Welcome to the Fourth Turning

Posted in: News By House Divided on June 24, 2020

“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear…” These words from the song by Buffalo Springfield reverberate through the hearts and minds of Americans: there’s something going on in America, but we’re not sure what.

In 2020, Americans have already seen President Trump impeached along party lines, suffered illness and death as the coronavirus swept across our land, producing a lockdown which nearly collapsed our economy, generating a recession with 36 million claims for unemployment benefits, resulting in a stimulus package plunging Americans 3 trillion dollars deeper into debt. Just when we thought the virus was contained, it has resurged, threatening a new round of illness and financial setbacks. The senseless death of George Floyd on May 25th at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked protests and campaigns to defund the police. Violent riots erupted in major metropolitan areas: businesses were looted and burned to the ground, police precincts overrun and many, including law enforcement officers, were injured or killed. Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ulysses S. Grant were forcibly toppled by rioters and vandals defaced the Lincoln Memorial. Shaun King, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, called for destroying statues of Jesus and smashing stained glass windows in which “white Jesus” appears. To top it off, we are in a bitterly contested presidential election year, with Republicans and Democrats threatening that if other party gets in power, it will be the end of America as we know it.

Welcome to the Fourth Turning.

In 1997, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote, The Fourth Turning, an American Prophecy: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiney. History, they say, is seasonal: Spring turns to Summer, Summer turns to Fall and Fall always turns to Winter…a season of crises. All four turnings take place in the span of a saeculum, a period of about 100 years or a long human life. What is happening in America now has happened before.

“The First Turning is a High,“ say the authors, “an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays. In the current saeculum, the American High took place during the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies. The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960’s to the tax revolts of the early 1980’s. The Third Turning was the Culture Wars, an era of cultural unraveling that began with Regan’s mid 1980’s Morning in America and expired sometime in the Oh-Oh decade. The Fourth Turning is a season of Crises, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.” Around 2025, the authors predict, America will pass through the next great gate of history.

Fourth Turnings are “critical thresholds for national survival” and the authors make no rosy predictions for America on the other side of our present crises: “American society will be transformed into something different. The emergent society may be something better…or unspeakably worse.” They ask, “Is new thinking required? On the contrary: to prepare for the Fourth Turning America needs old thinking.”

In 1954, Barbara Ward wrote Faith and Freedom and observed, “Racially, the United States is a melting pot of every nation under the sun. Only by force of an idea – the ‘proposition’ that all men are created equal and possess inalienable rights – has it risen to be the most powerful community in the history of man.” Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this ancient proposition is theological, not political. In a 1965 sermon, King said, “You see the Founding Fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the imago Dei…is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected and this gives them uniqueness……Every man is significant…because every man is made in the image of God”. Ward warned that when religious faith in this “proposition” vanishes, “all the energies of the soul are poured into the one channel of political faith.”

As American’s celebrate the birth of our nation on July Fourth, will our Founding proposition from 1776 survive our Fourth Turning?