not the typical “tending to the flock” messages, but rather of fear; on the one hand, fear of the Devil taking hold of their lives and equating it to the equal fear of God if they let him.

His greatest contribution perhaps was in the “multiplier effect” of his sermons, of lighting a fire in others to fan out over the countryside spreading the revival spirit to smaller churches and towns. That kind of preaching survived him at least another thirty years.

That may have had something to do with the ease with which a nation of small town farmers could join up with first-second generation factory and mill workers to come together to fight a common enemy after December, 1941, a decade after Sunday’s crusades ended.

But that multiplier effect is not apparent (to me at least) in our efforts to not just defeat the efforts of the Left, but also to grow our cause.

So far it seems the Left has anticipated “how” we would react. I regret to say this, but it seems the Left in their planning about us has been more aware of America’s prior Great Awakenings than we have. Going back at least to Sol Alinksy in the 60s, but in areas such as public education, into the early 20th Century and John Dewey, the Left knew how and where our children learned their core values, (home and church) and when they were most impressionable, around 4th grade and over time got there first. All they had to do was replace Sunday School and its “love thy neighbor” with “tolerate thy little boy neighbor who wants to be a little girl” or “little Jeffie who has two daddies”.

Then, simply don’t teach the tales of our American heroes or the great things our nation has done, on the pretty good bet that within a generation there will 50% fewer parents will ever knowing that American heroes or virtues are even important, and the 50% of the next won’t even know how to reintroduce it into their children’s lives, for their great-grandparents will have died out. I called this the John Cleese Rule (from Monty Python), and having witnessed these changes occur, I know, without parents my son’s age, stepping in, the next generations “won’t know that they don’t know because they haven’t been trained in the skills of knowing that they don’t know.”

So, it would seem to me that public schools and local governments in the counties, towns and cities where you live would be reason enough to get out with others to make some revival noise where it really matters, especially since there’s very little Donald Trump and a Congress filled with Jim Jordan’s and Ted Cruz’s can do anyway from the top-down. No law from Washington can cure this ailment.

That is our Great Awakening with teeth, and trust me, it will trickle up, if you just care to give it a go.

Our Great Awakening has nothing to do becoming “woker”. The original awakenings gobbled up new converts. We can’t do that on Twitter. We have to go outside in to make it happen. Film it, which is easy, then post it, so while you’re scaring the bejeezus out of city council, you’re also scaring the trolls, just because they can see “the look” on your face, and the “I mean business set jaw” with voices that won’t back down. That’s the antidote to the Stockholm kool aid they drank.

Better still, you can even use your real name, instead of “BadAssMommafromJoplin” on Twitter when in fact you live in Nashville.

I’m not saying give up Twitter, just get rid of the notion that you, or we, are moving the needle one inch against the Left’s overall plan by engaging them. I also like to sit in and read what the Left’s minions have to say. But no more than an hour a day. For one, it’s an indulgence, a kind of catharsis, that makes us feel better, but which really never lays a glove on them. They are conditioned, in the Stockholm Syndrome sense of the term, to deflect virtually everything we can say. They are a bundle of fear, and there are ways to tap it, but that fear has been transferred to not letting their “masters” down. The way you beat them is to defeat their handlers and that really can’t be done on social media.

So quit using as a pasttime, so you can think you’re a super-patriot giving the Cause a full day’s effort. If people are going to start showing in my driveway with placards and bullhorns, it will not be because of something I said on Twitter…but because of the tables I helped turn over at the school board or city council meeting… alongside 50 new friends I met at a recent “revival” meeting.

And it will be the “look” you project there, and the select words you used there, all videoed for distribution, hashtag @GreatAwakening, or somesuch, that will be what bedevils them. Especially once they become frequent, proving the revival is for real.

Have you noticed the success of Scott Pressler just by getting out?

Take a “chisel to their veil”. Create a group persona so they can see what they’re up against. Then they will change. By the way, the Trump rallies had this very effect. Create your own rallies (revivals) without even a candidate on the stage. Or even a stage. You don’t even have speeches. Pick music that will hover over them, the kind they can’t get out of their head.  Then combine with the facial imagery of what you’re saying.

That will be what sells it.

That’s how it works folks.

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VASSAR BUSHMILLS

Contact:           VassarB@gmail.com                Twitter: BushmillsVassar

Books:                Famous Common People I Have Known and Other Essays

                            Donald Trump, the Common Man and the American Theology of Liberty

(Both books in Kindle format only, Publishers and agents welcome, as both need to revised)

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