Bruce Reed at Slate noted something that I skimmed right past as I was going over Mr. Bush’s remarks to the select journalists he spoke to in the Oval Office this week: Bush thinks that a “Third Great Awakening” may be underway, which would be great except for the fact that it already happened over a century ago.  The Third Great Awakening is better known through its association with the era of the Social Gospel–the age of the Salvation Army’s foundation and William Jennings Bryan’s religiously-charged populist protests.  GetReligion doesn’t think the numbering is significant (so much for accuracy). 

For my part, it is no more of an astonishing historical lapse than when he says democracies don’t fight one another or when he seems surprised to learn about these “Sunnis” and “Shi’ites” in Iraq (“I thought the Iraqis were Muslims!” he said), so it is really just par for the course.