spineless pinko's update

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. rosserjb at jmu.edu
Thu Feb 15 12:27:02 PST 2001


Actually I think the new round began in the 1950s. It was the progressive and leftist 1930s and 1940s that saw a real bear market on piety.

"In God We Trust" was put on the coins in 1954 as part of the McCarthyite wave. Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Lisa & Ian Murray <seamus at accessone.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, February 15, 2001 1:55 PM Subject: RE: spineless pinko's update


>
>
>> 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
>
>



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