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The Great Awakening (To Our Own Stupidity)

The Great Awakening (To Our Own Stupidity)

Last updated on: April 23, 2025 at 11:54 am by Stuart Delony

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The Great Awakening (To Our Own Stupidity) 2025-04-22T20:13:46-04:00 Stuart Delony

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Remember when religious revivals were all the rage? The tent meetings, the sweaty preachers, the sobbing sinners crawling down sawdust aisles? America used to know how to awaken—with fire, fury, and a touch of snake handling. But now? We’re in a new kind of revival. Call it the Great Dumb-ening: a mass spiritual movement powered by YouTube conspiracy videos, anti-science tantrums, and sermons preached with the theological depth of a bumper sticker.

We used to awaken to God. Now we awaken to grift.

From “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” to “Patriots in the Clutches of a Deep State”

The original Great Awakening was a response to spiritual apathy. Today’s version is more about ideological cosplay. We’re not stirred by the Spirit—we’re tickled by clickbait. Instead of fearing hellfire, we fear that our gas stoves will be taken away by socialist demons. Jonathan Edwards warned of eternal damnation; now Pastor Greg Locke screams about demonic Democrats while waving a microphone like it’s an exorcism wand.

And let’s be honest—half the country isn’t waking up. They’re just yelling “Awake!” while sleepwalking into authoritarianism with a Bible in one hand and a Chick-fil-A sandwich in the other.

“God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It”… Is Not an Epistemology

We’ve mistaken stubbornness for conviction. In this new Great Awakening, the bar for truth is so low it’s tripping over its own shoelaces. Misinformation isn’t a problem—it’s the gospel. You don’t need to read the Bible, just quote a meme. Bonus points if it’s misspelled and poorly formatted.

The church that once birthed universities now hosts flat-earth conferences in its fellowship hall. Science is suspect. Experts are elitists. And discernment? That’s for the weak. Real believers follow their gut—and their gut says the COVID vaccine is the mark of the beast.

Jesus Is Lord… and So Is the Algorithm

At the core of this dumb awakening is a theology driven not by Scripture or Spirit, but by engagement metrics. Pastors are now influencers. Sermons are edited for TikTok. Discipleship is just a playlist. And worship? That’s just the opening act before the pastor sells you survival buckets or tells you who to vote for.

What we’ve built is a religious-industrial complex that feeds on fear, loathing, and a curated sense of persecution. It’s not about transformation—it’s about keeping the audience mad, addicted, and buying the next course in the online “freedom academy.”

We’re not making Christians anymore. We’re producing brand-loyal consumers of outrage theology.

The Dumb-ening Is the Point

If you’re wondering whether we can turn this around, I hate to break it to you—but this isn’t an accident. Dumbing down faith has always served the people in power. A poorly informed congregation is easy to manipulate, mobilize, and monetize. Keep them afraid. Keep them angry. Keep them ignorant. That’s the business model.

But here’s the bitter hope in it: maybe this is the actual Great Awakening. Not a revival of righteousness, but a realization—an uncomfortable, overdue realization—that what we’ve built in American Christianity isn’t a church. It’s a content farm, churning out pseudo-spiritual junk food for a people desperate for meaning but unwilling to change their diet.

The awakening isn’t to God. It’s to our own complicity. To our comfort in being spoon-fed simple answers to complex questions. To our preference for certainty over truth. To our love of being right more than being good.

And Yet…

If we are waking up—if even a few of us are rubbing the crust out of our eyes—maybe there’s still a chance to reclaim something real. But it won’t look like what we’ve known. No altars, no acronyms, no megachurch vision statements. Just small acts of honesty. Just truth spoken plainly. Just love without condition.

Because until we wake up to our own stupidity, we’ll just keep calling our coma a revival.

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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