[What follows is not a prediction, nor is it a program that I advocate. It is a thought experiment. I attempt to answer the question: If the USA in the year 2050 is on a better path, what might have been the reason?]
Back in the early 2020s, things seemed hopeless to thoughtful Americans. Their government was controlled by oligarchs favorable to big business monopolies and by militarists committed to maintaining U.S. dominance by any means necessary.
Material living standards were falling. Addiction and mental illness were increasing. So-called “deaths of despair” – suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol-related liver disease – were increasing.
The manufacturing economy was being hollowed out. The political system was unresponsive to public needs or the public will. Few expected the next generation to be better off than the present generation.
What Americans back then had no way of foreseeing was the religious movement we now call the Third Great Awakening. It took a religious movement to transform lives and thereby transform the nation.
Historically, in the English-speaking world, this has always been the case. Periods of moral and social decay evoke religious revivals in response.
So it was with the rise of Puritanism and Methodism in 17th and 19th century Britain and the first and second Great Awakenings in the early 18th and 19th century USA.
The core values of the Third Great Awakening were (1) putting the needs children, mothers and families first, (2) help in overcoming addiction of all kinds and rehabilitation generally and (3) sympathy for the poor and suspicion of holders of great wealth.
It was a combination of Pentecostal spirituality, Mormon emphasis on community, family and self-reliance, Twelve Step rehabilitation and Latin American-style liberation theology. It was strict (though forgiving) in terms of personal conduct, but embraced a no-frills Christian theology that made it compatible with diverse denominations.
The core supporters of the Awakening movement were African-Americans, Hispanics and Bible Belt whites, but the movement appealed to people in every niche of American life.
The rise of the movement took place against the background of the Greater Great Depression of the late 2020s. Governments and corporations went bankrupt and ceased to function. This time the banks were “too big to bail.”
Confidence in major American institutions had been falling all through the early 21st century. As they ceased to function, they lost all moral authority.
Americans were forced to self-organize to cope with the emergency. They joined together through their local religious congregations, and also through newly-formed labor and community organizations.
About this time the Jeffrey Epstein client files were published by Wikileaks. They revealed how many high-level politicians, business executives and celebrities had sex with under-age, exploited young girls, and also how Epstein was part of a network of sex traffickers that had continued to function.
This resulted in a great backlash and a drive to track down and punish the guilty—many of whom were also guilty of financial fraud and war crimes. Financial, political and sexual corruption became conflated in the public mind.
Some people called what followed a witch hunt, but it weakened, discredited and, to an extent, emptied out the power structure. New institutions and movements arose to fill the vacuum.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 