A lot of parties have put a lot of stake in the Great Awakening, the wave of religious enthusiasm which swept up and down the colonial seaboard in the early 1740s. To evangelicals, it shows how well revivals can work and entrenches them at the nation's foundation. To liberal Protestants during the cold war and to neoconservatives since, it has endowed American nationhood with moral ballast.
The 20th century has ended much as it began, with ethnic hostilities in the Balkans, sectarian violence in China, a change of power in South Africa, "reform" in Russia and economic power in the hands of the U.S.
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