> I started teaching in 1957 -- but it wasn't til
> the mid-70s that students started to be offended
> by my sacreligious remarks. In the rural grade
> school I attended in the '30s & '40s sneers at
> creationism were perfectly safe. In my 10th grade
> biology (1944) class in a small town high school
> evolution was taken for granted. It would have
> been a real shock had someone objected.
>
> My own subjective impression from the '50s is
> that they represented the highwater mark of
> secularism in the U.S. There is a lot to
> accuse the '50s of, but religiosity is not
> one of them (at least in comparison with the
> last quarter century). Things may have reversed
> in the late '50s -- but my impression is that
> the real change for the worse began in the
> early '70s & climaxed in the mid '80s.
>
> Carrol
*************
Blame Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, LSD and the west coast infatuation with Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism etc [an effect of the wives of US servicemen returning from Japan utterly fascinated with the tea ceremony and Japanese aesthetics]
Ian